A Third Modi Term Will Test the United States of India
A Third Modi Term Will Test the United States of India
Southern states regard the electoral reforms the Indian prime minister plans to unveil as a Trojan horse for northern supremacy
As India is going through a scorching election season in peak summer, the battle for its tropical states in the south is heating up more than usual this time. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is seeking a third term, has been trying extra hard to make inroads into this area, a largely unconquered frontier for his Hindu nationalist ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which dominates in northern India but has limited presence in the south. With repeated tours of the region, which he has visited nearly 60 times in the past three years, he has thrown everything at “Mission South,” as his party calls it.
A lot rides on how he fares—a lot more than just the result of this election, which is due in about two weeks: It will determine the fate of India’s secular republic and test the resilience of its diverse federation already squirming in Modi’s centralizing grasp. Both are at a tipping point in this election, raising the risk of political turmoil and instability in coming months and years.
This term will most likely be the 74-year-old Modi’s final chance to effect the big-bang changes toward dismantling India’s multicultural democracy and establishing a Hindu state. In his first two terms he has constantly pushed the envelope to undermine the principle of equal citizenship with incremental attacks on minority rights. Now, at the zenith of his power, he is as close as Hindu supremacists will ever get toward their long-cherished goal of a Hindu state. It’s now or never.
Modi’s Southern Strategy
With little room to grow in the northern states, where the BJP already commands a semi-hegemonic hold, Modi is looking to the south to consolidate his power. The BJP got just about 9% of its seats in the last elections in 2019 from the south, compared to almost 60% in the Hindi-speaking northern belt. That was enough for its coalition to win 345 of the 543 seats in the directly elected Lok Sabha (lower house of India’s Parliament). In this election, Modi has made it his personal goal to raise that number to over 400 and obtain a supermajority to effect transformational changes.
But the irony of Modi’s southern charm offensive is that if the south really gives him what he wants, it will also end up strengthening his hand in delimitation, an exercise detrimental to its interests. Due after two years, delimitation by its very nature would make the south less electorally relevant by reorganizing parliamentary seats in keeping with population growth. In a Modi 3.0 administration, it will be one of the major flashpoints.
Delimitation has been put off for nearly half a century for its inevitably contentious outcome of weakening the south’s stake in the federation. But its official freeze ends in 2026, and Modi’s government is committed to setting it in motion after this election instead of kicking the can yet again. Modi’s historic promise to reserve one-third of seats in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies (legislatures) for women is also contingent on delimitation, adding to its imminence, with a very high probability that the next election in 2029 would be contested over a substantially expanded Parliament. But delimitation will be fought tooth and nail by the south. It will give so many more seats to the more populated and poorer northern states, on which the BJP already has a lock, that the party would no longer have to bother courting the more politically progressive south. This would make it far easier for the BJP to impose a Hindu-first order to which the south thus far has been something of a brake.
More seats and support from the south itself in this election will help Modi blunt the inevitable backlash to this coming political disenfranchisement. It will also increase the risk of a policy ram-through and subsequent conflict. The legislature of one southern state, Tamil Nadu, has already passed a resolution to oppose delimitation, which the state’s chief minister calls a “Damocles’ sword” hanging over southern India. Another southern party has warned of a “people’s movement”—meaning, mass agitation—throughout the region. The opposition Congress party is avoiding a north-south controversy and keeping its powder dry. All sides are holding their fire for now, waiting for the results of the current electoral contest to judge each other’s strength before the more decisive contest for the new federal arrangement breaks out.
Changing Demography, Frozen System
The number of India’s directly elected seats has remained unchanged at 543 since 1976, when the practice of periodically aligning constituency numbers with population growth was stopped because of the wildly different fertility rates among states. As a result, each Indian member of parliament today represents an average of 2.5 million citizens, compared to about 250,000 in Japan and 750,000 in the U.S., hampering the quality of representation. India also has a serious problem of parliamentary malapportionment. On average, a member of parliament in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, which has more people than Brazil, represents nearly three million people, while an MP in Tamil Nadu, just 1.8 million. This violates the principle of equal vote. So there is no question that delimitation is long overdue.
