The delimitation debate has begun to make news and like most political controversies, it skirts the foundational issues. Exactly like some policy wizards of the Hindutva variety, chief ministers from the southern states have suddenly found virtue in large families and having multiple babies. Before the latest statements of the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, similar sentiments were expressed by the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister, when he questioned the two-child policy to draw attention to the demographic imbalance that marks the North-South divide.
These remarks underscore the better performance of the states of South India both in terms of the human development index and economic parameters. The blatant attempt by the Centre and Hindutva votaries to push Hindi is another irritant that has re-ignited the “North-South” conflict. The possibility of the next delimitation exercise and the hanging sword of a mechanical application of the population criterion that will reduce the current strength of the South in the Lok Sabha have further fuelled tensions.
The irrationality of the “more children” plank apart, the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister has made a specific plea — to freeze the current strength of each state in the Lok Sabha. In effect, this demand seeks to continue the earlier policy of avoidance. Since the mid-1970s, for the past half-century, India has allowed the ratio of population-to-representative to remain unreasonably high. Freezing the current strength of each state in the Lok Sabha may allow us to retain the current balance of numeric power among states. But it would also mean a huge distortion because in most of the states, every representative would continue to represent an impossible population of about 20 lakh.
Most parties would find the proposal of freezing the current arrangement more convenient but that may not solve the problem, only postpone it again.
For a genuine debate on the delimitation question, it is necessary to avoid two tempting tropes. First, there is a temptation among politicians from the South and many intellectuals to set an alarm about the domination of North India over the South. It is true that often a certain North Indian imagination is circulated as the idea of the Indian nation, but that has nothing to do with the relative strength of the states in Parliament. Already, the Lok Sabha has a larger number of representatives coming from the states of North India. It is not clear whether any injustice to the “South” has happened on account of the numeric disadvantage it has in the Lok Sabha (and Rajya Sabha too). The North-South prism is only likely to persuade people and parties of the North to push for a delimitation that would give them an advantage. Such a counter-mobilisation in the North can make it impossible to arrive at any negotiated settlement.
The North-South prism presupposes that multi-state and all-India parties would be unable to take any stand on this issue —one is either a votary of the South or a supporter of the North. This will practically exclude both Congress and the BJP from any serious debate on the issue; their state units will be forced to take contrary positions making a compromise even more difficult.
Secondly, in the present party-political arena, there is a temptation to see the issue through the prism of the BJP’s dominance. While the BJP and Hindutva historically always saw the northern normative universe as constitutive of national identity and while they have always been uncomfortable with India’s pluralism and in particular with Dravidian claims, it will be a mistake to posit the current delimitation debate within an anti-BJP framework. The BJP would be pulled internally in contrary directions. In particular, when the BJP is poised to expand in the South, it will not openly counter the claims of southern states. The recent statement by the Union Home Minister that states of the South will not lose any seats marks the limits of anti-BJPism on this issue.
How, then, should we address the vexed issue? At one extreme, an argument may be made that if population is the basis of representation (at least in Lok Sabha), then, there is nothing wrong in a skewed strength of the states. This is the formalist democratic argument. Such an argument may also appear to have constitutional legitimacy, because this is how the Constitution would expect the delimitation process to unfold.
In a draft paper for the Pune International Centre, Sanjeer Alam and I have argued that India needs to transcend the formalist argument and employ democracy in a broader sense to inform the method for delimitation. Following the leads of Milan Vaishnav and Alistair McMillan, we argue that there are two routes to resolving the issue (not necessarily mutually exclusive). While the idea of reforming the Rajya Sabha is indeed useful, it would require a greater consensus and more wide-ranging amendments to the Constitution, whereas there is more merit in exploring the other possibility of expanding the Lok Sabha wherein the current strength of any state will not be adversely affected even as more populous states will get additional seats.
On the surface, it does look like a mere compromise, but in doing so, the representation debate can be taken a step further. The Constitution does mandate the application of the democratic principle as the basis of delimitation, but we need to pause and ask what that principle means. So far, a simplistic understanding has informed the debate and apprehensions around the issue, but given the ideological context of diversity in crafting the Indian nation-state and the later political ethos of consolidating democratic politics, it is necessary that being democratic must be understood as also being federal.
As a matter of fact, delimitation exercises already appreciated this in an implicit manner: Allocation of seats to states would begin by first allocating a minimum representation to “smaller” states to ensure that howsoever small a state is in terms of size and/or population, it will at least have one member in the Lok Sabha. In doing so, the principle of state-based representation overrode the principle of population.
It would be a great step if leaders like CM Stalin seize the moment and expand the scope of democracy to incorporate federal interests over and above mere numbers. In other words, the proposal to expand the size of the Lok Sabha and to ensure that no state loses its current strength should be seen not only as a politically prudent step, but as a step to enrich the idea of democracy in the Indian context.
The writer, based at Pune, taught political science
