South vs north debate isn’t divisive, Centre’s ‘one nation, one policy’ is

Social media outrage used to be fun a decade or more ago. Now, motivated partisans, organised ‘attacks’ and bots have weaponised the medium. Anything anyone says can inspire fury. And instead of engaging in good faith with people one may disagree with, one has to now face a deluge of vicious manufactured outrage. Congress politician Praveen Chakravarty, experienced that ugly truth after his post about the recent assembly elections elicited a barrage of outrage on X.

All he did was post a partial photograph of the cover of my book South vs North: India’s Great Divide on the day the state assembly election results for Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, and Mizoram were announced. The outrage factory called the post divisive, which led to Chakravarty eventually deleting it.

The data on health reveals that the difference between the best and worst states is as wide as that between OECD countries and Sub-Saharan Africa. When it comes to education, this divide is as wide as that between middle-income countries and low-income ones. In terms of economic prospects, the better-off states are two to three times richer. Overall, south India is a vastly different place from the central and northern parts of the country.

Already Sir …!!! They always keep two cards ready . Now they have taken out second card …. Right from the drawing room of ‘ Bharat Jodo ‘ & ‘ Mohabbat Ki Dukaan ‘ …. https://t.co/48dXfXKT9y pic.twitter.com/W1LXZCCNU3

— B L Santhosh (@blsanthosh) December 3, 2023

The solutions to the problems of India’s states are often ones that are orthogonal to each other given their developmental trajectory. For example, the southern states need to focus on output metrics in education while the northern states need to get kids into school and keep them there. The southern states need to focus on chronic health issues and possibly elder care given their demographics and current achievements, while northern states need to focus on pre and post-natal healthcare delivery. These differences seep into almost all areas of public policy and make any centralised policy impossible.

Also Read: Clueless opposition cooked up a north-south divide—like tourists lost in their own country

Zero-sum game

The southern states are also caught in a peculiar bind: they are doing well because they have achieved stable populations through good governance but this threatens to rob them of political power through delimitation and resource allocation through the finance commission’s use of population in devolving revenues. And this threat comes precisely at a time when citizens have come to expect relatively good government services from their states and are seeking to customise them even further to their changing needs.

Consider Telangana: the state’s tax revenue was 7.7 per cent of its Gross State Domestic Product in 2020-21 while central transfers accounted for only 2.5 per cent of the GSDP. The state receives so little from the Union to meet its budgetary demands that it is forced to tax its citizens more at the state level. In most of South India, a state’s revenue as a per cent of GSDP is consistently high because they have relatively lower rates of population growth and poverty.

In other words, people in these states are taxed more heavily than others as the Union taxes the citizens pay are mostly sent elsewhere owing to how Finance Commission allocations work. This is on top of the union masking some taxes as cesses, which only worsens the tax burden on these states.

The democratic model in India is situated in a federal structure that is skewed towards a powerful Union, which tends to accrue even greater power at the expense of the rights of the states. Such a unitary approach to governance in a diverse country with various states being in varying stages of development renders most nationwide policies suboptimal. This centralised approach has already forced states into a zero-sum game on resource allocation problems.

But union governments derive power from making ‘one nation, one policy’ declarations. And this suits the states in the Indo-Gangetic plains because they get a better bargain in the process.

Also Read: 2024 isn’t about north vs south. See BJP’s limitations & do the maths

Matter of the heart

The dilemma that South India faces in terms of negotiating a better status for themselves in India is perennial; with no easy answers. The status quo condemns them to receiving less in transfers, giving more in taxes and sacrificing political power; all because they have been successful. The southern states also happen to be linguistically and culturally distinct, which adds a whole new dimension of political complexity.

Therefore, it’s only natural that many voters in Telangana and other southern states behave distinctly from voters in the Hindi heartland. Of course, voters don’t vote with their heads. We vote with our hearts. And in that calculation of the heart, the party which is most aligned, at the moment, with those they are engaged in the zero-sum game with has to work the hardest to win them over.

If the political landscape of this country is any indication, the BJP has won the hearts and minds of the Indo-Gangetic plains. And as a natural corollary to that, it has to work the hardest to win votes in south India. These states view the BJP with suspicion when it comes to development metrics.

South vs north is a question every thinking citizen of India must engage with. It’s a pressing question with no easy answers. I had proposed gamified direct democracy as a solution in my book. One where we improve the transmission efficiency of people’s will by having a system that depends on Direct Democracy but with sufficiency guardrails so that it doesn’t descend into majoritarian tyranny. Others may come up with their own. But whatever one comes up with, there are bound to be significant costs.

Nilakantan RS is a data scientist and the author of South vs North: India’s Great Divide. He tweets @puram_politics. Views are personal.

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)