Even as the language row continues to escalate between Tamil Nadu and the Modi government, Chief Minister M K Stalin has opened another front against the BJP and the prime minister by raking up the threat posed by the proposed delimitation exercise on the basis of population that might potentially reduce the representation of the southern states in Parliament.

Reiterating his apprehension about Tamil Nadu losing parliamentary seats if the delimitation exercise was carried out solely on the basis of population, Stalin, while speaking at the wedding of a party functionary’s family in his Kolathur assembly constituency on Sunday, the chief minister said, “We are faced with the situation of the Lok Sabha constituencies getting reduced because of properly implementing the family planning programme and brining population growth under control.”

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“It would be grave injustice to Tamil Nadu and other southern states which implemented the Union government’s policies. It would be punishment for the south. For, increasing the number of MPs based on the population of a state is a political conspiracy to reduce the political representation of the southern states and we have to defeat it,” he argued, urging the prime minister to give an assurance to the southern states that their parliamentary representation would not be reduced.

“We could have got more children and we are second to none in that to any state or any country in the world. We are Tamils,” he asserted while reaffirming his position that his state won’t implement the three-language formula and the ‘retrograde’ National Education Policy.

At a similar event in October last year, Stalin had encouraged the newlyweds to have more children so that the state would not be unduly penalised for curbing population explosion. “It is customary to bless the newly-married ones to have 16 types of wealth which does not mean 16 kids by different types of wealth including children, house and land. Small family norm has taken strong roots in the state. But now, there is a need to rethink it since it has resulted in a new threat loss of parliamentary seats,” he explained.

Interestingly, his call for abandoning the small-family norm came close on the heels of his Andhra Pradesh counterpart Chandrababu Naidu calling for parents to have more children. The chief minister urged the newly-wed couple, whose names were in Sanskrit, to christen their children with beautiful Tamil Names. “The marriage invite and the names on it weren’t palatable. At least christen you kids with names in sweet and chaste Tamil,” he said.