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| Edited By: Yogesh Pawar |Source: DNA |Updated: Jul 11, 2018, 11:34 AM IST
As demographics of North go up and the South depletes, is the voter inadequately represented by the distribution of MPs? In the run-up to World Population Day on July 11, Yogesh Pawar takes stock of what this means for India…
Basantpur Saitli in Uttar Pradesh’s Ghaziabad district is two and a half hours away from the Parliament in Delhi. The village falls in one of India’s most populous parliamentary constituencies. Liaquat Baig, a landless daily-wage labourer, has been making regular rounds to Delhi to find funds to help him with his six-month-old daughter born with Down syndrome. “Whenever I call my MP Gen VK Singh’s landline, I’m told to come down and present my case. Despite repeated attempts, I’m still to make contact,” says the helpless father.
Baig is not alone, given the poor and often inaccessible representation that more populous states have to deal with. Members of Parliament (MPs) from constituencies in the heavily populated states admits off the record, to the pitfalls of representing such a varied population. “There are more people than one could ever merely meet briefly even if the whole five-year tenure was spent meeting people,” they admit, adding that this is why MPs are only seen in the election season.
Along with apathy and lack of political accountability, flashpoints like hunger deaths, public health emergencies, disasters and even law and order situations repeatedly cruelly underline how both India’s logistics and infrastructure fall woefully short of her 1,354,051,149 (as of July 03, 2018) citizens. The country is already home to 17.74% of the total world population, and despite its 66-year-old family planning programme, is poised to pip China in six years to become the world’s most populous country.
This growth is anything but homogeneous. It becomes evident if one looks at the Parliament as a representative microcosm. Take the example of the make-up of the current Lok Sabha (the 16th one), which came into being in May 2014. Here, a Keralite has more than one and a half times the representation a Bihari enjoys. While each MP from Bihar represents 26 lakh people, in Uttar Pradesh s/he represents 25 lakh people. Further east, in West Bengal, each MP represents only 22 lakh people. As one moves south, each MP from Tamil Nadu represents 18 lakh people and in Kerala the number falls further down to about 17 lakh.
This means the South is less populated (lesser babies are being born than those dying) than the North, particularly Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. For example, 67 years ago, Tamil Nadu was slightly more populous than Bihar. Today, Bihar has almost 1.5 times Tamil Nadu’s population.
But shouldn’t the number of Lok Sabha seats of each state depend on its demography? Ideally, yes. Only, long ago in 1976, it was realised that the South had been able to contain its population explosion while the North was lagging behind (it still is). So apart from the Emergency, another important decision taken by the Indira Gandhi government of the day was to ensure the more populous states were kept on par with the less populous. A constitutional amendment was passed which froze the number of seats allocated to each state in Parliament till 2000. This was done based on the 1971 census population figures.
Despite the complete breakdown of dialogue between the then ruling Congress and the opposition (due to the Emergency), Lucknow-based sociology and population studies expert Dr Malini Mathur laughs remembering how the constitutional amendment enjoyed all-party support. “Except when it came to the actual crunch 29 years later, no party wanted to end the freeze. They all knew it’d lead to widespread disaffection in the Southern states, which were already grumbling over five decades of the North’s upper hand in the polity. They realised that any attempt to disturb the status quo could even fan secessionist rage. So, like good Indians, all party leaders unanimously decided to postpone the problem they couldn’t find a solution to, till 2026,” says Mathur.
“Effectively, this has led to a considerable weakening of the one-man-one-vote principle being stretched to breaking point,” former Chief Election Commissioner SY Quraishi admits. “It has long been ignored due to fears of how the country’s federal structure will react to any attempt to redistribute seats depending on actual population size.” He says this dilutes the already poor interface and accountability voters contend with post elections. “It contributes in its own way to gradually, yet systematically, eroding voter confidence in the election process and hence democracy itself. We can’t put away addressing this forever. As a nation, we have to decide how and when.”
Others, like human rights expert and law faculty at Pune’s ILS College Dr Nitish Nawsagaray, say this issue has been in abeyance with an ulterior agenda. “While the Constitution promises equality in the eyes of law, such inaccessible representation reduces the extent to which citizens of populous constituencies can hold MPs accountable. It encourages apathy with the system,” observes Nawsagary, calling it a “sinister backdoor disenfranchisement” and “a subversion of the safeguards on equality enshrined in the Constitution.” According to him, if the powers-that-be want to really make changes, they must begin with removing the first past the post system (where a candidate who gets even one vote more than others wins) and change it to proportional representation (where the total number of seats a party gets corresponds to the number of votes they got).
