Delimitation With a Dose of Patriarchy: The Final Act in Modi’s Plan to Hold On to Power Come What May
Hidden behind the Modi government’s plans to expand the size of the Lok Sabha from its current strength of 543 seats to as many as 850, and link the reservation of a third of all parliamentary seats for women to this expanded house is a sinister political objective: to reconfigure the relative distribution of seats between states based purely on demography, a change that it hopes will make it easier for the Bharatiya Janata Party to win a majority in the 2029 Lok Sabha elections.
Being regressive men, there is also a patriarchal objective that Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have in mind: diluting the potentially revolutionary essence of reserving seats for women.
Women’s reservation has always been as much about giving women a voice as about compelling powerful men to vacate political spaces they have illegitimately come to occupy through centuries of gender-based discrimination. By unnecessarily linking the reservation of seats for women to (1) delimitation and (2) a huge and gratuitous expansion in the strength of the Lok Sabha and legislative assemblies, the Modi government is acting in the service of the patriarchy.
Giving 1/3 seats to women in a 543 seat house where men today have 86% of the seats means forcing parties to redistribute power away from powerful men towards women. Instead, Modi wants to ensure that the bahubalis with enviable assets and unenviable criminal records not only get to stay in the house, but worse, that more of their brethren will get to join them. This is not what ceding space to women is supposed to look like. This is managing the discomfort of powerful men at the entry of women in unprecedented numbers, something akin to attempts by caste Hindus to ensure control of 'their' temples even after they were forced to allow Dalits in.
In essence, Modi is proposing to provide a zenana wing to an expanded haveli, where there will be even more men in absolute terms than there were before. Of course, women will be one-third of the membership but it is well known that men tend to occupy more physical and aural space, especially in Indian legislatures. So the effect of having 284 women amongst 566 men will be quite different from having 181 women amongst 362 men. If one considers the clubby, khap-like instincts of many male MPs, one can easily see how the larger house becomes a more formidable space for women MPs to negotiate their way around – individually and as a bloc – than the more intimately sized 543-member Lok Sabha.
Why delimitation – and size – matter
In the run up to the release of the text of the 131st constitutional amendment on Tuesday, BJP leaders had sought to allay concerns about the statewise reconfiguration of seats by suggesting that the number of MPs each state elects would rise by 50% across the board, thus preserving the relative ‘voice’ of each state in the Lok Sabha. While the Bills made public yesterday provide no such ‘assurance’, the claim that this would be 'neutral' is itself dubious – the ’physicality’ of parliamentary proceedings in India means that 40 more MPs from Uttar Pradesh, for instance, will carry much, much more weight than, say, 14 more MPs from Tamil Nadu – the fact is that. In other words, even if the government were to codify an across-the-board increase in seats of 50% for all states, the net effect would be to add voice and space to a group of Hindi speaking states that already have a domineering presence.
There is also a more general point which has not received adequate attention: Even with 543 MPs, the Modi government has systematically scuttled the Lok Sabha's deliberative culture. Throwing an additional 300+ MPs into the mix will further the dysfunctionality, which suits a regime whose interest lies in the theatre rather than substance of democracy. Don't be surprised if we eventually end up with 3,000 legislators like China's rubber-stamp parliament.
The last time the Lok Sabha saw an increase in seats (from 522 to 542) was in 1973, when the 1971 Census was used as the basis to adjust the strength of states in parliament on a very modest basis.
Increase in Lok Sabha seats in 1973. Source: Election Commission of india
As the table above shows, the shifts were not particularly dramatic. Uttar Pradesh did not gain any seats, the south and east gained three and five seats respectively, the north gained seven, and the west five seats. Despite this, successive governments took the view that it was best not to repeat the exercise. In other words, even as the population of UP, Bihar, Rajasthan, MP and other north Indian states grew at a much faster rate than that of the southern states in the decades following that delimitation exercise, there was broad agreement across all parties that the representation of each state and Union Territory should remain frozen at the level determined by the 1971 census.
There was a ‘moral’ aspect to this decision: giving the north more seats would amount to penalising the south for having raised its level of human development while rewarding UP, MP and others for their underinvestment in health, education and public welfare – key drivers of fertility. But there was also statecraft at play: federalism in India is a political contract of sorts and nothing was to be gained by undermining the complex skein of commitments, attachments and obligations which bind the Union of States that is India together.
