G-word at heart of fears: Why Oppn wants total LS seats and women quota delinked, what's gerrymandering | Explained

WBiddy Parliament convened this hebdomad for a special session to deliberate deuce-ace bills linked to redrawing India's electoral map out to increase the seats in the Lok Sabha — and thus reserve one-third seats for women — the Opposition was careful to make one thing clear from the outset, that it is not against the women's quota."We support women's reservation wholeheartedly," Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi told the Lok Sabha during the debate on the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill 2026, the Delimitation Bill 2026, and the Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill 2026.What the Opposition contests, Gogoi underlined, is that the government's real intention behind the delimitation exercise is gerrymandering for political gain.The G-word — gerrymandering — sits at the nub of these fears.In its simplest form, gerrymandering means drawing electoral boundaries not to fairly represent voters but to predetermine who wins.This charge, the government has flatly denied.Yet, to understand why the Opposition is not convinced, here's a look at what PM Narendra Modi’s government has promised, and what the bills actually say.We will return to gerrymandering, and its origins, in a bit.Base fearThe Lok Sabha number was last updated to 543 in the 1970s, and thereafter postponed for 25 years, twice.The fear has always been that states with higher populations, such as UP and Bihar in the Hindi belt, will gain even more share in Parliament.The South, which has been more progressive in controlling its population, would end up with a smaller seat share — a sort of punishment for being good at population control.That’s why any change in total number has been pushed for five decades. The polity of the country has been unable to discuss and decide what to do.The government has now proposed to increase the Lok Sabha seats to create a bigger House, statedly so that women’s quota can be accommodated.The women's quota law was already passed in 2023, but its implementation was linked to the next census and delimitation. The government wants to change that linkage to say any census can be used, such as the last one of 2011, and delimitation be done accordingly.As per the Constitution, a nationwide delimitation is anyway due after 2026 as per the latest Census after that year. That would have been the 2031 Census as per the 10-year cycle. The 2021 Census itself was delayed due to Covid and some unexplained reasons, and has only now started. That means we could have a new Census sooner than 2031 too.But now the government wants powers to use the 2011 Census to redraw the Lok Sabha. In fact, the proposed amendments and bills say the government can get the powers to use any census it picks, in the future too. That means the South’s fear of losing seat share can come true if delimitation is done purely as per census or population. Because, the North’s population continues to grow much faster and larger.Government's ‘guarantee’Union home minister Amit Shah sought to throttle this fear in Parliament, presenting what he claimed a state-by-state breakdown of seats. This data said southern states won’t lose out, as all states will get a flat 50% increase. So, no change in anyone’s share of the pie. His numbers said the proportional share of the South would remain stable, around 24%.Prime Minister Narendra Modi, speaking in the Lok Sabha, offered a “guarantee”. "No injustice will be done to anyone," he told the House, assuring southern states.But these are political commitments made on the floor of Parliament. Not written into the bills.DMK MP Kanimozhi Karunanidhi pointedly asked for the basis of Shah's numbers.Congress MP Shashi Tharoor said in the Lok Sabha on Friday, “Since this formula (promised by Amit Shah) is not codified as an immutable constitutional or legislative safeguard, it could be easily discarded or altered by a simple parliamentary majority, offering no guarantee that it will survive beyond the very short term."What the bills actually sayThe Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, 2026 raises the ceiling on Lok Sabha seats from 550 to 850 — with up to 815 members from states and up to 35 from union territories. That means the numbers can go up to a maximum of 850.Shah has said for now the figure will go to 816 seats, to adjust for a 50% flat increase.More consequentially, the bills remove the existing constitutional provision that tied delimitation (change in number of seats) to the latest census.The new bill says the government — with a simple majority in the Lok Sabha — can decide when delimitation is carried out, and which census is used forn that.This is the long-term provision in the actual bill, no matter what the current government says.What happened in Assam and J&KLimited delimitation has already been carried out in two places under the current government — Assam (2023) and the UT of Jammu & Kashmir (2022). This could only change the boundaries of the constituencies, and not the total number, as the number is frozen since the 1970s.HT's data analysis on Assam showed that, after the 2023 delimitation, the smallest assembly constituency had only 50% of the state average in electors — worse than the pre-delimitation figure of 63%. The pattern held for parliamentary constituencies too. And similar trends were found in Jammu & Kashmir.In short, the delimitation exercise under the current government did not bring constituencies closer to equality; it moved some of them further away.The 2008 delimitation, conducted under a Congress-led UPA government, also showed variations in elector counts, and thus was imperfect. But in most big states, the difference between constituencies decreased after 2008; meaning, constituencies became more equal, not less. And that's just numbers.There are real fears around how different communities, religions, support groups are split in different seats.In Assam, if equitable representation was the principle, each Lok Sabha seat should have had approximately 17.5 lakh voters. Instead, the Muslim-majority Dhubri seat had around 10 lakh extra voters. That means a vote cast in Dhubri is worth much less than a vote elsewhere in the state. The additional voters for Dhubri were drawn from the neighbouring Barpeta, from which Muslim-majority areas were removed.This turned Barpeta into a Hindu-majority constituency overnight. The BJP-led NDA won it for the first time in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. “Delimitation has secured the Barpeta Lok Sabha seat for the Hindu majority in the future too,” a student union leader aligned with the NDA was then quoted as saying.This is where the term gerrymandering becomes relevant.The G-Word, properly explained'Gerrymandering' was coined in 1812, when the US newspaper Boston Gazette published a political cartoon of a Massachusetts electoral map, which had been redrawn to benefit the Democratic-Republican Party under Governor Elbridge Gerry.The shape of the map resembled a mythological salamander, a lizard-like amphibious animal. A poet at a Boston dinner party combined the governor's name ‘Gerry’ with ‘salamander’ to produce the term. It entered dictionaries by 1848.Gerrymandering works through two ways that the Opposition has specifically invoked in the Indian context.The first would mean concentrating Opposition-leaning voters into as few seats as possible. That means they can win those seats by large margins, but have very little influence beyond those.The second feared method is a dispersing of Opposition voters thinly across multiple seats, so they cannot form a majority in any of them.Legal expert Srinivas Kodali analysed the Assam delimitation maps of 2023 to point out that constituency boundaries even split roads, rivers, and mountains. At least one assembly segment does not have a continuous map. “Mangaldoi is not even spatially connected," he noted, in a thread on X.Long-term questions: ‘Only population cannot be basis’India's delimitation law has never mandated equal voters per constituency; it only calls for approximate population parity.In this technical gap between total population and the number of voters, manipulation can operate, such as when voters increase or decrease in an exercise such as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) held in West Bengal and other states.The government's promises are big, and seek to address some fears. But they rest on the assumption that the Delimitation Commission, appointed by the central government, will draw boundaries without any political calculation.The bills create no legal obligations to address such fears. They give the current government powers to decide when and with which data future delimitations can be done.“If the government wants women's reservation, they could have done it in 2023,” Tharoor has said, pointing out that the quota was already okayed three years ago with all-party support."We will support — no delimitation, just women's reservation bill," he said. "The manner in which you are doing delimitation — the way you did demonetisation (of currency notes in 2016), without thinking — we don't want this political demonetisation. There should be a big debate on what should be the formula. Only population cannot be the basis. Speak with south, northeast, small states," Tharoor, MP from Kerala, said."A detailed discussion is required on delimitation but right now, there should be immediate implementation of women's reservation. We will support it," he added.