• An Indic solution to Delimitation concerns - thought provoking indeed.

Authors are Gautam R. Desiraju and Deekhit Bhattacharya.

Who says Sanātana Dharma is not a political religion?

From the earliest days of our civilization, our scriptures have dwelt upon the rights and responsibilities of our ruling classes and how they are accountable to the people they rule. They are, however, also accountable to a higher call—the call of dharma, which is the sovereign of sovereigns: dharmam kshatrasya kshatram, so says the Brihadāranyaka Upanishad.

Recent times have seen an unusual and peculiar political problem in our country—that of delimitation, an unusual and perhaps little known word at least as far as the average citizen is concerned. We are a democracy, and this means that from time to time, we participate in elections where we vote for candidates in such a way that the one who secures the maximum number of votes in our particular constituency is declared the winner and represents us, the electorate of that particular constituency, in an assembly of legislators, say the Lok Sabha or lower house of parliament. So far so good.

An essential feature of any functioning democracy, and India does consider itself one, is that the value of any vote anywhere in the country in being able to elect a representative to the Lok Sabha should be the same. It sounds simple but in India this simple idea has become complicated because for a full 50 years, the delimitation exercise has been frozen, in other words the sizes of the constituencies have not been continuously modified to take into account the changes in population within that particular constituency.

Because of the freeze, constituencies where the rate of population growth has been relatively high have ended up being systematically under-represented in the Lok Sabha. Typically, these constituencies are found in the northern states, for example Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.

Conversely, states with lower rates of population growth are over-represented. Tamil Nadu is a notable example, and today a vote in this state is worth roughly 1.6 votes in say, Rajasthan.

Delimitations are carried out in democracies on the basis of the latest census that has been carried out in that country. Here, another problem crops up for us—the last census was held in 2011 i.e. fifteen years ago. The census that would normally have been carried out in 2021 was held in abeyance because of the Covid pandemic. So any delimitation exercise we carry out today must be on the basis of a new census, or we shall have to compromise and use the population figures of the 2011 census.

Delimitation has become a pressing political problem because the two groups of states, northern and southern, have entirely different opinions as to how the exercise is to be carried out.

The northern states have not said so explicitly but they would clearly prefer if our constituencies are delimited on the basis of population—as is done in any functioning democracy in the world. The principle here is: Each Vote, Same Value. Conversely, the southern states wish to retain their representational advantage, as it stood when the freeze was first put in place in 1976, and simply increase the number of constituencies all over in a proportional manner. In this proposal, any constituency would be delimited so that it becomes 1.58 constituencies, and effectively our 543 Lok Sabha members would become 858 members reflecting the population increase over 40 years, namely from 1971 to 2011. 

Ideally, however, each state of the Union must enjoy the same heft with the central government: Each State Same Heft. The southern formulation not only contradicts this but goes further and asserts that the smaller southern states must enjoy greater heft simply because they are special. Some southerners even say that delimitation should follow from economic status: those states who have contributed more to the economy should have a greater say in the legislative business of the country. The meaning of the word ‘delimitation’ itself seems to be changing!

Both solutions will raise more problems.

The suggestion based on population is constitutionally correct and mathematically flawless but it will increase the heft of large heavily populated northern states in parliament contradicting the principle of Each State Same Heft. The suggestion based on proportionality is plain incorrect, and worse still, illogical. If this suggestion made by the southern states is accepted, the asymmetry that has arisen because of the 50 year freeze will only get amplified further; effectively it is equivalent to imposing another 25 year freeze, and indeed this is what the chief minister of Tamil Nadu is implying. By 2051 when a new freeze expires, we would effectively have ceased being a democracy, in any understood sense of the term.

There is no way in which the twin conditions of Each Vote Same Value and Each State Same Heft are satisfied unless Bhārat is reformulated in terms of nearly equally populated smaller states that are in themselves defined keeping in mind historical, geographical, economic, cultural, linguistic and civilisational criteria.

An organic formulation of seventy-five states is shown in the map below and has been arrived at naturally without any artificial contrivance. The best argument or proof for our conjecture is a visual one—behold! A justification is provided in our recently published book that is mentioned at the end of this article but any Bharatiya will recognise that these divisions are a truer representation of our identities than the twenty-eight state model that we have at present.

Credit authors. Map not to scale. 

The structuring of our present 28 states and 8 Union Territories is irrational, even eccentric, and has no basis in the history, geography, culture and economics of our ancient land, Bhāratavarsha. It was a cut-and-paste hotchpotch of boundaries that had been hastily and arbitrarily drawn up by our colonial masters overlaid with a crazy quilt of 564 Princely States that were defined and orchestrated by them to maintain their effective suzerainty over their Indian Empire. To add insult to injury we further compromised our map in 1956 with the introduction of linguistic states, another British concept that set Indian against Indian using the fake concept of linguistic identity.

If we have seventy-five states of nearly equal population of 2 crore each, we naturally arrive at a situation where each of these small states will send 12 elected representatives to the Lok Sabha in a lower house of 858 members. There is no question of any north-south divide because there will be no north and no south, just 75 logically obtained domains that have their culture encoded from the past and their economy beckoning to the future. India of the past will become Bhārat of the future.

One may only ponder as to why these seventy-five political entities appeared so naturally, almost affirming our past and our Sanātani culture that upholds Dharma above all else. The number 75 immediately leads to an average population of 2 crore for these states, a number that is eminently governable with no rancour and ill-will among states.

The only ones who would stoutly defend the present 28 state dispensation would be the entrenched political classes who have built up financial empires based on caste calculations within states as defined presently.

This confluence of politics and dharma, unique to Bhārat, is already foretold in Verse 165 of one of our most ancient hymns, the Lalita Sahasranama where the Supreme Goddess is invoked thus:

Dharmādhārā dhan’ādhyakshā dhana-dhānya-vivardhinī

Salutations to Her who carries Dharma of the Universe. Salutations to Her who controls all riches. Salutations to Her who increases riches and harvests.

Salutations to Her who brought together this conjunction of politics and dharma to further the economic prosperity of Her chosen land.

Gautam R. Desiraju and Deekhit Bhattacharya are authors of ‘Delimitation and States Reorganization: For a Better Democracy in Bharat’, 2025, BluOneInk.

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Also read

1. India is a Union of States not a federation like USA – How did Indian states come into existence. 

2. How Democracy evolved in India

3. Concept of Elections and Democracy in the Vedas and Dharma Sastras

4. What is Dharma