00:00India's five-decade-long political compromise between the North and the South has just imploded.
00:05Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government introduced a surprise constitutional amendment
00:09bill to expand the size of parliament by roughly 50%. His administration said its goal was to
00:14speedily implement a 2023 law that will make more room for women lawmakers, granting them one-third
00:20of the expanded number of seats. But Rahul Gandhi's party and other opposition groups accused Modi
00:26of using the quote as a ruse. The government's real intent, they said, was to redraw the balance
00:31of power in a way that would be antithetical to the country's South. Why does all this matter so much?
00:37Because the North, which is more agrarian, impoverished, and more prone to communal
00:41polarization, already dominates national politics. For example, Uttar Pradesh, a state more populist
00:46than Brazil and poorer than sub-Saharan Africa, elects 80 members of parliament. Tamil Nadu,
00:52a southern manufacturing powerhouse with more progressive views on caste and religion,
00:57elects only 39. For 50 years, representation of North and South has followed an old 1971 census
01:04so as not to punish the South for population control, something it has done a lot better than
01:09the North. Expanding parliament by 50% while using the most recent 2011 census would raise Uttar Pradesh's
01:16tally by 53 seats and Tamil Nadu's by only 9. Ultimately, the bill was defeated,
01:22handing Modi a rare loss. But a pathway to using the ongoing 2026 census to reallocate seats in the
01:28future has opened up. That might allow the Prime Minister's Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Jananda
01:33Party to secure its fortunes in the post-Modi era. The party's strongholds are in the North and the West.
01:39It hasn't made much of an inroad into the more liberal South, which has raced ahead in education,
01:44health and economic growth. In fact, their growth is funding everyone else. An even tighter Northern
01:51control over national politics and a smaller voice for the South could affect the latter's willingness
01:56to keep bankrolling the former. But as long as Modi refuses to heed the South's demand to preserve
02:02the 50-year-old status quo, his successor may be able to force through a representational change,
02:08perhaps as early as the 2034 general election. That's what is worrying the South. India's
02:14ambitions may be derailed, not by a lack of capital, but by a broken internal consensus.
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