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Journalism of Courage
The all-party resolve to have the 2009 general elections held on the basis of fresh delimitation of constituencies should return sanity to discussion on a slew of political reforms. The air has been rife for far too many weeks with a spurious earnestness to utilise the delimitation exercise to finally get women one-third representation. Thankfully, the two issues were delinked at an all-party meet on Friday. Correcting the imbalance between constituencies due to uneven demographic changes and righting gender imbalance are separate concerns. And it is for good reason that legislators have of late been suspected of affirming support for women8217;s reservation to stall the delimitation process, which is bound to completely alter India8217;s electoral map.
It is a clicheacute; to call Parliament India in microcosm. Political parties may serve themselves well to revisit the clicheacute;. It would help them to anticipate and deal with a lot of the pain that will come with fresh delimitation. Much of that pain would have been averted, had the exercise been conducted every decade, instead of now having to tackle more than 30 years of demographic changes in one blow. There is, first, concern being expressed that rural India will lose seats to urban dwellers. But the fact is that around the world urbanisation has accompanied economic growth and development. To expect the composition of legislatures to reflect otherwise would be an act of denial. There is also the very specific anxiety of many practising politicians that constituencies they are associated with will change to their disadvantage. Their dread of sudden irrelevance is understandable but, once again, it draws from the long freeze that was placed on delimitation three decades ago. To extend the freeze would only postpone the inevitable. Murmurs about 8216;general8217; that is, unreserved seats decreasing are also in the air. But reservation is a political decision. It would be outstanding hypocrisy for legislators to expect themselves to be insulated from their own decisions.
