The Arithmetic of Injustice

Delimitation will reduce Tamil Nadu, and by extension much of the south, to spectators in a democracy where they have long been equal stakeholders

- Kavitha Muralidharan IS A CHENNAI-BASED JOURNALIST COVERING TAMIL NADU FOR OVER 25 YEARS

IN the long arc of its history, Tamil Nadu has always chosen dignity over submission. The state's history of defiance is not a recent political posture—it is a pulse that has throbbed in its veins for over 2,000 years. From the raw earth of the Sangam landscape to the halls of modern parliaments, it has resisted distant powers and spoken truth to empires. This is a land that has never been afraid to walk away from injustice, even when clothed in the robes of kingship or the grey suits of bureaucracy.

It was in this spirit that Avvaiyar, the grand matriarch of Tamil poetry from the Sangam era, once stood at the gates of a king's court. Wounded by the indignity of being refused an audience with the king—Athiyamān Nedumān Añci, who would later become her patron—Avvaiyar uttered her immortal words: “Ethisai sellinum aththisai sōrë” (Wherever I go, I will find sustenance). To set the record straight, the story has it that Athiyamān had instructed the gatekeeper to turn her away not out of malice, but because he admired the poet and wished for her to linger longer at his palace. But the modern gatekeepers that Tamil Nadu face today are not so benevolent: a Delhi that stands between the state and its rightful share—delaying, denying, and diminishing.

In the years after Independence, Tamil Nadu stood alongside other states at the dawn of a new nation, with population figures that spoke of a somewhat shared starting point. But the decades that followed is not merely a story of numbers—it is the story of divergent paths shaped by different visions of what governance could be.