The BJP wants to amend the Constitution. The 131st Amendment Bill and its companion Delimitation Bill do essentially one thing. They change which census we count. Seats today are frozen to the headcount of 1971.
The Bill will be fought clause by clause, state by state, party by party. Parties are being broken to find a two-thirds majority. Everyone is arguing about which census, whose headcount. Whichever way the vote falls, we will not have debated the one sentence that decides the outcome.
Article 81 in the Constitution is the reason for this major upheaval in India’s politics. The BJP wants to amend it to reflect an increase in total number of seats that would automatically trigger a delimitation exercise.
Clause (2)(a) of Article 81 says: seats shall be allotted to each state so that “the ratio between that number and the population of the state is, so far as practicable, the same for all states”. That is the engine. Clause (3), that all parties are debating, is merely the footnote—it tells you which census the word “population” happens to point to.
Now look at what we have actually amended in 75 years. The Forty-second. The Eighty-fourth. The Eighty-seventh. Every one of them reached into Clause (3) and changed a census year. Not one has ever touched Clause (2)(a). The current Bill before Parliament does the same thing again. We are about to hold a constitutional war over the definition of a word.
The word is not the problem. The rule is. Article 81 does not merely say population matters. It says population—and nothing else—decides a state’s voice in Parliament.
Why should that be so? Begin with what Parliament is for. Its first power is the power of the purse. The Union cannot raise a rupee or spend a rupee without Parliament’s sanction, and Parliament’s central task is to scrutinise both halves of that—how the money comes in, and where it goes. Population is a fair proxy for one half. A state with more people needs more schools, more trains, more grain. That is real, and it should count.
But it is a proxy for one half only. On the other side of the ledger sits the question of who actually fills the kitty—and there, population is not a good proxy. Over the four years from 2022-23 to 2025-26, Maharashtra averaged 21.7 percent of India’s total GST collections while carrying 9.1 percent of its people. Karnataka: 8.8 percent of the tax, 4.8 percent of the people. Tamil Nadu: 8.8 and 5.5. Now run it the other way. Uttar Pradesh, with 17.1 percent of Indians, contributes 6.7 percent of GST. Bihar, with 9.3 percent of the population—one in eleven Indians—contributes 1.9 percent. Madhya Pradesh, 6.3 percent of people, 2.7 percent of tax.
So Parliament exists to watch how the Union’s money is raised and spent. Its composition reflects only the spending side. The raising side—the entire other half of its own mandate—counts for zero. Why should one side of the ledger be worth everything and the other worth nothing?
Suppose it were not. Suppose Article 81(2)(a) allotted seats on two factors instead of one, weighted equally: a state’s share of the population, and its share of what it puts into the national tax pool. I did the arithmetic—population as projected for 2026, GST averaged over the last four years, 50-50.
The Lok Sabha would look like this. Maharashtra 84 seats, up from 48. Uttar Pradesh 65, down from 80. Gujarat 39, up from 26. Karnataka 37, up from 28. Bihar 30, down from 40. West Bengal 32, down from 42. Telangana 19. Kerala 15. And Tamil Nadu—39 seats. Exactly what it holds today.
Look at what leaps out of this exercise: it is not a southern story. The biggest gainer by a mile is Maharashtra, and much of that is Mumbai booking tax the rest of India generates, an artefact of where head offices sit rather than where value is made. Gujarat and Haryana gain too. Kerala and Andhra still lose. Any honest formula must reckon with all of it: which tax you measure, whether you correct for headquarters, what else belongs in the basket—human development, ecology, need. But that is the argument we ought to be having.
This is not a proposal to let rich states buy votes. It does not price a citizen’s franchise by her tax receipt. Every individual’s vote remains exactly, identically equal—an Indian in Kanpur weighs no less than an Indian in Coimbatore, and nothing here touches that. Delimitation was never about the individual vote. It is about the collective weight of a state as a unit of the federation, and no federation on earth has ever settled that by headcount alone. The Rajya Sabha was supposed to be our counterweight, but we handed out its seats by population too—so it magnifies the imbalance instead of checking it. We built a bicameral Parliament with one sole basis: population.
We already know how to do this, and we do it every five years. The Finance Commission does not divide the Union’s taxes on a single axis. It weighs population, area, income distance, forest cover, demographic performance, tax effort. A basket of factors is obviously right for splitting the money. A single blunt number is somehow right for splitting the power. Why?
Change that, and see what else changes. No Chief Minister has to stand up and ask families to have more children, dreaming up production-linked incentive schemes for baby production to defend seats in a delimitation still years away. Inter-state migration stops being a threat to be resented—because the worker who moves builds the economy and pays the taxes of the state she moves to. There is an irony buried in the present arithmetic: much of the tax Maharashtra and Karnataka remit is earned by workers who came from the very states now poised to gain seats, and who are still counted for representation in the states they left. And the quarrel between states shifts from babies and migrants to development and finance, which is the quarrel a serious federation should be having.
For fifty years we have fought over which census to use. 1971 or 2011. This headcount or that. We are about to spend a session and a constitutional amendment, and God knows how many broken parties, fighting over clause (3) of Article 8—over the meaning of a single word.
Amend clause (2)(a) instead. That is where the mistake lives. Not in which population we count, but in the four words nobody has thought to question in seventy-five years: population, and nothing else.
Praveen Chakravarty | Member of Parliament, Chairman of All India Professionals’ Congress and visiting Professor, Ashoka University
(Views are personal)