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What should an honest conversation on federalism look like in India? The reason for asking this question is that at present any federalism talk is like proverbial blind men feeling an elephant and describing the part they are holding as the elephant.

Let us look at them one by one.

Take state-wise representation in the national legislature first. India’s constitution adopted the principle of one man-one vote-one value as the sacrosanct building block of its democracy. Other things such as state-wise distribution of parliamentary seats and even demarcation of states, were left open to change and seen many changes overtime. On the reorganisation of states front, the early battles were fought in geographically contiguous areas in the north and the south rather than between the north and the south. Some of these were rooted in linguistic questions and others in questions of regional political economy and identity.

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The north-south tension we see today is a manifestation of the demographic divergence which has happened between the northern and southern states because of the economic and social divergence which became wider in the post-reform period. It did not exist in the early years of the republic.

To be sure, the north and the south did have a different kind of conflict in the pre-demographic conflict era. This was on the question of choice of Hindi as the official language and its imposition in non-Hindi speaking states. Cultural pride aside – a language such as Tamil for example has a rich heritage and is worthy of being studied and engaged with in its own right rather than some regional feature – there was also a material question involved here. The nascent Indian state had very little in terms of capitalist development and the state was one of the most important quality employers. A decision to prioritise Hindi would have diverted state employment away from the work force of non-Hindi speaking regions. A similar but much smaller in scale conflict of this nature also took place between Hindi and Urdu. Of course, it also had communal overtones. The national leadership back then was prudent enough to realise these tensions and came up with acceptable solutions on the Hindi question.

Here too things have changed overtime. As the economy opened up overtime and economic trajectory of states started diverging, the importance of state as a provider of quality employment came down in the prosperous states. While local population of the more economically developed states has harvested most of the gains of their economic growth, there have been two channels through which some of these fruits have been diverted. The first is the equity principle in India’s fiscal federalism framework which awards a bigger share of national taxes (mostly raised in the richer states) to poorer states, thereby redistributing some of the fiscal ballast originating in the richer (also southern) states to poorer ones. Southern states are increasingly protesting against this now. What has increased the heartburn in the south over this redistribution is the fact that their economic growth has also been extremely unequal in nature. This is leading to more demands for fiscal palliatives within these states too.

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The language question per se has also transformed overtime. The number and share of Hindi speakers in the country continues to grow. Economically driven migration has meant that this is confined not just in the Hindi speaking parts of the country. The south, apart from dealing with Hindi speaking migrants, is now also having to deal with blue-collar migrants who speak languages such as Bangla and Assamese. Take out these migrants and the revving southern economic engine will increasingly start stuttering in the near future. The south must reconcile itself with the possibility of a growing non-native population locally. This is the second key change.

While there is very little evidence to suggest that non-Hindi languages have seen a widespread acceptance in the Hindi speaking parts in terms of speaking, one can make an argument that the Hindi speaking part of the national market is now much more open to non-Hindi operators. This is true not just in commodities but also cultural markets such as films. At least a section of the Indian elite is now cosmopolitan in its consumption preferences and is not constrained by linguist boundaries in making these choices. Any demands for change on language centric economies are likely to be more driven by markets than states in the future.

What does all this mean for the future of the federalism question? Any attempt to answer this must deal with all three parts: federal representation, fiscal federalism and the language question. Even beginning to think about an answer requires an admission that there cannot be any corner solutions here and the attempt has to be towards reconciliation with realisation of mutual interest.

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Capital in the south needs labour from the north to stay economically competitive and dare one say even viable. It is delusional to think that some of this migration will not become a part of the local population. To be sure, the labour from the north is also gaining economically in this process and would otherwise be stuck in low-level equilibrium in their home states.

This economic reality has to be made more politically palatable by a political narrative which champions it as a mutually beneficial thing. Politicians, both in the south and the north, have to realise that there is a difference between polemics against a particular party and a region or cohort of people living there. If the BJP were to lose power to say a coalition of the RJD and the SP tomorrow, would the DMK drop its anti-north rhetoric? What can politics do to soothe these tensions? One would have to think ingeniously.

Should India’s fiscal federalism discussions take into account the end-use of the additional component of revenue which poorer states get on account of the equity principle in devolution of revenue? Should it be tied to developmental or investment rather than political needs. Should there be an attempt to evolve a political consensus to freeze the existing distribution of state-wise Lok Sabha seats in relative terms for good? Should labour importing and exporting state government enter into mutual MoUs to set up basic language proficiency teaching centers which facilitate the employment and lives of migrant workers and their families in each other’s states? How about native parties setting up dedicated fronts to tend to the concerns of migrant workers?

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One can come up with more such ideas. But the driving philosophy of all this has to be that the future of the Indian state, unlike, electoral politics today, cannot be a zero-sum game where one side has to necessarily lose in order for the other to win. Are India’s politicians willing to invest in this philosophy? Do they realise the pitfalls of a shrill political economy rupture on federal lines? It is high time somebody asked these questions which take us beyond to comfortable terrain of local political correctness while appearing radical.

Roshan Kishore, HT’s Data and Political Economy Editor, writes a weekly column on the state of the country’s economy and its political fallout, and vice-versa