Beyond the rhetoric of the north-south divide

For decades, the discourse surrounding India’s development has been framed as a slow but steady march toward national synchronisation. The prevailing hope was that the economic dynamism of the south would eventually pull the rest of the country along, creating a unified middle-income power. However, as the Census and the subsequent delimitation exercise loom, a more fractured reality is emerging. The socioeconomic gap between what economist Rathin Roy calls the Great Indian Plain and the Peninsular States has not merely persisted; it has calcified into an existential fault-line that threatens the very structural integrity of the Indian Union. This is not merely a regional squabble over tax shares or language; it is a profound asymmetry where the locus of economic prosperity is increasingly decoupled from the centre of political power.

Distinct nations in one sovereign space

The physical and economic geography of modern India reveals two distinct nations inhabiting one sovereign space. On one hand, we have the Peninsular States, boasting per capita incomes that are at least double those of their northern counterparts. In States such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala, human development indicators — life expectancy, maternal health, and literacy — align closely with (and in some cases exceed) upper-middle-income countries in Europe or South America. On the other hand, the Great Indian Plain, encompassing the populous Hindi heartland of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand, remains mired in a reality comparable to sub-Saharan Africa. While the heartland leads in population and fertility, the Peninsula leads on every other metric of modern progress.

This divergence has created a potential political problem of unprecedented proportions. In most healthy federal polities, such as the United States, Canada, or Australia, the most economically prosperous regions also hold the majority of the population, ensuring a natural alignment between wealth creation and political representation. India is treading the dangerous path once walked by the USSR and Yugoslavia — the only two major historical examples where an economically prosperous minority was tasked with subsidising a politically dominant but impoverished majority.

Following the next Census, if parliamentary seats are redistributed purely by population, the ratio of parliamentary seats in the south to the Hindi heartland seats will fall dramatically. The voice of the region that generates the nation’s wealth will be further muffled by the sheer demographic weight of the region that consumes it.

This is the essence of India’s existential crisis. When prosperity vests with the majority, they can conceivably subsidise the minority in perpetuity to maintain stability. But when a productive minority is forced to subsidise a relatively poor and deprived majority that holds the reins of dominant political power, conflict is not just a possibility — it is a probability. The current trajectory suggests a scenario where the South could increasingly be viewed by some as an extractive colony for the political ambitions of the Hindi-speaking “cow belt”. A rupture between the heartland and the peninsula could well follow, unless handled wisely by both sides.

As negotiations follow on the revised delimitation of seats in Parliament, the idea of digressive proportionality, advanced in this space by Professor Santosh Mehrotra — “Reimagining delimitation”, January 12, 2026 — goes the farthest towards balancing the interests of the more populous States of the north with those of the high-human development States of the South. It ensures fair representation in Parliament by giving larger States more seats but fewer per person and giving smaller States fewer seats but more representation per person. By balancing population size with State equality to prevent total domination by large States, it is likely to strengthen national unity better than any other system.

The South has a crisis

It would be a historic blunder for the southern States to frame this divide solely as a grievance against a biased central government or worse, against the Hindi belt. While the political asymmetry is real, the south faces a deep-seated crisis of its own that threatens to stall its progress toward high-income status. The region is currently caught in a socio-economic “middle-income trap”. Despite high per capita incomes, the southern economy remains largely extractive and unequal. The gap between the wealth of the rich and the daily wage of the common labourer is staggering. In Tamil Nadu, the per capita income is triple that of Bihar, yet the daily agricultural wage is not even double.

This indicates that the fruits of the South’s “growth explosion” are being skimmed off by a narrow elite, leaving the bulk of the population behind. The inequality that defines India is as present in the gated communities of Hyderabad as it is in the hinterlands of Patna (Kerala is arguably an exception). Patriarchy, misogyny and casteism remain the great unifiers of the Indian experience. Whether it is the blatant caste discrimination in rural Tamil Nadu or the flouting of traffic and environmental laws in Bengaluru and Chennai, the South has largely failed to translate economic wealth into social transformation. Literacy rates in districts such as Dharmapuri (Tamil Nadu) are lower than in dozens of districts in Uttar Pradesh, and the bulk of the wealth in States such as Karnataka and Telangana is concentrated in just three or four urban districts.

Still, the prognosis for a natural convergence between north and south is gloomy. A decade ago, one might have hoped for a “grand bargain” where the north caught up economically before political representation was rebalanced. But with a 300% differential in per capita income today, moving the needle will take generations. The second theoretical solution — massive population movement from the Hindi heartland to the Peninsula that “equalises” the demographic — is already happening, but it is creating a class of “internal outsiders” rather than a cohesive social fabric. These migrants still vote in the north and as Northerners, so they will do nothing to boost the South’s political clout. The third scenario, where the Peninsula’s prosperity grows so fast that it pulls the rest of the country up, is failing because the southern States are themselves punching below their weight due to weak institutions and a persistent disregard for the rule of law.

The need for sober dialogue

What is required now is a sober, intellectual dialogue that moves beyond the reactive rhetoric of regionalism. We are witnessing a situation where even prosperous States are forced to spend a large proportion of their resources compensating for economic failure and social fragmentation rather than investing in the future. The South’s focus must shift toward internal inclusivity. True progress is not measured by the number of unicorns in a capital city, but by the daily wage of an agricultural labourer and the literacy rate of its poorest district. This is where Kerala alone scores well.

The divide between the South and the Hindi heartland is real, and the central government’s push for hegemonic control only exacerbates the tension. However, the southern States must recognise that their economic lead is fragile. Without a radical commitment to social cohesion, better human capital, and the dismantling of extractive economic structures, they will remain trapped in a middle-income cycle, socially stagnant and increasingly, politically marginalised. The “grand bargain” for India’s future cannot just be a political deal between New Delhi and the State capitals; it must be a social contract that ensures prosperity is shared by the many, not just the few. Only then can India hope to bridge the fault-line that, if it is allowed to worsen with the coming delimitation, threatens the Union itself.

Shashi Tharoor is a fourth-term Member of Parliament (Congress) for Thiruvananthapuram (Lok Sabha), the award-winning author of 28 books, including, most recently, ‘The Sage Who Reimagined Hinduism: the Life, Lessons and Legacy of Sree Narayana Guru’, and the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee for External Affairs

Published – March 28, 2026 12:16 am IST