The Preface: The South versus North Divide in India

By Philip Mudartha
Bellevision Media Network

07 Mar 2025: The South Indian states are demonstrating against the hegemony of the federal government headed by the BJP. One such campaign was led by the state government of Karnataka which is ruled by the Congress party. This campaign was accompanied by a sit-in in New Delhi, and supported by leaders of other states, including Tamil Nadu and Kerala. The effort evidently struck a chord.

 

“Today I want to share my pain on a specific matter,” said PM Modi in Parliament. “The way language is being spoken these days is to break the country. These new narratives are being made for political gains. An entire state is speaking this language, nothing can be worse for the country than this... what language have we started saying… ’Hamara tax hamara money’, (Our tax, our money) what is this language being spoken? Stop giving such new narratives to break the nation. It poses a threat to the future of the country.”

 

Why are South Indian states demanding their ‘fair share’ of tax collections in India? The broader issue at hand is often reduced to a simplistic formula: North India Versus South India.

 

North India is more populous, poor, and Hindi-speaking states with their sputtering economies, miserable human development indicators and immense support for the BJP and Modi. In contrast, South India is the economically developed, socially progressive and non-Hindi-speaking states where the BJP’s Hindutva agenda has struggled to take root.

 

The argument of ‘my tax, my right’ protests, is summarised by a Tamil Nadu Minister: “When we pay Rupee 1 to the Government of India, the union government devolves only 29 paisa. But Uttar Pradesh, where BJP is in power, gets Rupees 2.73 in return for a contribution of Rupee 1.”

 

In other words, the industrious South makes all the money. The Union Government takes it and ploughs into the North for political gain.

 

 

The socio-economic disparity:

 

That there is a huge gap between the South and the North on economic as well as human development indicators is evident.

 

A child born in South India will live a healthier, wealthier, and more secure and socially impactful life compared with a child born in North India.

 

In indicators of health, education and economic opportunities, the difference between the south and the north is as stark as that between Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.

 

This is the true nature of socio-economic disparity which divides India into the haves and have-nots.

 

Why is that? And has it always been the case? Authors Samuel Paul and K S Sridhar have suggested that the economic divide was a “relatively recent phenomenon”, with data suggesting that the Southern states only began surging ahead in the late 1980s. Since then the two regions went from relatively even to so far apart that the South’s per capita income was more than double that of the North by 2005.

 

 

What explains why this might have happened?

 

Political stability, progressive policies, resource efficiency, investment in human capital are some explanations. Also, the ‘so what’ is important: The growing socio-economic divergence will give birth to political disputes and debates. The flip side of this economic success has meant that the share of taxation funds passed on to these states has been falling over the past few decades, since the Finance Commission – which calculates this split – prioritises moving funds to poorer and more populous states, with less consideration given to resource efficiency or ‘success’ of population control measures.

 

BJP hegemony:

 

Since 2015, Modi’s BJP is dominant and sets the national narrative. BJP is the pivot around which national politics revolves. An important aspect of this hegemony, which seems entrenched at the national level but is shakier at the level of states, is that it is heavily tilted towards the North.

 

The Opposition has struggled to come up with a national narrative to take on the BJP’s potent mix of Hindutva, development and welfarism. The most successful opposition to BJP has come from regional parties which ride on regional pride and depict the BJP as a party of Hindi-speaking outsiders that seek to impose their language and culture on the rest of the country. The opposition to NEP with its emphasis on three language formula is an example.

 

There is fear among the South India states that the 2025 census will come up with the population inputs for delimitation of Lok Sabha constituencies which would be detrimental to their party interests.

 

Delimitation Sword:

 

India’s Parliament has frozen the number of seats it has since the 1970s, despite massive changes to the country’s population since then. The freeze was put in place in part because population control was official government policy at that time. So ‘rewarding’ North Indian states with more seats for their much higher fertility would have been politically problematic. The status quo prevailed all these years. Now, the disparity is massive. One Member of Parliament from Tamil Nadu now represents on average 1.8 million citizens, whereas an MP from Uttar Pradesh represents 3 million.

 

The new Parliament building inaugurated by Modi has space for 888 Lok Sabha MPs. Speculation is ripe that Modi would unfreeze before the next LS elections. He has the motivation: Projections suggest that the reconstituted Lok Sabha would have 143 MPS from UP and 79 for Bihar, while Tamil Nadu would add just 10 more seats and Kerala none at all. In other words, political power would be even more concentrated in North India than it already is.

 

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin has referred to this as a “sword hanging over the South” and is trying to mobilize the South Indian states against the BJP hegemony. Watch this pace for development of the unfolding story.