Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Thursday claimed that Union Home Minister Amit Shah’s assurance that southern states would not suffer due to a proposed delimitation exercise were “not trustworthy”.

“The Union home minister Amit Shah’s statement that he will not allow injustice to be done to the southern states during the delimitation of constituencies is not credible,” Siddaramaiah said in a post on social media. “It is tainted with malicious intent to create confusion in the southern states.”

The chief minister alleged Shah’s “sweeping statement” suggested either a lack of information or a deliberate intention to wrong Karnataka and other South Indian states.

On Wednesday, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said that South Indian states would not lose a single Lok Sabha seat on account of a proposed nationwide delimitation exercise.

“The Modi government has made it clear in Lok Sabha that after delimitation, on pro rata basis, not a single seat will be reduced in any southern state,” Shah said at an event in Tamil Nadu’s Coimbatore. “And I want to reassure the public of South India that Modi ji has kept your interest in mind to make sure that not even one seat is reduced pro rata. And whatever increase is there, southern states will get a fair share, there is no reason to doubt this.”

Delimitation is the process of redrawing the territorial boundaries of an electorate, in this case Lok Sabha constituencies. Article 82 of the Constitution states that after every census is completed, the allocation of Lok Sabha seats to each state must be adjusted based on changes in their population.

The composition of the current Lok Sabha is based on the 1971 census. According to the 84th Amendment Act of 2001, the constituency boundaries were frozen until the first census after 2026, which would be due in 2031.

However, southern states have expressed concerns that population-based delimitation could give an undue advantage to northern and central states in the Lok Sabha.

In a series of five posts on X, Siddaramaiah asked Shah to clarify whether the Centre indeed wishes to ensure fairness for southern states. “It is evident that if delimitation is carried out based on the latest population ratio, it will be a severe injustice to the southern states,” he said.

He also highlighted that to avoid such unfairness, previous delimitation exercises were based on the 1971 census, in line with Constitutional amendments.

“The enthusiasm shown by the central government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the redistribution seems to be a malicious intention to punish the people of the southern states who are resisting the hoisting of their party’s flag,” Siddaramaiah said.

He also highlighted his intention to join forces with neighbouring states in southern India “to wage a comprehensive struggle against this injustice”.

Shah’s comments on Wednesday came a day after Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin announced an all-party meeting on March 5 in Chennai to discuss the impact of the proposed delimitation exercise, which he claimed could cost his state eight Lok Sabha seats.

On Thursday, both the ruling Congress and the Opposition Bharat Rashtra Samithi in Telangana also criticised Shah’s comments, PTI reported.

“We have certain doubts,” Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee president B Mahesh Kumar Goud told PTI. “The central government has a responsibility to clarify them. We will not accept even if a single seat is reduced.”

Bharat Rashtra Samithi working president KT Rama Rao said that delimitation based on population trends was “certainly unjust”.

“Today to say that because your population is reduced, therefore I am cutting down your representation in Parliament is a travesty of justice,” Rao said.

In a 2019 paper, Milan Vaishnav and Jamie Hintson, from the American think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, used 2026 population projections to estimate that the Lok Sabha’s membership would need to be expanded to 846 seats.

Of these, Uttar Pradesh, the largest Hindi belt state, would have 143 seats, up from its current 80. Similarly, Bihar’s seats would nearly double to 79 from 40.

Overall, the proportion of Lok Sabha seats in 10 Hindi belt states and Union Territories – Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand – would jump to around 48% from about 42% right now.

Correspondingly, several states outside the Hindi belt such as Kerala, West Bengal and all of the North East would see their representation drop. For Kerala, its representation in the Lok Sabha would drop from nearly 3.7% to around 2.4% as the House’s capacity increases, according to Vaishnav and Hintson.

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