Calls mount to redraw electoral boundaries across India to ensure fair representation

BENGALURU – A plan to redraw parliamentary and assembly constituencies to reflect changes in the population offers India the chance to make structural changes to its governance system to better serve its 1.4 billion people.

But how Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government does it will determine how soon the nation reaches its goal of becoming a developed country, along with uplifting its poorest and youngest.

The so-called “delimitation” exercise that is expected to be done after 2026 has been championed by the Modi government, which says that it is imperative to rejig electoral boundaries to ensure that people across the country are equally represented in legislative bodies.

This will be achieved by changing the number of people represented by every MP and state legislator, in line with latest population figures. The process is expected to kick off once India conducts a fresh population census in 2025.

The last census was in 2011.

The Modi government wants Parliament to reflect the current population. But India’s prosperity, demography and political priorities vary across its 28 states and union territories.

“The fundamental problem is that the gaps between the richest and poorest states are widening in India. We need delimitation and a federal bargain to avoid massive regional imbalances that hamper India’s growth,” said Mr Alok Prasanna Kumar, co-founder of Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, a think-tank in Bengaluru.

“New structural solutions won’t make everyone happy or solve all problems, but it will lead to fair representation and good governance of all Indians,” he added.

Are more prosperous states punished for slowing population growth?

India’s acute regional population asymmetry has made the redistribution of seats through simple division by population a matter of contention between the more populous and poorer northern states and the less populous, richer southern states. The denser northern states, now ruled primarily by Mr Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), will end up cornering more parliamentary seats.

Beyond mere population, politicians from the southern states and political scientists want the Indian government to factor in economic output, ageing demographics, internal migration and other realities that capture the country’s uneven development since the 70s.

That was the last time delimitation was carried out before being officially frozen to avoid punishing prosperous states for controlling their population.

At the time, each Indian MP represented just over 700,000 people. However, a population explosion of an estimated 167 per cent in the past five decades has meant that each lawmaker in India’s 543-seat Parliament now speaks for an average of 2.5 million people, larger than most countries.

The US is a distant second with 762,000 constituents per representative, and China comes third at 476,000 per representative.

“India should not kick the can down the road by postponing delimitation again. Updating the share of MPs according to population changes is crucial, even urgent, for better governance,” Ms Suman Joshi, policy analyst at the Takshashila Institution think-tank in Bengaluru, told The Straits Times. 

“At the same time, given uneven population control and economic growth rates, upholding the principle of one person-one vote to the letter means upsetting the principle of federalism. So some states legitimately fear that they will lose their political voice with delimitation,” she added. 

What the BJP-led government wants versus what southern leaders want

As the gap between states has widened in the past decades, southern leaders are lobbying for “fair delimitation”, as Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin put it in his March 27 letter to Mr Modi.

They want the BJP-led government to convert the vital statistical exercise into a grand political opportunity to devise a new democratic structure that will serve Indians more efficiently.

A fairer way to redistribute seats for more efficient governance could emerge from a consultation with experts and all political parties. But at the moment, the potential electoral wins for the BJP from a simple population-based division seem most persuasive to the government, said analysts.

The southern states – namely Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka – claim that the BJP-led government is keen on delimitation to hike the number of MPs in Parliament from the more populous northern states, where its hardline Hindu-first agenda resonates the most.

They argue that this would reduce the proportion of MPs from the richer, less populated south in the country’s apex decision-making body.

In effect, they allege that Mr Modi’s grand plan is to ensure that the mainly Hindi-speaking northern states where his party and allies are popular will have an outsized say in the outcome of general elections in the diverse country, which is home to thousands of communities with their own cultures and languages.

This will allow the BJP to dominate the agenda in Parliament, even as the southern states – where the BJP has failed to make any significant inroads thus far – are marginalised.

The Modi government’s inauguration of a new 888-seat Parliament building in 2023 is one indication of the BJP’s intent to expand the total number of seats in the Lok Sabha, the Lower House of Parliament.

Unequal regional growth is a conundrum

At present, northern states make up 173 seats in Parliament and the southern states have 129 seats.

