Why Government Wanted To Rush Delimitation Bill

'The reason why they rushed through the bill was they wanted to avoid using the 2026 Census because the 2026 Census by their own decision will be a caste census.'

'The BJP knows that a significant share of the OBCs who will get captured in the census, for the first time after the 1931 Census, are against the BJP. Only a segment of the OBCs are in their favour.'

'So they wanted to avoid the OBC reservation among women, which is a demand of a lot of Opposition parties.'

The Union government's plan of clubbing the delimitation of states with women's reservation got defeated in Parliament on Friday, the 17th of April 2026.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M K Stalin, the strongest critic of the Delimitation Bill, called it the 'defeat of Delhi by Tamil Nadu'. He added that the 'victory was just a trailer.'

But the Bharatiya Janata Party is using the defeat of the bill to call the Opposition anti-women.

What exactly is the Delimitation Bill and how will it affect the southern states, explains Santosh Mehrotra. A former professor of economics at JNU, he is now a research fellow at the Institute of Labour Economics, Luxemburg and visiting professor at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow.

"They are very clever in not telling you how it is going to change. What is clever is not to use the latest data, which is the Census of 2026-2027. By using the 2011 Census data, not only will they avoid the caste census and OBC reservation for women but they will achieve several others," Professor Mehrotra tells Rediff's Shobha Warrier.

On the Delimitation Bill, Narendra Modi and Amit Shah said that there would be a 50% increase in the number of seats, and that no state would lose any seat.
But what they did not saying was, when a state like UP will gain 40 seats, Tamil Nadu gains only 20. So, are they projecting a kind of mirage?

Yes, it is a mirage.

Let me explain. The bill doesn't talk about which census they are going to use.

Point one. It was clear in the Act of 2023 that they will use it after the first census post-2026. It was exactly what was agreed way back 25 years ago when the extension of 25 years took place.

So, in saying verbally, without actually committing that they will use the 2011 Census, they are already going against their own commitments.

Point two. There was no reason to call this special session to pass the bills and the Constitutional Amendment in such a hurry.

You feel the BJP was pushing the Bill in a hurried manner, looking at the 2029 election?

Totally correct.

They want to do this while the Assam, Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu elections are on.

The objective was to try and minimise the chances of all the Opposition parties coming together in the special session to defeat it.

In order to push through this Constitutional Amendment, they not only had to have a simple majority of 543 which they could have, given that the NDA was supporting them. But they needed two-thirds of those supporting them present and voting. But they did not succeed.

They were also trying to gain advantage by telling the electorates who are about to vote in the four or five state elections that the Opposition was against the women's reservation bill.

It is a stupid argument for the simple reason that the entire Parliament had supported the Women's Reservation Bill in 2023.

And the Opposition had told the BJP government that to implement Women's Reservation, they did not need to do delimitation or any such thing.

So, in 2023, it could have been implemented, but they didn't do it then.

The reason why they rushed through the bill was they wanted to avoid using the 2026 Census because the 2026 Census by their own decision will be a caste census.

The BJP knows that a significant share of the OBCs who will get captured in the census, for the first time after the 1931 Census, are against the BJP. Only a segment of the OBCs are in their favour.

So they wanted to avoid the OBC reservation among women, which is a demand of a lot of Opposition parties.

So it is more political?

It is entirely political, not more political.

'If you apply the 2011 Census, the number of seats UP will get is 132'

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Stalin called the delimitation bill a black law and burned it.
Last year when there was the joint action committee meeting in Chennai organised by Stalin, Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan described it as a Damocles' sword over the southern and some other states. Do you think so?

Absolutely yes. I completely agree with that.

The Centre claims that the southern states are not going to lose any seats, and that they are committed to proportionate increase of seats for each state.

If there is proportionate increase, then there will be a 50% increase for Kerala just because there will be a 50% increase for UP.

Now the problem with the argument is that how this is going to change.

They are very clever in not telling you how it is going to change. What is clever is not to use the latest data, which is the Census of 2026-2027.

By using the 2011 Census data, not only will they avoid the caste census and OBC reservation for women but they will achieve several others.

I did the estimate and made a table.

