A freshly-anointed Congress dataman’s claim that “the protesting Tamil farmer pays for the Uttar Pradesh farmer’s loan waiver” shows the absurdity to which some economists can descend to damage the discourse on nation-building in India.

The idea of which state contributes more to nation-building was raised by Praveen Chakravarty, a former investment banker, who was recently inducted to head Rahul Gandhi’s data analytics team in the run-up to the general elections of 2019. We cannot say if his idea, presented last year in BloombergQuint, is that of the Congress party today, but clearly Chakravarty’s claim that four states – Gujarat, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu – contribute most to nation-building by virtue of their high share in total tax revenues generated needs debunking. The Congress party needs to dissociate itself from this idea if it wants to come to power.

In fact, it is a mistake to even lump these four states together, for neither Gujarat nor Maharashtra has ever grudged the nation its share of taxes; parochial sentiments against internal migrants have been wholly absent in Gujarat, but occasionally surface in Maharashtra whenever a regional party (like the MNS) seeks to find political space. Language chauvinism has been highest in Tamil Nadu followed by Karnataka. So, whether one can call various types of southern chauvinisms as truly reflective of contributions to nation-building is anybody’s guess.

While one can (and should) also hold the Hindi-belt responsible for pushing Hindi as a national language (all Indian regional languages should be given the status of national languages), I would like to suggest something equally provocative to prove the absurdity of using one metric to claim some states have contributed more to nation-building than the others. I would suggest that the Hindi-belt’s democratic “sacrifices” have fuelled southern “tantrums” – a point I will elaborate with figures a bit later.

Chakravarty’s loaded analysis was substantially refuted by Srinivas Thiruvadanthai in an article last week in Swarajya, where the latter pointed out that the phenomenon of tax revenues flowing in a lopsided manner from some states within any large country is almost universally true. In fact, it would be true even of some big cities in India (Delhi and Mumbai, for example), where most corporations and taxpayers tend to reside. But can we then conclude that the big urban centres contribute most to nation-building? In India, we can take this argument to absurd lengths, and claim that the upper and middle classes, most from the upper castes, contribute the most to nation-building, since their relatively higher incomes will tend to get taxed the most. And, to take the argument to even more absurd lengths, why not call Mukesh Ambani the greater single contributor to nation-building, since one company – Reliance – has paid more than Rs 2.88 lakh crore in terms of taxes over the last 10 years?

In this article, I would like to emphasise that using any one measure of contribution to define nation-building is actually an unwelcome contribution to “breaking India”. If commentators make irresponsible statements like these, one can be sure that sooner than later they will be stoking the embers of India’s break-up campaign.

Thanks to demographics, some states, especially the states in the Hindi belt, contribute disproportionately to nation-building by accepting a far lower share of democratic representation in the Lok Sabha than their population figures suggest. It is the higher-than-warranted share of Lok Sabha seats of the southern states that makes them punch above their weight in national politics.

If one were to take the 2011 census figures for state-wise population, Uttar Pradesh, with 16.49 per cent of the country’s population, ought to get nearly 90 seats, but it gets only 80. A clear sacrifice in the cause of nation-building since this deficit is given to other states. Bihar, with a 9.28 per cent share of the population, ought to have got 46-47 seats, but actually gets only 40 – a six- to seven-seat shortfall. (see table below).