The Narendra Modi government has proposed to increase the number of seats in Lok Sabha from 543 to 850, with one-third of the seats being reserved for women.
Tied to these two significant changes is a third – the formation of a Delimitation Commission, to carve out the new parliamentary seats.
Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, has alleged that this allows the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government to “gerrymander” all Lok Sabha seats to its advantage for the 2029 elections.
Gerrymandering refers to redrawing the boundaries of constituencies to give an advantage to a particular political party.
Gandhi cited the example of two recent delimitation exercises that were carried out in Assam and Jammu and Kashmir, which, he alleged, were “hijacked” to favour the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Both the delimitation exercises, carried out in 2020 in Jammu and Kashmir, and in 2023 in Assam, were sharply contentious. Critics said they enabled a significant reduction in Muslim representation and favoured communities that were more likely to vote for the BJP. This was done by redrawing constituencies, sometimes with complete disregard for geographical boundaries and features.
The Assam model
Analysts, political observers and Muslim lawmakers described the delimitation in Assam in 2023, carried out by the Election Commission, as a “communal” exercise aimed at shrinking Muslim political power.
The ruling BJP government in the state did not deny the charges. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma claimed that delimitation has secured the representation, if not domination, of “indigenous” or majority Hindu communities in 100-odd Assembly seats. A senior minister in his government had claimed that the exercise will bring down Muslim legislators to 22.
Muslims constitute approximately 35% of Assam’s population, according to the 2011 Census. Before the 2023 delimitation, typically around 30 Muslim legislators were elected from constituencies in which the community was dominant. The change in electoral maps effectively brought that number down to 23.
This was done by outright abolishing several Muslim-majority assembly seats, many of whom were represented in the last Assembly by legislators from the state’s Bengali-origin Muslim community.
The abolished seats were either merged or subsumed under other newly-created constituencies, many of them with significant Hindu populations.
While the number of Assembly seats did not go up from 126, seats increased in autonomous regions inhabited by tribal groups and regions inhabited by Assamese ethnic communities. In contrast, the number of assembly constituencies in Muslim-majority districts went down.
For instance, seats in the areas under the Karbi Anglong Autonomous Council region went up from four to five, and in the Bodoland Territorial Region from 12 to 15. In Bengali-dominated Barak Valley, the number of seats went down from 15 to 13 – one each was shaved off from the Muslim-majority districts of Karimganj and Hailakandi.
Three Assembly constituencies where Muslims play a decisive role – Barpeta, Goalpara West and Nowboicha – were reserved for candidates belonging to Scheduled Castes and Tribes, effectively debarring minority leaders from contesting. The Muslim voters of Nowboicha were divided up into four neighboring constituencies.
In Barpeta district, two Muslim-majority seats of Baghbar and Jania were scrapped and combined into one, Mandia – with 2.81 lakh voters.
As Assam Congress leader Gaurav Gogoi pointed out in the Lok Sabha, during the debate on the three bills, the delimitation exercise violated the Constitutional guideline that constituencies within each state should have roughly the same population. “While there was one Lok Sabha constituency which had 14 lakh voters, another parliamentary constituency had 25 lakh voters,” Gogoi said.
For instance, the total number of voters in Dhubri Lok Sabha seat is 26.43 lakh, while an average parliamentary seat in Assam includes 17.35 lakh residents.
The same pattern was repeated across Assembly seats. While the voter population of seats in Upper Assam varies between 1.4 lakh and 1.8 lakh, in a Muslim-majority district like Barpeta, four seats each have 2.4 lakh votes.
In effect, the delimitation ensured the consolidation of Muslim voters, thereby bringing down the value of each Muslim vote.
A stark example of a contentious redrawing of maps is the Barpeta Lok Sabha seat, which elected Muslim candidates in all but two Lok Sabha elections since 1967.
But the delimitation exercise changed the demography to such an extent that no Muslim candidate was fielded by major parties in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections.
While 60% of the constituency’s electorate was Muslim before, it was brought down to 35% by the delimitation exercise, making it harder for Muslim candidates to win from it in the future.
