Delimitation can’t be done carelessly: India's federal future demands an acceptable balance of power

Remember, it was not so long ago that Chandrababu Naidu, chief minister of Andhra Pradesh and a member of India’s ruling National Democratic Alliance (NDA), urged Andhra people to have more children. And Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin suggested that rather than the 16 forms of wealth traditionally invoked while blessing newly-weds, a new invocation should be for 16 children instead.

Both were wary of what they saw, presciently, as a shift in the balance of political power to northern states that would likely follow the delimitation of Lok Sabha seats, originally slated for 2031 (post the first Census after 2026).

Their fears were not without reason, it would seem. The Constitution Amendment Bill moved by the government in a three-day special sitting of Parliament last week purportedly seeks to accommodate the 33% reservation for women in Parliament and state legislatures legislated under the 2023 Act.

But by linking it to delimitation—an exercise that southern states fear will reduce their voice at the national level, due to their greater success in curbing population growth—the Union government has needlessly stirred a hornet’s nest.

Though the final allocation of seats is to be determined by a yet-to-be-set-up Delimitation Commission, what is at stake is how the increased number of seats (from the present 550 to 850) is to be apportioned among states.

Unfortunately, the bill is silent on this. The southern states fear that any population-based delimitation exercise will result in their losing political weight in Parliament, relative to northern counterparts with higher populations. Worse, it will further skew an already-skewed relationship in the inter-se sharing of political and economic power.

Consider. At the time of elections to the 4th Lok Sabha in 1967, the southern states together accounted for roughly 25% of India’s GDP and had roughly the same percentage (about 25%) of Lok Sabha seats. Today, they account for close to 31% of India’s GDP, yet have only 23.8% of Lok Sabha seats.

The angst of southern states stems not only from their fear of a decline in their political representation at the national level, but also the fact that their political clout, which already lags far behind their economic clout, will fall further behind if the Bill is passed.

To give a simple analogy that might be familiar to Indian readers, the situation today is akin to a joint family where some members do not contribute as much as others to the family kitty and yet have the final say in deciding the family’s priorities and spending decisions.

Sure, the present state of affairs, where delimitation of constituencies has been frozen since 1976, does grave injustice to our claim of being a true democracy, since faster population growth in the north means each Lok Sabha Member of Parliament from the more populous northern states represents a larger number of citizens than from southern states.

The latter realize that this is an anomaly. But they fear the government’s present move will only aggravate the growing disconnect between their economic and political power.

Indeed, chances are that in a business-as-usual scenario, the imbalance between economic and political power will continue even if delimitation were to happen in 2031.

In such a scenario, a better way to allay their apprehensions might be to keep their relative shares unchanged in Parliament, while using the interim period to ensure more balanced regional economic development so that the disconnect between economic and political power between the south and north is narrowed.

A uniform proportionate increase would do this. It would also not privilege any political party that has a strong base in a more populous part of the country; the NDA’s biggest member, the Bharatiya Janata Party, for instance, has a strong base in the Hindi heartland, but is largely missing in the south.

But southern states, led by Tamil Nadu in particular, have made no bones about their opposition to the Bill.

Why? The reason is simple.

The draft Bill makes no mention of a 50% across-the-board increase. All we have is the government’s word for it. So why is the government fighting shy of making this a part of the Bill? Ah! There you have it! If it is made part of the Bill, once it becomes an Act, incumbent governments will have to seek a fresh Constitutional amendment each time they want to tweak it, possibly to their advantage. But if it is left to the Delimitation Commission, it will be easy to change the formula at whim.

“Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” is how Macbeth described his life as he lamented his wife’s death in Shakespeare’s play by the same name. ‘Full of sound and fury’ is an apt description of what we are seeing play out on the national stage today.

Except that in our case, it signifies something very important for us as a nation. It is a timely reminder that, both in economic and political terms, our federal democracy is still very much a work-in-progress. We risk upsetting the applecart at our peril.

The author is a senior journalist and a former central banker.