- Tuesday, February 25, 2025
The PM said north-south narratives were not good for the country and could jeopardise its future after the chief minister of Karnataka led the protest in New Delhi.
By: Shubham Ghosh
A ‘NORTH-SOUTH’ divide has hit Indian politics with a number of ministers and lawmakers from some of the country’s southern states staged a protest in national capital New Delhi on Wednesday (7) accusing the Narendra Modi government of discriminating on distribution of federal funds.
Prime minister Modi asked the opposition Indian National Congress and its government in the southern state of Karnataka not to create a narrative to divide the country into north and south, saying it jeopardises the nation’s future.
The protest by the southern leaders was led by Siddaramaiah, the chief minister of Karnataka, the capital of which — Bengaluru — contributes India’s second-highest taxes. The protest brought to the fore long-running disputes between the more affluent southern states and their poorer northern counterparts.
Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is not in power in any of the five southern states — Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala. Two of them — Karnataka and Telangana — are ruled by the Congress which has not been much successful to stop the BJP’s electoral onslaught in a number of key northern states in the Modi era.
Pinarayi Vijayan, the chief minister of Kerala, India’s only communist state, will lead the protests on Thursday (8).
On Wednesday, Siddaramaiah told the demonstrators that over the past four years, Karnataka has witnessed a decrease in its portion of tax funds returned by the federal government, dropping from 4.71 per cent to 3.64 per cent of the total national taxes collected.
Furthermore, New Delhi has reneged on commitments regarding grant allocations, refused approval for irrigation projects, and ignored appeals for special funds for drought relief, he added.
He also said federal policies of distributing funds based solely on states’ populations were unfair for the southern states that have effectively managed population growth.
“North Indian states did not tackle population growth,” he told ministers and lawmakers who staged a sit-in at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi’s main protest location.
The protesters shouted slogans and held placards that read ‘Our Tax, Our Right’, and ‘Our Tax Money, Give it to us’.
“So population control has become a curse for us. Is this not injustice?” the chief minister of Karnataka asked.
The PM, in his reply to the debate to the Motion of Thanks in the Rajya Sabha or Upper House of the Indian parliament, lamented that the government of Karnataka was building such a narrative through advertisements.
“Today I want to share my pain on a specific matter…The way language is being spoken these days to break the country, these new narratives are being made for political gains. An entire state is speaking this language, nothing can be worse for the country than this…what language have we started saying,” he said.
Modi said such narratives were not good for the country and could jeopardise its future. He lamented that a vaccine is made in one part of the country and someone says that it can’t be given to other parts. “What is this thinking? And it is very painful that such language is emerging from a national party, it is very sad,” he noted.
Indian finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman, who was born in Tamil Nadu and represents Karnataka in the Rajya Sabha (previously she represented Andhra Pradesh), denied the charges of discrimination saying there is a well-set system that handles distribution of funds and the accusations were politically motivated.
(With agencies)
