The nation is beginning to wake up to delimitation. As we stand in front of the new political map of the country and rub our eyes, it is natural that we ask questions of immediate concern, of how it would affect the timing of the Karnataka elections or the fate of parties in the next Lok Sabha elections. It is yet to sink in that the boundaries of every single assembly and parliamentary constituency have been drawn afresh after three decades and that the new boundaries are here to stay for the next three decades. Perhaps no one has noticed that the country has missed a major opportunity to attend to some of the major challenges that face our polity in the new century.There was nothing wrong with the procedure. The Delimitation Commission (DC) — the fourth of its kind in our republic — was headed by a retired judge of the Supreme Court, Justice Kuldip Singh. The DC included one member of the election commission — earlier B.B. Tandon and then N. Gopalasamy — but was not subordinate even to the chief election commissioner. MPs and MLAs from each state had their say as associate members, but they did not have a vote in the exercise. The final order, now in place for all but four states, is of course non-partisan. Though it took longer than its predecessors, the DC needs to be congratulated on completing a gigantic and incredibly complex exercise in a way that is free of any apparent political bias. They have underlined the wisdom of the makers of our Constitution in putting in place a mechanism to ensure that the delimitation of electoral boundaries in India is neither as blatantly partisan as it is in the US nor as out of step with the times as in the UK.Yet this first mapping of the political geography of India in the 21st century did not take up some of the key challenges of the country’s demographic and political transition: shifting balance of population among different states, rapid urbanisation, salience of community-based politics and the proliferation of the third tier of democracy. To be fair, the commission alone is not to be blamed for all this missed opportunity. Parliament itself tied the commission’s hands with a law freezing the number of Lok Sabha seats for each state as it stood after the last delimitation in 1974. It means that the value of a citizen’s vote in states like Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra, whose share in country’s population has grown, is much less than that of citizens in Tamil Nadu and Kerala, whose share has fallen. True, it is important to keep a balance of representation of different states in Parliament. But Rajya Sabha is the right place to attempt this federal balancing. Freezing Lok Sabha seats violates the basic constitutional and democratic principle of one person, one vote, one value.While there was at least some logic to freezing the number of Lok Sabha seats, Parliament’s decision to freeze the number of assembly seats was simply beyond any reason. So we must persist with an anomalous situation of Uttar Pradesh which has five assembly segments in each Lok Sabha constituency compared to six in Bihar and Maharashtra and seven in AP and West Bengal. An increase in the size of the assembly would have reduced the number of voters that each MLA is expected to represent and thus led to greater political accountability.Neither Parliament nor the commission seems to have learnt from the disastrous experience of the previous one in dealing with urbanisation which resulted in monstrous constituencies like East Delhi with an electorate over 30 lakh. If we wish to freeze electoral boundaries for the next 25 years, we cannot take the population figures that are already seven years old. We have to consider professional population projections. But this route was firmly avoided once again. We can be fairly sure that the experience of East Delhi will be replicated in Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad and dozens of other peripheries of urban centres all over India, leading to a severe under-enfranchisement of the urban poor halfway through the period of the current delimitation.The DC appears to have avoided some tough questions. While it has reduced arbitrariness in deciding which assembly constituency is to be reserved for the Scheduled Castes, it did not do the same for Lok Sabha constituencies. Nor did it address the tough question of rotating seats which have been reserved for three or in some cases even five decades. Another tough question pertained to whether the existence of social communities would be taken into account while drawing boundaries. We do not need to follow the American method of carving black majority constituencies. But the DC could take a cue from the Sachar Committee and find ways to make the delimitation process more sensitive to the communities that suffer from severe under-representation in our legislatures.The biggest opportunity missed by the commission is its refusal to align the map of the first and the second tier of democracy to the third tier. We have a ridiculous situation of two parallel electoral rolls for the entire country, one for Lok Sabha and assembly elections and another for panchayat and municipal elections. All that the DC needed to do was to define the boundary of each assembly segment in terms of a group of panchayats or municipality wards. Instead it has persisted with an archaic practice of defining the assembly constituency in terms of revenue circle in one state, mandala in another, police thana limits in the third and panchayat in yet another state. This is not just technical and could have long-term political significance if we wish to have any serious decentralisation of power in the country. These questions are not going to disappear just because the DC refused to take note of them. The latest delimitation may have only delayed an inevitable encounter with some of the pressing issues of democratic representation by another quarter of a century when the next delimitation is due.The writer is senior fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhiyogendra@csds.in
