Why India’s south rejects Modi — and why it matters

India’s five southern states want development — but it’s the poorer north that has an outsized voice in the nation’s parliament.

The south, where Islam arrived with sea-borne commerce rather than conquest, can’t understand the fuss over yet another temple, not when it has many grand ones of its own and has spent 100 years asserting marginalized people’s rights of worship. That was how, in 1925, Tamil Nadu began democratizing its society — by challenging Hinduism’s hierarchical caste system under E.V. Ramasamy, popularly known as Periyar.

After India won its freedom from the British in 1947, Tamil Nadu was quick to grasp that there would be no dramatic redistribution of farmland. The landed gentry’s interests were far too powerful. So Periyar’s self-respect movement, which by then had spawned a political party, decided to broaden access to education, health and non-farm jobs, correctly viewing them as pathways to social justice in a modernizing economy.

This is what came to be known as “The Dravidian Model,” explain the authors of the book by the same name. Dravida is a seventh-century derivative of the Tamil name for their language. While linguistic pride sustained popular support for Dravidian policies and politicians, the economic model itself was mostly common sense. The north missed the trick because its champions of the downtrodden didn’t really have a plan for their immersion in a more urban, capitalist economy. The results show it. More than 47% of Tamil Nadu’s 18-to-23-year-olds are in higher education, compared with 17% in Bihar in the east.

Madhya Pradesh in central India wants to set aside one-fourth of all beds in district hospitals for paying customers. That’s almost a death sentence to tribal communities and urban poor who can’t afford private care. Tamil Nadu, too, cut costs in public health in the 1990s, but by eliminating shortages. R Poornalingam, then the state’s health secretary, centralized purchases of quality drugs. Costs came down, availability went up. People’s out-of-pocket medical expenses are 24% lower than in UP, even though the government of the northern state allocates more of the state’s output to health. “The north should be governed by enlightened politicians focused on the two key sectors for human capital — education and heath,” Poornalingam told me on a recent trip there.

The two are closely linked, and perhaps nowhere more so than in Kerala, where I met up with Antony Kollannur, a specialist in tropical pediatrics. The former UNICEF official served across the country on important campaigns like polio eradication, child survival and safe motherhood. He recalls how women in the north almost never spoke up in public meetings. That’s very different from his hometown in Kerala where — regardless of their religion or economic status — they participate vigorously with facts, figures and demands of accountability. When the electorate isn’t educated, officials lie and cover up, as UP did with polio numbers during Kollannur’s time — and with its Covid-19 death toll and oxygen shortages, more recently.

Kollannur invited me to visit the community health center near his house in Kochi. The port city on India’s southwestern coast was the seat of its first European settlement in 1500 A.D. The facility, which caters to the fishing community, has doctors, nurses, medicines, beds, modern diagnostics, a busy immunization program, and even a dentistry department. The medical care for which people in the north get pushed toward private providers is available in Kerala as a free public service. (Arvind Kejriwal, the northern politician who tried to emulate the southern model as the chief minister of Delhi state, was arrested by federal agencies just before elections.)

India’s Income Gulf