Delimitation: The Arithmetic of Representation Remains Unsettled

After the defeat of the 131^st Constitution Amendment Bill in the Lok Sabha, for want of the requisite support of the two-thirds of those present and voting, the government withdrew the Delimitation Commission Bill as well, putting off reservation of legislative seats for women to that elusive dawn of consensus.

Why did the government bring up such consequential Bills without public debate, without reference to a committee of Parliament, and in a special session convened at short notice? What has the ruling side achieved, and what is the state of representative democracy in India, with the number of state-wise representatives being frozen as per the 1971 population, now that Indians have proliferated to more than two and a half times the 1971 level of 548 million, at different rates in different states?

Given that the strength of the ruling alliance in the Lok Sabha, 292, is far short of the two-thirds mark of 362, and given that no effort has been made to hold all-party meetings and build consensus on the bills, getting the bills passed at short notice looked like a wild gamble at the outset. Why did the government still roll the dice?

The ruling side gets two campaign points, apart from possibly luring some active Trinamool Congress MPs to Delhi, disrupting their role in the assembly election campaign underway at present: one, it posits the ruling side as the champion of women, a powerful constituency in both Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, and two, it potentially creates a rift between the Congress and its Tamil Nadu ally, the DMK, with the DMK stoutly opposing any delimitation exercise that would bring down the share of Tamil MPs in the Lok Sabha, and the Congress running the risk of being branded ‘anti-North’, were it to fully endorse the DMK.

But how did the government hold out the assurance that the proportion of seats currently held by every state would be held unchanged, even after delimitation takes place on the basis of the 2011 Census?

Delimitation is not just about fixing the number of Parliament seats in each state, but also about redrawing the boundaries of assembly and Parliament constituencies. If the most recent Census data is used for allocating the number of seats among states, there is no way the present proportions among states can be retained in the enlarged Lok Sabha, and it would be extremely impolitic for the Home Minister to assert that the extant proportion of statewise allocation of Lok Sabha seats would be retained. So, how are fresh boundaries to be drawn for territorial constituencies, while maintaining extant proportion of seats among states?

The Delimitation Commission would have to use different Census figures for allocating the enlarged number of seats proposed among the states, and for re-engineering constituency boundaries. Extant proportions can be preserved by continuing to use the 1971 population for allocation of seats among the states. Constituency rejigging can be done on the basis of the 2011 Census figures.

The 131^st Constitution Amendment Bill makes this possible. It seeks to replace the provision in Article 81, calling for the most recent Census figures to be used for allocation of total Lok Sabha seats among states, with the provision that the Census to be used would be the Census specified by Parliament. “…the expression “population” means the population as ascertained at such census, as Parliament may by law determine, of which the relevant figures have been published.’ All the government would need to do is to specify that the Census to be relied on under Article 81 is the Census of 1971, this time around.

But can the Delimitation Commission then use Census 2011 figures for redrawing constituency boundaries? It can. In fact, the present constituency boundaries have been drawn on the basis of the 2001 Census, even as distribution of seats among the states has been done on the basis of the 1971 Census, enabled by a prior Constitution amendment.

But how do we reflect, in the days to come, the changes in population proportions among states since 1971 without making South Indian states feel they are being penalised for having stabilised their population through social development, even as North Indian states that failed in their development mandate are rewarded with greater decisionmaking power in Parliament?

I have addressed this question in detail in an article written in March 2025. Equality of franchise across states is, of course, a prime consideration. But so is federal cohesion in India’s diverse, quasi-federal polity. Large polities go not just by the equality of franchise among constituents, but also by the need to maintain federal cohesion among big and large units.

In the US, all states have just two members in the powerful Senate, however big or small the state might be. While the number of Representatives elected from each state to the House of Representatives is determined by the state’s share in total US population, the share of each state in the totality of the electoral college votes that determine who becomes President is weighted to privilege the smaller states at the expense of the larger ones. The number of electoral college votes for each state is the size of their Congressional delegation, meaning number of House members and number of Senate members from the state. Since the number of Senate members is two for all states, this arrangement dampens the extent to which population alone determines a state’s role in electing the nation’s chief executive.

The European Union determines the size of each member state’s contingent to the European Parliament based on a principle they call degressive proportionality. Here, degressive stands for the opposite of progressive in ‘progressive taxation.’ European MPs from smaller states would exceed, and their counterparts from larger states, trail their respective shares in the total EU population.

India already puts this principle in practice, when the per capita number of MPs from tiny states like the Lakshadweep, the Northeastern states, and Goa greatly exceeds the number of MPs per capita from the major states.

To what extent degressive proportionality should dampen the population-size difference created by differential development in different parts of the country should be debated by the polity, and a consensus reached, before the next delimitation exercise is carried out.

The quest for principled solutions, rather than short-term political expedience, should guide lawmaking.