While admitting the problems and challenges this will brings in its wake, veteran journalist, political observer-commentator and new Rajya Sabha MP Kumar Ketkar insists, “The ball on this issue is firmly in the court of those in power. If any amendment has gone beyond its best-past date and is unable to accommodate contemporary ground realities, then the government of the day can and should take all parties into confidence to re-look and change it. Such consensus shouldn’t only address the poor representation in the North, but also work out safeguards so that southern states don’t feel slighted in the process.”
Dr Mathur cautions that any such move will only confirm the Hindi hegemony charge of the South. “Currently, the more populous Hindi states monopolise the country’s socio-political discourse. Changing the current distribution of seats will make this into a stranglehold India might find hard to shake off. Let’s not forget the lion’s share (51% of its seats) of BJP’s landslide majority in 2014 came from Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. If the seats were indeed proportionate to the population, then the seats would be far more than that.”
In most of South India, this issue ends up touching a raw nerve. A politically assertive Tamil Nadu is no exception. Leader of opposition in the state assembly MK Stalin of the DMK from Chennai points out: “Delhi shouldn’t forget that the South contributes much more to India’s revenues than the North but we always get a step-motherly treatment when it comes to the distributing the revenues.” He further adds, “Every five years, a finance commission decides how to split India’s tax revenue between the Centre and states. The previous commission decided to go by the 2011 Census instead of the 1971 Census. That is unfair. We will fight this tooth and nail. After all, we are answerable to our people and have to look out for them.”
No surprises then that this demographic North-South divide is also raising the socio-political temperatures in the South. Regional outfits/parties find massive support, especially after the steep rise in migration from the North to the South from 1991 onwards. “Not only sectors like IT, but also daily wage labourers on construction sites and the retail sector have seen a marked rise in the number of North Indians. First, they contribute less to the revenue.
Then, they want to take a larger slice of it. As if all this weren’t enough, they come to grab our jobs,” charged Deviprasad Babu of the Kannada Rakshana Vedike (a regional outfit which aggressively pushes for Kannada usage) from Bengaluru, the Karnataka capital. He cites the “successful” agitation by his outfit against the Hindi signage on the Metro stations. “Metro authorities were trying to force Hindi signage on us. After they saw how ugly our agitation could become in an election year, they decided to drop the plan.”
In Andhra Pradesh too, readers may recall how Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu, comparing the state with Japan, had exhorted citizens of the state to have more children. “You don’t want outsiders to come and take away your land and property, do you?” he had asked in 2015.
So is this a case of North is North and South is South, and never the twain shall meet? Congress MP from Thiruvananthapuram Dr Shashi Tharoor says, “It is not just about the instability of redistribution of seats. It is about the real risk of rewarding delinquent states (those that, since 1971, have failed to empower women, control their population growth and improve their social development indicators) by disenfranchising those states that have made the effort to do well on these indicators and so have fewer people. I worry about the southern states feeling politically alienated by being punished for doing well – ending up with fewer seats in the Lok Sabha because they have relatively fewer people.”
He underlines though that parliamentary democracy comes with its limits. “We all understand that in a democracy each citizen’s vote must count the same. In a presidential system, we could’ve balanced the power of the more populous states through an Electoral College that gave more power to the smaller states. In a parliamentary system that option isn’t available.” He suggests that the only answer is to evolve a more decentralised democracy in which political power in Delhi does not overwhelm the states. “Otherwise unfreezing the present arrangements would have severe consequences for national unity.”
The latest National Family Health Survey 4 shows fertility rate (average number of children a woman would have from 15-49 years) has declined in India by 22.73% from 2.7 in 2005-06 (NFHS-3) to 2.2 in 2015-16 (NFHS-4).
The fertility rate in rural areas was 2.4 and in urban areas, it was 1.8. It is only when we look at the state-wise break-up do we realise that Bihar has the highest rate (3.41) during 2015-16 (NFHS-4) while Sikkim has the lowest (1.2) in comparison to other states.
Bihar, Meghalaya, Uttar Pradesh, Nagaland, Jharkhand, Manipur, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram and Dadra and Nagar Haveli were above the national rate 2.2 during 2015-16 (NFHS-4). Going by this data, West Bengal has a fertility rate lower than Norway, while in Kerala it is actually closer to Japan’s.
