Deepening Democracy Malaise Amid Frozen Delimitation

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Perils of Frozen Delimitation Proliferate

By Gautam R. Desiraju and Deekhit Bhattacharya

A number of inconsistencies have been brought about by freezing the Legislative Assemblies and the Lok Sabha strength without simultaneously taking into account the population changes in the respective constituencies.

Our parliamentarians and legislative assembly members are now overstretched. Each of them now speaks for a sizable and disproportionately large segment of the electorate, resulting in a number of issues that are important for a relatively smaller section of the electorate getting drowned out, diluting the representative efficiency of the system.

If the size of an electoral constituency is sufficiently small, local issues will be electorally relevant for representatives—an impossibility under the present state of affairs. This might also be a contributing factor in the rise of absentee or rentier elected representatives who are mostly aloof from their constituencies and the general lack of effective communication with the electorate.

The inability of parliamentarians from different states to represent the same proportion of the population is in violation of the constitutional provision enshrined in Art. 81(2)(a) that ‘there shall be allotted to each State a number of seats in the House of the People in such manner that the ratio between the number and the population of the State is, so far as practicable, the same for all States’.

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This is because throughout the past fifty years, the population growth rates in Indian states have varied. The Constituent Assembly had drafted this provision to precisely prevent a situation like today, where one ends up with constitutional gerrymandering based on scientifically rejected reasons.

Not every MP or member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) in a state represents the same proportion of the population in their respective constituency. This is due to the different population growth rates in different regions of any given state and flies against the face of the principle enshrined in Art. 14 which says, ‘The State shall not deny to any person equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws within the territory of India.’

While many states have carried out state-wide delimitation exercises, there is no uniform system or time frame for an institutional arrangement which directly impinges on the value of a citizen’s vote. These anomalies have also harmed the principle of the equality of votes as the value of the votes of voters in thickly populated states or the constituencies becomes less than that of the voters of the thinly populated states and constituencies.

It is true that in some cases of small states the requirement of Art. 81(2) (a) has been waived so that every state, however small and thinly populated, gets at least one seat in the Lok Sabha. But the bigger states get no such advantage, again going against the principle of Art. 14.

The matter is not the north gaining or losing at the expense of the south or Bengaluru Urban pitted against Mysore; the principal problem is that one citizen has been rendered unequal vis-à-vis the other in terms of the single most important political right under democratic citizenship, that is, their vote Let us examine some further incongruities.

As per the ECI, the largest five parliamentary constituencies of the country in terms of number of electors constitute 1,16,51,249 electors taken together, while the smallest five together have just 7,56,820.16 The total electorate size in the largest five constituencies is thus 15.4 times that in the smallest five constituencies.

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We may term this as a ‘skew ratio’. These skewed numbers clearly show that the electoral significance of a vote can differ significantly from one constituency to another. Let us also remember that the 1950 constitution capped the number of Lok Sabha seats at 500 and allowed a maximum of one MP for a population size of 7.5 lakh. We are now close to exceeding the 1950 limit by a factor of three.

Additionally, if one takes the voting population of India as roughly 97 crore, there are currently on average 17.9 lakh voters represented by each Lok Sabha member. This number is way too large, and it means that an individual voter has, for all practical purposes, lost direct contact with the person he or she has elected to the Lok Sabha.

A lone representative in the Lok Sabha cannot possibly represent a constituency which is more populous than, say, all of Sweden. We have already seen how this average itself hides more than it reveals since the very small and the very large are shrouded by this number and are responsible for vast inequalities in the value of a vote

(Excerpted from Delimitation and States Reorganization, published by BluOne Ink)

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