The BJP has already been undermining federalism in many different ways over the past decade. Now, in an act of supreme irresponsibility driven purely by a desire to cement its hold on the electoral process, the Modi government intends to open the Pandora’s Box of delimitation. In fact, the ‘Statement of Objects and Reasons’ explicitly states that the expansion of seats envisaged is because of shifts in India’s population distribution:
“While the freeze of seats on the basis of population figures of the year 1971 census served an important policy purpose, the country’s demographic profile has since undergone substantial changes, as reflected in the population figures of the latest published census, including significant inter-State and intra-State population shifts, rapid urbanisation and migration, and disproportionate growth in certain regions, resulting in wide disparities in the population and the constituencies.”
The Delimitation Bill that will also be tabled in the special session of Parliament convened for Thursday envisages the establishment of a Delimitation Commission whose membership will be decided by the Modi government itself and which will then proceed to use 2011 Census data as the basis for apportioning the additional 307 seats to states so as to correct the “varying density of population in electoral constituencies”. The gerrymandering of 850 new constituencies to suit the BJP – as was done for the assemblies of Assam and Jammu and Kashmir – will be easier to camouflage in this exercise than if confined to the existing 543 constituencies.
There are any number of approaches the Delimitation Commission could adopt in deciding the new distribution of seats between states in an 850-member Lok Sabha. The table below summarises what the Lok Sabha would look like if the commission were to adopt the rule of equalising the density of population in electoral constituencies.
It should be readily apparent that the relative seat share of the South in such a scenario would fall from 23.93 % to 20.82%, a reduction of over three percentage points. Eastern India also suffers a fall, as do Himachal Pradesh and Punjab. The big gainers, unsurprisingly, are the Hindi speaking states of north and central India, as well as Maharashtra and Gujarat. The map below tells the whole dramatic story.
The states which stand to gain are, ‘coincidentally’, states where the BJP is a dominant political player so it is not hard to understand the crude political calculations behind the party’s delimitation drive. Add to this the secretive nature of the entire process, the absence of wide stakeholder consultation and the sudden convening of a special parliamentary session (with amended rules aimed at limiting debate) and it clear that the Modi government is looking to ram its proposals through.
In a unitary state, it makes perfect sense to ensure that MPs represent the same number of electors. But in a federal nation like India, this principle needs to be balanced against the rights and prerogatives of the states. The Rajya Sabha, as the Council of States, was structured to give minimum representation to every state and Union territory. However, unlike the United States Senate where every state has two and only two senators, the Rajya Sabha also broadly follows the population principle – UP has 13.3% of the seats, Maharashtra has 8.15% and Tamil Nadu 7.72%., etc. Based on its current structure, then, the upper house can provide at best limited comfort to states whose share of voice in the Lok Sabha comes down after delimitation.
If the Modi government were genuinely interested in resolving the tension between the principles of voting equality for all citizens regardless of the state they live in and of robust federalism, they would have allowed the issue to be debated and discussed widely. Already, in the past few days, scholars, politicians and election experts have made proposals worthy of consideration. But then Modi is not interested in finding a harmonious solution. Ever since the setback they suffered in the 2024 general election – the BJP lost its majority despite its electoral bond war chest, its communal campaign, the misuse of investigative agencies and the support of Big Media – Modi and Shah have focused all their energies on tinkering with the election process and system to ensure a smoother passage back to power in 2029. A pliant Election Commission and the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls is one weapon in their armoury but enlarging the Lok Sabha and foisting delimitation would complete a trifecta that the Opposition will find hard to counter if the current bills are passed rather than getting referred to a parliamentary committee. Next in the pipeline, no doubt, will be Modi’s ‘one nation, one election’ plan.
A final word on the 850-seat monster parliament that Modi wants to ram down the throat of the country. Given the enormous amount of money needed to run a parliamentary election campaign – even if constituencies become physically smaller – it is clear that only the BJP has the resources to benefit from this expansion.
Postscript: Unnamed government 'sources' are saying the delimitation exercise will give every state a 50% increase in the number of seats and that legal language will be added to guarantee "no state will lose its current proportional strength in parliament". If this is indeed the plan, then the key rationale for carrying out delimitation as stated in the Bills – to equalise the size of constituencies in demographic terms – goes out of the window, as does the underlying logic for increasing seats.
What remains then is just a shabby plan to give more jobs for the boys – to 'compensate' them for the reservation of a third of all seats for women – and more lung power to Hindi speakers, besides a bonanza of gerrymandered constituencies for the BJP. So much for women's empowerment and federalism!
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