Badri Raina 
In recent decades, the fall in the rate of fertility has been the sharpest among Indian Muslims.
That hard fact, however, does not prevent voices and organs that speak for majoritarian opinion from berating Muslims with harbouring the intent of turning the nation’s demographic profile upside down.
At the same time, a politic silence prevails on the crude reality that fertility rates remain highest among the Hindi “heartland” states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
Given that our Constitution ties the number of representatives to legislatures and parliament to the “one citizen, one vote” principle, it is never the intention of the “heartland” states to make any perceptible exertions to slow down their population growth rates. Only Muslims are kindly required to do so at a rate even more furious than now prevails among them.
Curiously, as of now, the prospects of legislative clout remain most rosy for those who have the most numbers.
While states that perform the best on curbing population growth and making the most concrete advances in social and economic development stand to lose more and more of their voice in the Lok Sabha and also the Rajya Sabha, aka the Council of States, ironically for performing better on concerns vital to the transformation of the republic into a fully developed one.
What wonder, then, that this lopsided and illogical development carries deep anguish among such regions as have delivered the best results in holding down fertility and lifting their populace into better standards of living.
A sharp and potentially most deleterious divide here can be seen on all data points between the “heartland” states and those below the Vindhyas.
Conundrum
As a new delimitation exercise is potentially again around the corner, great fears afflict the southern states that their outstanding performance in demographic and developmental areas may only help to do them in, threatening to bring down their relative representation in parliament. In effect, they will be punished for having done well, including contributing the most tax revenues to the central treasury.
So, what may be done to obviate this most irrational and unjust prospect?
That the new parliament building has been enlarged to accommodate some eight hundred or more legislators clearly seems an ominous visual in this regard.
Is there a hint here that parliament is set to become the home of the “heartland”, reducing recalcitrant southerners to an even more minuscule proportion in the democratic clout of the republic?
Already, some of the most astute political minds (P. Chidambaram; Yogendra Yadav, etc.) have commented that for now one way of obviating the likely injustice is to put a freeze on the seats in parliament as well as the numbers that are eligible to enter from various states.
Sensible as this is, does the suggestion address the fundamental conundrum: that those that perform better should democratically fall behind those that do not?
No doubt the constitutional injunction restricts – for now – the scale of representation to demographic quantum, but does this need to be an insuperable obstacle?
Is it unthinkable that an amendment may be brought by common consent that, for example, rewards the states performing better on restricting fertility rates and enhancing the quality of peoples’ lives by having the required number of voters in a parliamentary constituency scaled down along a codified point system, affording a greater number of seats to such states, and encouraging others to emulate the example?
Where is the harm in first floating the proposal for extensive public debate, among all sections of the populace?
After all, many developed democracies in the western world, most chiefly in America, have designed legislatures, that ensure less populated regions in a federal polity are not robbed of their voice. But this can happen only if it is first widely recognised that the system that now obtains is a source of democratic injustice to wide swathes of the country whose chagrin has reason to be voiced.
Badri Raina taught at Delhi University.
This piece was first published on The India Cable – a premium newsletter from The Wire & Galileo Ideas – and has been updated and republished here. To subscribe to The India Cable, click here.