People And Power | TN CM Stalin echoes a fear prevalent in South India

‘Padhinaarum petru peruvazhvu vaazhga’ is an ancient Tamil blessing. It means ‘May you beget 16 children and have a great life’.

Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu M K Stalin alluded to the first part of this blessing recently asking if it was perhaps time for people to have more children like they did in the past. He was alluding to the delimitation exercise due in 2026 where states like Tamil Nadu and Kerala that have done well to control their population are likely to lose their clout in terms of representation in Parliament compared to their more populous northern brethren.

Stalin’s statement came less than a week after Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu also suggested that couples should have at least two children to arrest the declining population trends in the southern states.

The reasons for their statements may have been different, but one issue is clear: population decline, which is now a major problem in the developed world where it threatens to halve their population within 50 years, is now a concern for parts of the developing world too.

Ignore the misogyny in these statements for a moment, and we can see the concern in what these two chief ministers are saying. The South with fertility rates below replacement rate is now staring at a population decline. The Total Fertility Rate of the southern states at 1.73 is now well below the national average, and is also below the replacement level of 2.1. An ageing population is what the southern states confront in the coming decades.

The delimitation exercise is widely seen as a major flashpoint in Centre-State relations. The southern states are united in their opposition to the exercise being carried out purely based on population. Sentiments on the issue run high and emotions can be stoked easily. With Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to be the biggest beneficiaries of delimitation, with some estimates suggesting that UP alone could get an additional 48 Lok Sabha seats to Tamil Nadu’s two additional seats, it is not hard to see why the south is standing up to the delimitation exercise. Tamil Nadu even passed a resolution in February saying that the criteria need to be relooked at and population alone as the criteria meant that states that had performed well would be punished. There is, however, the perception that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government with a shaky mandate may choose to kick the delimitation can further down the road.

Whatever be the decision, states like Tamil Nadi, Kerala, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, and to a lesser extent Karnataka, are seeing fertility rates declining rapidly. For example, in Tamil Nadu, the TFR dropped from 1.8 in 2010 to 1.4 in 2020, well below the replacement TFR of 2.1. There are no signs of the trend reversing. Population increase in these states is being driven by migrants from the northern states.

Neither the threat of delimitation nor exhortation by their political heads is likely to influence people to have more babies. In Japan, South Korea, and several European countries, governments have started to offer incentives to couples having babies — but there has only been a limited impact. Across the economic strata, people want to give their children a good life and if they feel they cannot, they choose not to have children. Educated women now decide when and whether to have children, and how many.

Stalin may have a political motive in making the statement but the sentiment in his opposition to delimitation in its current form is widely shared in Tamil Nadu.

There is already a feeling, stoked by regional parties like the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), that the South is having to disproportionately bear the financial burden for the relatively impoverished North, and attempts to circumscribe their power further are unlikely to be taken lightly.

It is hard to see a consensus emerging on this issue as the battle lines are clearly drawn, and the BJP would be expected to bat for its Hindi heartland base. Naidu, despite being an NDA ally, cannot afford to be seen siding with the BJP on this issue. In fact, no political party in southern India can.

The issue of delimitation apart, while the declining population is not as immediate a threat as in some other countries, it is now a discussion point among policy-makers in India. For the moment it appears very little can be done to reverse the trend. Stalin and Naidu will have to figure out some other way to deal with both delimitation and their ageing populations.

(Sumanth Raman is a Chennai-based television anchor and political analyst.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.