As parliamentary seats per state remained frozen even as India’s population ballooned asymmetrically across regions, constituencies have become unequal. Each MP from the northern state of Uttar Pradesh – India’s most populous – represents about 2.96 million people, while MPs from Kerala administer 1.75 million constituents. 

“Can you imagine a European Union that includes Germany and Ethiopia? That’s what we have in India today. A political and economic union can’t function like this,” said Mr Kumar.

The poorest, youngest and most marginalised Indians, who are more concentrated in northern states, are least represented in Parliament today, he added.

The primary causes for population disparity by region are economic prosperity and education levels, both higher in the south than in much of the north.

Mr Kumar argued that for poorer, northern states to catch up to other regions, they need more government capacity, and thus more representation.

India’s average fertility rate is two births per woman, as per official data. But in Uttar Pradesh, it stands at 2.4. In stark contrast, Tamil Nadu – one of the largest contributors to India’s gross domestic product – has the lowest fertility rate of 1.4, followed by 1.5 in Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Kerala, and 1.6 in Karnataka. 

On the other hand, the states likely to lose out due to delimitation are panicking.

On March 22, leaders from the five southern states held an unprecedented meeting to coordinate their opposition to the move in Chennai. It was hosted by Tamil Nadu’s Mr Stalin, who faces state re-election in 2026.

The gathering saw the surprise participation of leaders from Odisha in the east and Punjab in the north.

Agrarian giant Punjab has a fertility rate of just 1.5, while Odisha’s is 1.8, which could explain why they joined the meeting.

On the side lines of the Chennai meet, Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Singh Mann said that BJP’s attempt “to reduce the seats in the states where they cannot win is undemocratic”.

Telangana’s opposition party leader K.T. Rama Rao, who was at the meeting, told ST: “Southern states have led in economic growth, human development indices and population control. Penalising performing states and rewarding laggards is not in the nation’s best interest.”

On March 27, Telangana Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy spearheaded a resolution against population-based delimitation in the state assembly.

The Chennai meeting’s resolution called for the Modi government to consult with state governments, political parties and experts. Failing this, the states threatened to boycott delimitation and demand it be postponed for another 25 years.

BJP leaders have reiterated Home Minister Amit Shah’s assurance on Feb 26 that “after delimitation on pro rata basis, not a single seat will be reduced in any southern state”.

But, Ms Joshi said, even if the south does not lose seats in a bigger Parliament, the northern states will still have a higher proportion of seats. 

What are the options?

The high-stakes north-south political debate really emerges from a technical question: How to reapportion parliamentary seats – and power – among India’s big and small states? 

Policy analysts Pranay Kotasthane and Ms Joshi from Takshashila Institution suggest that southern states drive “a grand bargain” for more decentralising policies like increased devolution of expenditure funds to the states, and reducing centrally sponsored schemes.

For example, instead of a prime minister’s road building programme, road laying should be done by local bodies closer to the ground, Ms Joshi told ST.

The two analysts also recommend that the Rajya Sabha, India’s Upper House with nominated leaders, be transformed into a Senate-style body where each state has equal representation. Currently, the Upper House’s seat distribution mirrors the Lower House, relying on the same population figures.

Dr Shruti Rajagopalan, who leads the political economy programme at George Mason University, argues that the simplest fix that will not require changes to India’s Constitution could be population-based delimitation, as the BJP already envisions, along with a completely decentralised fiscal system.

Instead of states contributing to the central pool that is then disbursed according to developmental needs – leading to better-off states getting less than they give – Dr Rajagopalan suggests incentivising states to raise their own revenue, keep most of it, and spend on their priorities, while the central government does the same.

However, she admits it is politically unviable in the short run, as “it requires the political actors at the (central) government level to reduce their control over total revenue, and instead hand over fiscal control to state level actors.”

Telangana’s Mr Rao has called for delimitation “based on fiscal contributions to the nation”. Some sociologists recommend factoring in fertility rates and internal migration while redistributing seats.

Without considering any of these alternatives, if the Modi government uses its dominance in Parliament, where it occupies 293 of 543 seats, to steamroll population-based delimitation, “it would be politically explosive”, said Mr Milan Vaishnav, a senior fellow and director of the South Asia Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.