The Congress will never admit, in victory or in defeat, that for years now it has been following a policy of ‘soft Hindutva’, which will explain all those visuals of its top leaders, irrespective of their surnames, stress their religious identity.
The Bharatiya Janta party, especially in the sort of overwhelming victory it saw this Sunday, too will never admit it follows the ultimate ‘appeasement policy,’ appeasing a billion or more people, with what it does for them. And how it treats the ‘others’ who also have inherited citizenship by birth in a free India, or Bharat.
Given an option of getting a genuine product or its pale shadow, the people would always want the genuine article. This comes wrapped in rupee gifts in their bank accounts of women and farmers, groups that cut across religion and caste.
Madhya Pradesh Congress leader Kamal Nath and Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupinder Bagel understand this fully now. For Nath, it is the end of the road. For Baghel, age is still on his side for another round at the hustings. It is moot question if the senior party leadership may want to make course corrections.
The reams of analyses of Sunday and Monday’s declaration of results and voting patterns of the assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram have thoroughly exhausted every facet of the election strategies, programmes, campaigns and failures of men and parties.
The margins of vote share were narrow, but their translation into seats was decisive, as it has been for the last five elections. The Congress lost where it was in direct contest with the BJP, or to put it mildly, where Rahul Gandhi was in a duel with Narendra Modi.
Telengana saw the Congress challenging the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), founded by K Chandrashekhar Rao, with the BJP forming the unbalanced triangular contest.
BRS is a regional clone of the Congress. Its name translates to ‘Indian National Council’, as close to the INC as possible. Its governing body is the KSR clan, including his son and daughter. The similarities are obvious. He lost because he failed to fulfil the promises he had made. His regime was corrupt. But corruption is not a major issue these days.
TV, YouTube and newspaper analysts have comprehensively proved that the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is head and shoulder above everyone else in his connect with the voters. He speaks their lingo; and he blows he dog whistle louder than everyone else. Rahul Gandhi has still to prove that he is a match.
But it is not about these two which India needs to worry about too much. It needs to worry about the growing mismatch between the voting patterns of the people of the southern states and those of the Hindi heartland. The dependence of the north east on resources from the Central government, and the limited seats they have in the Lok Sabha, theoretically make them a part of the northern grouping.
It was first noticed in the general elections of 1977 called by Indira Gandhi, ending the close to two years of the state of Emergency she had declared, Indira Gandhi was wiped out in the North, with a droplet of two seats. But the South stood firmly with her. This prevented the Janata governments fulling carrying out their promised reforms, or the vendetta they may have planned against the Congress.
Despite the rebellion of the two Telugu states against the Congress and their support to Modi at crucial moments in his two terms, the Southern states have not fallen under his spell. Barring the years of an internally divided AIADMK, Tamil Nadu has rejected the BJP summarily. So has Kerala where the CPM and the Congress have not left any space for the BJP.
Unlike the human genome scientists describing a South India and North India DNA variety, other political arguments will have to be marshalled. Economic and other social indices do not see radical differences between the two sets of people.
The South, out of a political heritage and tectonic social movements has in many ways broken away with a past rooted only in caste. The 1947 Partition did not lead to bloodshed in the South, nor did it see forced mass movements of Muslims and Hindus, across the new border. The dog whistle, therefore, is less audible.
And though both Kerala’s North and Karnataka have been touted as gateways to the South for the Sangh — which has more Shakhas in Kerala than in Uttar Pradesh, it is said —it has not had a full harvest. The terms in office in Karnataka have never seen the BJP confident and assured of a long stay in power.
This North South divide has created strains in the federal ethos of India’s republican governance. The issue of Hindi rankles as much today as it did sixty years ago. The demand for a proper share of Central resources remains strong. And even as States fight with neighbours on river waters, they make common cause in challenging the high handedness of New Delhi.
This can only grow in the future. The populations in the Southern states are stabilised at the replenishment level. The populations in the North show little sign of doing so in the near future. What are its implications?
One peak into the future can be seen in the new Parliament complex. It has 888 seats in the Lok Sabha chamber and 384 seats in the Rajya Sabha chamber. The old parliament building had a 543 seat in the Lok Sabha chamber. The new Parliament is built for roughly 50 percent more MPs. Sooner. Rather than later, these seats will be filled up.
In a very perceptive analysis in The Mint some months ago, computer scientist turned writer Dilip D’Souza noted that Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populated and politically significant State, and Bihar won’t reach replacement level of 2.0 for a decade or more.
The Constitution calls for proportionate representation – each MP should represent approximately the same number of people. The 84th Constitution amendment froze number of Lok Sabha seats at 543.
If Modi orders a new calculation based on the 2011 census – the 2021 census has not been held — it would bring political disaster for South India.
Milan Vaishnav and Jamie Hintson at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace projected the numbers 2026. They projected that Tamil Nadu’s seats could fall to 31, Kerala’s seats will fall from current 20 to 12. Bihar would go up from 40 to 50, and Uttar Pradesh from 80 to 91.
Not that he would do it, but it is in the hands of his government’s if they want to disempower the South from having any worthwhile say in federal governance. For him, it would not be punishing the people for their higher rate of education and their lower birth rate. But just an exercise in real politics.
(John Dayal is an author, Editor, occasional documentary film maker and activist)
