5 min readApr 24, 2026 06:17 AM IST
First published on: Apr 24, 2026 at 06:17 AM IST
The failure of the government to get its bills passed — combining women’s reservation and delimitation of parliamentary constituencies — has received a mixed response. While the tussle has been seen as a battle between the North and the South, it need not be. It can be seen as an argument between those who see India as a unitary state and those who see it as a federal one.
In a subcontinent of such diversity, the federalists would naturally view a rising share of any one region with concern. There is already a disparity in the number of seats between the North and the South. A continuing redistribution following population growth would leave the South with declining representation in the Lok Sabha. The South has witnessed occasions when its cultural independence has come under threat. The move to institute Hindi as the sole official language of India in the mid-1960s was the most important one. This was resolved with remarkable political maturity, with the South given an assurance that English would continue as one of the official languages of the country for as long as the states desired.
This historic compromise appears to have been forgotten since 2014, with the central government trying to promote Hindi at the expense of English and other Indian languages — naming central government schemes in the language and expanding its use in central government spaces in the South, where it is not only unnecessary but also ill-fitted. There was an inevitable pushback; the hurried tabling of the delimitation bill served as the occasion to fight back. The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, M K Stalin, has spoken strongly against it, and in Parliament, Rahul Gandhi roused the Opposition to defeat the Bill.
Though some have claimed the defeat of the bills as a victory for the South, it must actually be seen as a victory for the idea of a federal state, and more so for the idea of India as a space of diverse cultures regarded equally.
Having made their point, the political parties of the South must now turn their gaze inward to the inequality within their societies. This should not be difficult — all of them place the ideal of social justice high on their agendas. Largely due to the programmes of their political parties, the southern states have travelled a considerable distance in that direction, depending on how the population is differentiated. Caste dominates politics here, and the improved condition of the Scheduled Castes is presented by political parties as evidence of justice.
The progress made on social justice is indisputable, but inequality remains. Take consumption, a proxy for the absent data on income distribution. Strikingly, the consumption level of the Scheduled Castes of Kerala and Tamil Nadu is higher than the national average for all social groups. But in these states, the gap between the Scheduled Castes and the best-off is greater than the national average. This is not acknowledged in the relentless messaging on the advancement of social justice by their governments, an effort that rivals the messaging by the present central government.
Moving beyond caste by widening the space over which inequality is considered, we find Kerala and Tamil Nadu losing their iconic status as forerunners of development. The Achilles’ heel of these states is women’s empowerment. On most indicators of well-being, notably the presence of anaemia and infant mortality, the women and girl children of these states do worse than their men. The proportion of women with anaemia is twice that of men in these two southern states, which is higher than for India as a whole. But it is when it comes to governance that the inequality is most stark. Two metrics of gender parity in governance, namely the proportion of women legislators and of women at the highest level of the judiciary, would be relevant to the context. The proportion of women is 9 per cent in Kerala’s legislature and 5 per cent in Tamil Nadu — far lower than the national average. When it comes to women judges in the high courts, Tamil Nadu does slightly better than the national average of 14 per cent, but Kerala does far worse, with only 8 per cent of judges being women. In these two states, women are excluded from governance, even where they outnumber the men. Social justice has been imagined solely in terms of the distribution of goods, with power elided.
The failure to pass the three bills from in the Lok Sabha need hardly cause despair. It has sent out signals with a bearing on the future of democracy in India. First, the political class of a few northern states can no longer hope to dominate the world’s most heterogeneous polity. And the southern states cannot continue to concentrate power in the hands of men.
Balakrishnan is the author of India’s Economy from Nehru to Modi: A Brief History (Ranikhet: Permanent Black) and Yashwanth is a teaching assistant at Krea University
