On September 20, while parliament was discussing the women’s reservation bill, the home minister announced that the delayed census of 2021 and the parliamentary delimitation exercise would be completed after the general elections of 2024. While the census itself has aroused some controversy on whether caste-wise enumeration is to be done, delimitation, if it is done based on the 2021 census, could cause an even greater uproar. Under Article 81 of the Constitution, the delimitation of parliamentary constituencies is to be done on the basis of the preceding census. However, through the 42nd amendment of the Constitution, adopted during the Emergency, the allocation of seats to the Lok Sabha was kept frozen at the 1971 level until the year 2000.
In 2002, the issue was again taken up by the NDA government headed by Atal Bihari Vajpayee. In the 84th amendment to the Constitution, they chose to extend the status quo until 2026. The reason, as given in the Statement of Objects and Reasons in the bill placed before the House by Arun Jaitley, was as follows: “There have been consistent demands, both for and against undertaking the exercise of fresh delimitation. Keeping in view the progress of family planning programmes in different parts of the country, the government, as part of the national population policy strategy, recently decided to extend the current freeze on undertaking fresh delimitation up to the year 2026 as a motivational measure to enable the state governments to pursue the agenda for population stabilisation.”
Any government that comes to power after 2024, therefore, would be on the horns of a dilemma. The “motivational measures” undertaken by central and state governments to promote family planning have created a sharp divide between states that followed the government’s advice and stabilised population and those that went their own way. This is a division that has grown substantially in the last five decades. If the postponed 2021 census figures are now taken as the basis for delimitation, states that adopted family planning strategies faithfully would be disadvantaged considerably in terms of political power in comparison to states that went their merry way.
When I first came to Kerala in 1971, the population control programmes were at their peak. District collectors were encouraged to hold massive family planning camps. Panchayats and corporations were rallied, and people were enthused to come in their hundreds to the camps, which were judged for their efficiency in terms of the number of vasectomies done. Those who underwent the operation were given gifts. Even government officials who underwent the operation themselves were given advance increments of salary. Competitive federalism has now become a favourite phrase; in those days, states competed with each other on family planning figures. Kerala and Tamil Nadu raced ahead, while the northern states generally lagged, except for a spike during the Emergency when the bulldozer system of governance struck fear into the minds of innocent villagers, who would often hide in the fields at night fearing they would be herded and forcibly operated upon. Young district magistrates, eager to make a mark, competed to maximise the number of operations in their districts and often could be heard boasting about how they rounded up recalcitrant villagers.There are many ways of working out delimitation, such as the Jefferson method, the Hamilton/ Vinton method and the Webster method, the last one being the most widely used. Using the Webster method, it would appear that the number of seats in the Lok Sabha as a proportion of the present number would decline for Andhra Pradesh (16 percent), Arunachal Pradesh (50 percent), Goa (50 percent), Himachal Pradesh (25 percent), Karnataka (4 percent), Kerala (30 percent), Maharashtra (2 percent), Manipur (50 percent), Meghalaya (50 percent), Odisha (14 percent), Punjab (8 percent), TN (23 percent), Telangana (14 percent) and West Bengal (10 percent). Some other states would gain, such as Bihar (20 percent), Chhattisgarh (9 percent), Gujarat (8percent), Haryana (20 percent), Jharkhand (7 percent), MP (13 percent), Rajasthan (28 percent), and UP (13 percent). Whatever the number of MPs in the Lok Sabha, the highest gainer would be UP. All the South Indian states will stand to lose their political influence in comparison with the North.
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Many other issues may also be revealed. The communal and caste equation may have altered. The question of higher reservation of seats may arise. There may also be allegations of political gerrymandering. In the recent delimitation done in Jammu & Kashmir, such complaints did arise but remained unproven. Gerrymandering is a universal phenomenon that arises out of inequality in the size of the population that each MP represents. In Kenya, for example, it was found that malapportionment of seats, varying from a member representing 3,600 people to another representing 300,000 gave a 20 percent advantage to the ruling KANU, which the opposition party could overcome only in 2002. Every delimitation commission in India has had to face disputes relating to boundary demarcation. This is a recurrent feature in other democracies too, including the US.
At the same time, other states can complain that Indian democracy is not representative, not based on the ‘one person, one vote’ principle. As Sanjay Kumar wrote in the Economic and Political Weekly in 2009 following the fourth delimitation exercise, “Taking the state population into account, it appears that an MP elected from Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Uttar Pradesh would be representing larger numbers of people in comparison to MPs elected from Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, and Uttarakhand.”
The next government would therefore need to tread very carefully when the question of delimitation comes up. It has the potential to blow up into a major conflagration as has happened in the past when another constitutional provision relating to the official language was taken up in the mid-sixties of the last century. Political sagacity and statesmanship of the highest order and wide consultation with states, communities and social formations would be essential.
K M Chandrasekhar
K M Chandrasekhar, Former Cabinet Secretary and author of As Good as My Word: A Memoir
(kmchandrasekhar@gmail.com)
With inputs from Steffy Antony, PhD scholar, Gulati Institute of Finance and Taxation, Thiruvananthapuram