Earlier governments wiggled out, but not Modi. He has already built a bigger Parliament building to accommodate the extra MPs. Delimitation is expected to increase the number of directly elected seats to more than 750 from the current 543 and that of the nominated Upper House to nearly 400 from the current 245.
But the real challenge is allocating these seats among states since the population has grown rapidly in the more agrarian and less prosperous north while it is shrinking in the southern states, which are more industrialized and have far better social and governance indicators in health, education, nutrition, and law and order. This will cost them dearly in a delimitation.
According to calculations by Milan Vaishnav and Jamie Hintson of Washington D.C.-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, just the two northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, among the most underdeveloped, would have more parliamentary seats than the five southern states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana combined. Yet the latter contribute 25% of India’s corporate and income tax revenues, compared with just 3% that comes from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The result: a volatile federal arrangement in which the most advanced states would have the least political say, and the least advanced states, the most.
Widening North-South Divide
This is already fueling a North-South divide that is manifesting itself in protests over tax distribution. Southern states are furious that they are getting a lot less from the federal pool of taxes than they contribute as a result of a new tax-sharing formula that Modi implemented taking into account the change in population over the decades. Uttar Pradesh, the biggest state which will gain the most seats in a delimitation exercise and is currently ruled by a strident Hindu supremacist BJP chief minister, alone received more federal funds than all the five southern states put together this fiscal year.
The anger is palpable. Talks of secession from India are no longer idle social media outrage or casual living room chatter in the south—they have entered mainstream political discourse. When a Congress party member of parliament recently created a stir by demanding a “separate country for south India,” he couldn’t understand what the fuss was about because, he said, everybody thinks the same.
Delimitation would be a challenge for any leader. Modi’s strength puts him in a better position to navigate an intractable issue. But his intransigent temperament raises the risk of less negotiations and more confrontation, as was seen in a year-long farmers’ protest after his government railroaded contentious agrarian laws in Parliament without heeding opposing voices and all stakeholders. Meanwhile, the BJP’s north-centric focus and an avowed program of cultural homogenization and administrative centralization automatically raises pre-existing southern anxieties over the north’s political-cultural domination.
Linguistic Imperialism and Religious Divisiveness
India is an extremely culturally and linguistically diverse country with over 20 major languages spoken in the country. Every southern state has its own vernacular. But Modi’s push to promote Hindi, a northern tongue, all over the country in keeping with the Hindu right’s motto of “Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan”—conflating language with religion and nationalism—causes alarm in the south, where fears of “Hindi imperialism” have historical resonance. Anti-Hindi agitations and riots in the 1950s and 1960s in the south forced the government to shelve the plan to make Hindi the national language after independence. Instead, both Hindi and English had to be kept as official languages for federal government and administrative work (apart from 20 other official languages for states).
Except in one state, Karnataka—where the BJP was ousted from power last year—the BJP’s politics of Islamophobia is also culturally alien in much of the south, where Islam reached through trade long before it arrived in the north through conquest. The historical Hindu resentments toward Muslims that the BJP has tapped and aggravated so effectively in the north are far less pronounced in the more syncretic south.
With the south’s long history of social reform movements and mobilizations building political identities around social justice rather than religion and caste, BJP’s politics thus does not sit easy with southern parties. Modi’s efforts to penetrate the south with Hindu identity politics only adds to the unease. His trips to the region in recent years have inevitably triggered #GoBackModi trends on social media.
With its instinctive aversion to Hindu extremist politics, the south is a roadblock to the idea of a majoritarian state. By cementing the north’s dominance of Indian politics, delimitation will remove a major hurdle to constitutionalizing Hindu supremacism, triggering southern resistance and pushing India into a vortex of political unrest.
Once the election ends and the heatwave recedes, Indian politics is about to get a lot hotter if the results show Modi really continues to be as hot as his party would have us believe.
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