The Delimitation Question

Like most democracies, India has a constitutional provision for periodically updating the number of parliamentary seats, based on the population count. The idea behind that, as Nilakantan RS explains in South vs North:

“We want the will of the people to be reflected in a democracy. And the way to ensure that is to make sure all voters are equally represented in Parliament.”

Equally represented – that’s the key phrase. Say, each MP is supposed to represent 10 people, then if a state has 100 people, it should have 100 ÷ 10 = 10 MP’s. It follows that if the population of a state increases to 110, then it should have 110 ÷ 10 = 11 MP’s.

 

During the Emergency, Indira Gandhi put this delimitation (reassignment of MP counts) on hold for 25 years. Why? One of the things she wanted, however crudely and badly it may have been implemented, was to reduce population growth. Why should states that increased their population be rewarded with more MP’s, she reasoned. (In 2001, the freeze was extended by another 25 years. The topic will thus become open again in 2026).

 

Today, the book points out, while the MP count has stayed frozen, some states have done well in slowing down population growth while others have done badly. Which means that that today, an MP from a state that did well (like the southern states) represents fewer people than an MP from a state that did badly (the BIMARU states). If you don’t see the problem, Nilakantan spells it out – any one citizen of the southern states has greater representation and thus a greater say in matters than a citizen from the BIMARU states. Whereas, as we saw, the principle of democracy calls for all citizens to have equal say or influence…

 

This then is the problem we have to face up to when the delimitation question comes up in 2026. Which is more important – population control? Or equal representation for every citizen?

 

Suddenly, the topic isn’t so clearly black and white. My mistake was to think of the two opposing perspectives as population control v/s clout of individual states. While there is definitely that angle, as the book points out, it is also a population control v/s equal representation of every citizen aspect to this question.

 

Of course, when the debates happen, one cannot make out the reason why different people will take different stances. After all, as JP Morgan once said:

“A man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.”

And everyone on both sides, politicians and common man alike, will attribute the worst motives to the other side.