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The delimitation Bill being pushed through by the Modi regime in the ongoing special session of parliament by using the cover of the Bill for reservation of seats for women in the Lok Sabha and state assemblies hoodwinks the nation and egregiously violates the vision of two stalwarts of modern India, C. Rajagopalachari and B.R. Ambedkar.

Ambedkar warned in 1955, at the time of the reorganisation of States, that the way boundaries were being reset by creating huge states in the Hindi belt and the western part of India, and smaller states in the south, would lead to the perpetual domination of north over south.

In his book Thoughts on Linguistic States Ambedkar brought out the vast differences between north and south and asserted: “The North is conservative. The South is progressive. The North is superstitious, the South is rational. The South is educationally forward, the North is educationally backward. The culture of the South is modern. The culture of the North is ancient.”

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty.

Having outlined the positive attributes of the south in contrast to the regressive state of affairs of the north, he sharply asked: “How can the rule of the North be tolerated by the South? Already there [are] signs of the South wanting to break away from the North.”

Those utterances of Ambedkar’s are being echoed in the resentment of the chief ministers of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Telangana against the delimitation Bill. They charge that the southern states have registered impressive progress in achieving much better human development indices and drastically controlling population growth in sharp contrast to the northern states, and yet are being penalised by reducing their share of Lok Sabha constituencies based on their lower population figures.

They persuasively argue that the delimitation Bill proposing to increase the number of Lok Sabha seats from 543 to more than 815 delimiting constituencies based on 2011 census figures would politically put southern states at a hugely disadvantageous position vis-a-vis the northern states.

According to The Hindu‘s editorial of April 15,

“the Hindi heartland states (Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand and Delhi), which currently hold 207 of 543........

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