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Journalism of Courage
New Delhi, Dec 6: NDA constituents from the South today opposed the proposal of the Government to fix the cutoff date for the next delimitation of Lok Sabha constituencies to 2011 instead of 2026 as earlier decided.
Union Ministers and MPs belonging to DMK, TDP, MDMK and PMK met Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and said any such move would severely hurt the interests of Southern states.
The Government on Tuesday proposed at the Business Advisory Committee meeting of the Lok Sabha that the total number of constituencies be frozen till 2011, that is till the next census, rather than till 2026 as was proposed earlier.
"This decision will severely hurt the interests of Southern states especially Tamil Nadu which is implementing the birth control programme very efficiently and because of which the state has already lost two Parliamentary constituencies," DMK Party in Parliament said in a memorandum to the Prime Minister.
Stating that Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M Karunanidhi had already opposed any decision to prepone the year of freezing of 2026, the memorandum said that the people of Tamil Nadu would not agree to a "compromise" to prepone the exercise.
"It will upset the federal political balance in favour of a few states and create and develop North-South divide and hinder the family planning programme," it said.
Senior DMK member and Minister of Environment and Forests T R Baalu said in a statement that the Prime Minister has assured that the feelings of NDA partners would be given due consideration.
The delegation also met Lok Sabha Speaker G M C Balayogi and Union Ministers L K Advani and Arun Jaitley.
The Home Minister promised that the issue would be discussed by the Coordination Committee of the NDA, Baalu said.
Besides Baalu, the delegation included among others Union Ministers N T Shanmugam, A Raja, E Ponnuswamy, Yerran Naidu and Vaiko.
