India, Jan. 21 -- The strain in relations between the Centre and the Tamil Nadu government continues to manifest in newer ways. Two recent developments underline how it pops up frequently, in different forms and contexts, and why it eludes closure. On Tuesday, Tamil Nadu governor RN Ravi walked out of the first assembly session of the year without delivering the customary address. The Lok Bhavan has charged the government with making "numerous unsubstantiated claims and misleading statements" in the governor's address and said the national anthem has been insulted. The governor's address is conventionally a statement of claims and intent prepared by the government, which the governor reads out. It is unusual for a governor's office to refute the government's text and issue a counterfactual, but this is, after all, an election year in Tamil Nadu. The confrontation between Ravi and the Tamil Nadu government is not just about a difference of perception regarding the powers of the office - an issue that reached the Supreme Court - but also indicative of the differences in how the federal pact between the Centre and the states is understood. These extend to language and culture and how they interact in determining the character of the Indian nation. The divergence of views is evident from how the governor has sought to view the convention in Tamil Nadu to begin assembly sessions with an invocation to Mother Tamil (Tamizh Thai Vazhthu) and end with the national anthem: Ravi believes that the national anthem has to be privileged over the state anthem and anything less is insulting the former while politicians in the state consider language as central to the Tamil identity and playing both the anthems in the House is in step with the federal pact that recognises sub-nationalist impulses within the rubric of the larger Indian identity. Tamil Nadu's institution of Semmozhi literary awards for works in seven classical languages (Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Bengali, and Marathi) as an alternative to the Sahitya Akademi prizes is also an attempt to emphasise the distinctive and autonomous existence of Indian languages. CM MK Stalin claims the Akademi awards - the announcement of last year's awards was postponed - are now influenced by the Centre's political preferences. He recognises that language is a major fault line to which most states respond: After all, linguistic identity is the bedrock of many Indian states in the south, west, and even northeast. Just as in his battle against the office of the governor, Stalin is seeking a cultural alliance of non-BJP-ruled states by raising the case of language pride and recognition. Culture wars have always been political battles; this isn't different....