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India’s decades-long political truce is over

The constitutional amendment may have fallen Friday, but a reset of regional political representation is very much back on the ruling party’s agenda.

India’s five-decade-long political compromise between an overpopulated, impoverished north and more successful, faster-growing south has just imploded.

With little warning and no attempt at a national dialogue, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government introduced a controversial constitutional amendment bill to expand the size of parliament by roughly 50%. The administration said its goal was to implement a previously passed law that seeks to set aside a third of seats for women. The amendment would allow the change to kick in as early as the next election in 2029; meanwhile, a bulked-up Lok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, would ensure male lawmakers keep their jobs.

Rahul Gandhi’s Congress Party and other opposition groupings accused the Modi government of using the women’s quota as a ruse. The government’s real intent, they said, was to redraw the balance of power in a way that would be antithetical to the country’s south.

Ultimately, a united opposition managed to defeat the bill in a vote on Friday, handing the government in New Delhi a rare loss. In a televised address Saturday, Modi said that the opposition parties had delivered a “blow to the self-respect and dignity of women.”

The north already dominates national politics: Uttar Pradesh, a state more populous than Brazil and poorer than sub-Saharan Africa, elects 80 members of parliament. That compares with 39 from Tamil Nadu, a southern manufacturing powerhouse. Expanding the 543 constituencies by 50%, and reallocating them based on the 2011 census would raise Tamil Nadu’s tally by 9 seats, but award an extra 53 lawmakers to Uttar Pradesh.

For the prime minister’s Hindu right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, the loss may have been well worth it. With its eye on the future, the BJP is seeking to secure its longer-term fortunes in the post-Modi era. The constitutional........

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