If 800 is the number of Members of Parliament in the expanded House, I find that when you apply a proportionate increase based on population alone, and you use the share of a state's population and apply that to arriving at the state's seats, the result is not what they are telling is going to happen, which is 50% for UP as well as Kerala.

If every state is going to get a 50% increase, why don't they say that in the law? They don't say that in the law.

Nowhere does it say what will be the individual seat allocation to each state.

It says, that will be determined by the Delimitation Commission. And the Delimitation Commission has just three members, the Election Commissioner, a retired Supreme Court judge, and a state election chair.

So the point is, they will ensure that seats of some states increase by less than 50% while others get an increase of more than 50%. They have the excuse to say, we are using the 2011 census data.

If you apply the 2011 Census, the number of seats UP will get is 132, 12 more than the 50% increase.

But the southern states don't get that much of an increase. Why? Because the population growth rate of different states has been very different.

Between 1971 and 2011, it has been very different.

No one is telling you all this.

This is the devious reason why they have not said the delimitation exercise will be based on the 2011 Census. The moment they put it down in the law, all of us can estimate based on the 2011 Census.

So the point is, it is deeply and grossly unfair to the southern states, and they know it.

But the godi media will not tell you!

The current share of the southern states in the 543 member Parliament is 24%.

And that of the six Hindi belt states which have seen highest population growth rate, have a share of 36% percent. They have seen a high population growth rate over the last 70 years.

These six states are currently ruled by the BJP.

If you use the 2011 Census, you will see that their share will rise from 36% to 40.2% because of the population growth.

On the other hand, the share of representation of southern states which is 24% will drop to 20%.

Look at the gap between the five southern states which have always for the longest time had smaller total populations. That is because they had begun to reduce their population growth rates much earlier.

They have done it mostly in the last years of the 20th century.

Earlier the gap between the share of seats of the 6 northern states versus the 5 southern states used to be 12% (36 minus 24). Now the difference will is 40 minus 20, which is 20% points!

'What the southern states are complaining is they do all the work and those who do not do the work are going to benefit'

Are the southern states not being punished for implementing several programmes like population control, primary healthcare, etc?

When does population growth in the southern states decline?

Countries, states, governments do not implement population control. What they do are three things.

One, they implement public health policies and improve public health services.

The southern states did that, but the northern states did not.

Second, the southern states implemented education for their people, especially for women. The northern Hindi Belt did not.

Thirdly, the southern states conducted family planning programmes which are part of health service.

Condoms are distributed, IUDs (Intrauterine Device) are distributed to ordinary rural people in the villages.

When you have functional public health centres, modern contraception is much higher in the South than in the Hindi belt where they do not have quality local level public health services.

The other big difference is if girls are educated up to secondary level as they are in the South and as they are not in the North, then women look after themselves better.

Women have stronger reproductive rights within the household. They control their own population. The men cannot dominate them unless they are illiterate.

In the Northern Hindi belt, almost the majority of women are either illiterate or have very low levels of education, whatever the man demands, they accept.

Now do you understand why there is a difference between the South and the North?

When the demand for children falls, the possibility of a baby dying after birth due to some infection or diarrhoea reduces. Then the fertility rate also falls.

You will find that IMR (Infant Mortality Rate) is much lower in the southern states than the northern states. Because the IMR in the north is high, children die, and people have more children.

At this juncture, it is very important to have quality family planning services.

That is essentially the difference.

What the southern states are complaining is they do all the work and those who do not do the work are going to benefit.

IMAGE: Professor Santosh Mehrotra.

The southern states say they are getting punished for implementing ideas which is beneficial to people...

Yes. I will have to add one more thing.

India's population in 1947 and China's population in 1949 were as follows. India was 350 million and China was 542 million.

Today India is 1.42 billion, and China is 1.4 billion. We have exceeded them.

They were 200 million more than us in 1949, and they are now less than us by 200 million.

Because China did what the southern states did, and what the Hindi belt did not do.

And the reason why we are 1.42 billion is mainly on account of the Hindi belt.

Three of the six Hindi belt states I was talking about have still not achieved a fertility rate of less than 2.1.

Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff