A Southern Storm

“Women and children have no part in war, yet they pay the highest price.” —Leymah Gbowee, Liberian peace activist & Nobel Prize winner

-  —Edited by Mayabhushan Nagvenkar

IN India’s ongoing North-South cultural divide, women and children have, as always, been drawn into the frontlines, not by choice, but by consequence. As southern states push back against fiscal injustice and linguistic imposition, a peculiar battle cry has emerged from Tamil Nadu: have more children.

At a wedding event in Nagapattinam on March 3 this year, Chief Minister MK Stalin urged people to expand their families as a strategic counter to the looming threat of delimitation. “I will not tell you to not have children hastily; have children immediately,” he declared, linking reproduction to political representation.

His message was clear. Tamil Nadu, and, by extension the South, must strengthen its numbers to retain its voice in Delhi.

But not everyone down South is rallying to the call.

Many women, in particular, question why they must bear the brunt of political calculations. “Do women have to pay the price for the wrong policies?” asks Shalin Mariya, a lawyer and feminist activist in Chennai. She likens Stalin’s call to the RSS’ long-standing rhetoric urging Hindu families to have more children. “He said it more than once, so this isn’t sarcasm. It’s an overreach into the autonomy and liberty of women.”

The resistance to delimitation isn’t just about numbers. It highlights growing fault lines in India’s federal structure.