As Scroll had reported, panchayats with a large Muslim population were taken out of the Barpeta Lok Sabha seat and added to the Dhubri parliamentary seat. Panchayat areas with a significant Hindu population were added to Barpeta – a demarcation along religious lines.
The electoral map was redrawn, in many areas, without any reference to geographical norms. Multiple residents of Barpeta told us that they live just 20 km from Barpeta town but were added to Dhubri, which is 250 km from their village. In Mangaldoi, areas that are not even geographically contiguous have been included in the Assembly seat, as researcher Srinivas Kodali has pointed out.
Ten leaders representing nine opposition parties in Assam filed a petition against the delimitation exercise in Assam before the Supreme Court alleging that the Election Commission of India did not follow constitutional procedure in the exercise, terming it “vague”, “arbitrary” and “discriminatory”. The petition questioned the methodology adopted by the Election Commission.
The case is still pending before the Supreme Court.
Kashmir loses out
The delimitation of constituencies in Jammu and Kashmir was carried out eight months after it was downsized into a union territory and its special status under Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution scrapped.
The last delimitation exercise in the state was carried out in 1995, which gave the Jammu and Kashmir state Assembly 111 seats. Of these, Kashmir had 46 seats, Jammu had 37 seats and Ladakh was given four assembly berths. In addition, 24 seats were reserved for people living in the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir – though these remained vacant.
The 2020 delimitation exercise in Kashmir was viewed by the political class and the people as an exercise of gerrymandering carried out at the behest of New Delhi. The majority Muslim community in Jammu and Kashmir feared that it would further disempower them. Many saw the exercise as part of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s plan to bring Hindu-dominated Jammu’s seat strength on a par with the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley or close to it.
Most of their fears were proven right.
The 2022 delimitation commission, constituted by the Centre, added six more seats to the Jammu region. The Kashmir Valley got only one additional seat, bringing the number to 47.
While the Kashmir division had nine more seats compared to Jammu before, the difference between the two regions narrowed to four seats.
Muslims constitute 68.31 % of the total population of the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, the majority of whom live in the Kashmir Valley and Muslim belts of Jammu region. Hindus, who are mostly concentrated in four districts of Jammu, constitute 28.44 % of the population, according to the 2011 census. Out of the total 20 districts of the Jammu and Kashmir union territory, 16 are Muslim-majority.
In the new electoral matrix, Jammu could elect legislators in 48% of the assembly segments, even though it accounted for 44% population of the union territory. On the other hand, Kashmir Valley residents could vote in 52% of the seats even though 56% of the population lives in Kashmir. Ideally, the assembly segments have to be proportionate with an equal number of voters.
If a strict one-person-one-vote principle were to be considered, this meant that an individual from Jammu would have more say than a Kashmiri within the same union territory.
The delimitation commission also ignored geographical boundaries while carving out the Anantnag parliamentary seat. It “combined Anantnag region in the Valley and Rajouri and Poonch of Jammu region.” Earlier, Rajouri and Poonch districts were part of the Jammu Lok Sabha seat.
Of the nine assembly segments reserved by the commission for the Scheduled Tribes, six fall in the Anantnag-Rajouri parliamentary seat.
Rajouri and Poonch districts, which are part of the Anantnag-Rajouri parliamentary seat, have the highest population of Scheduled Tribes. In Kashmir, many saw the inclusion of tribal-dominated areas in the parliamentary seat as a measure to dilute the say of ethnic-Kashmiri speaking population.
Kashmir’s mainstream leadership questioned the logic employed by the commission awarding an overwhelming number of seats to the Jammu region. They argued that it deserved at least four out of the seven new segments.
The delimitation commission justified its decision by stating that it treated the whole union territory as a “single entity” and not two separate regions.
Of the six additional seats awarded to the Jammu region by the delimitation exercise, five were dominated by the Hindu population. In the 2024 Assembly elections, the first held in Jammu and Kashmir post 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party won five of the six new seats.
