The representation challenge for the Centre

Southern states such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala now have a much smaller share in India’s population today than what they had when the existing distribution of Lok Sabha seats was done. Any redistribution which works on the basis of current population numbers will lead to a drastic fall in the north-south balance in India’s national legislative. The population differential between the north and the south is largely because of the latter bringing down its fertility rates faster than the former. So, a valid argument can be made that this is tantamount to punishing the south for doing well in what was asked of all Indian states, and therefore, unfair. Stalin and his peers have a right to protest.

This, however, is just one side of the story. Important as state-wise balance of legislative representation is, it is equally important to respect the principle of one person-one vote which defines the core representation contract in India’s constitutional architecture. If the seat distribution is kept unchanged across states, it will only worsen the already skewed representation crisis across India’s states. “MPs in Uttar Pradesh cater to nearly 3 million residents on average, compared to 1.8 million in Tamil Nadu,” political scientists Milan Vaishnav and Jamie Hintson wrote on these pages in 2019.

A just delimitation strategy will have to balance between the objectives of correcting the representative-population imbalance without being seen as penalising states for doing well in demographic management. The latter becomes an even more important concern when read with the fact that richer states, many of them in south India, have already been complaining about poorer states receiving a bigger share in central taxes which are mostly raised in richer states in keeping with the equity principle in India’s fiscal federalism architecture. It is because of these difficult trade-offs that previous central governments have kicked the delimitation can down the road. However, with even the women’s reservation question now tied with the new population and delimitation, this might not be a feasible strategy anymore.

Solving this problem requires statesmanship and the latest census data. The onus of both is on the central government.