J&K delimitation and the political meaning behind it
There are the bald facts about the delimitation proposals for Jammu and Kashmir, and then there is the realm of deeper political meaning. One could treat them as objectively separate but, in reality, they are mutually constitutive of each other. The former did not come about in a void, the latter provides the driving impetus for it. As plain uninterpreted fact, what do the proposals seek to do? Expand the Assembly for J&K by giving it seven more seats. Six of those will go to Jammu, one to Kashmir. And rearrange the spatial ambit of the Anantnag Lok Sabha seat by attaching to it Poonch and Rajouri, which are on the other side of the Pir Panjal range and administratively a part of Jammu.
What will be the immediate consequence of these two proposals, if formally fructified, as they are likely to be? The share of Hindu-dominated Jammu in the Assembly, hitherto 37, will go up to 43. The Muslim-dominant Kashmir Valley goes up by just one, to 47. So their gap is reduced, and a greater sense of parity is achieved between the two regions, administratively bound up with each other but politically antagonistic. If a historical wrong was being righted there, a kind of legal redress could have been ascribed to the idea.
Delimitation, as a means to account for demographic changes on the ground, is meant to uniformise the value of every vote, to confer on every individual and group an equal weightage proportionate to their numerical strength. Jammu, with 43.8% of the population, at present accounts for 44.5% of the Assembly’s strength—proportionate enough. But now that latter figure could go up to 48%, nearly half. Kashmir’s share, already punching a tad below its weight at 55.4% seats for a 56% population, will fall to 52%. What it implies in the realm of political meaning needs no further elaboration.