Author: Mahendra Yadav
Every democracy lives by two kinds of lines. There are the visible ones that separate constituencies on a map. And there are the invisible ones that determine who is allowed to draw them, under what rules, and with what claim to authority. India has spent decades arguing about the first. It has barely begun a serious conversation about the second.
The constitutional freeze on the inter-state allocation of Lok Sabha seats, which continues to anchor representation to the 1971 population base, has long outlived the demographic realities it was meant to stabilise. Differential rates of population growth across states have produced a growing divergence between the distribution of seats and the distribution of citizens. This is not a new observation. Scholars, political parties, and federal forums have examined the distributive consequences in considerable detail — the relative gains that would accrue to some states, the relative losses that would fall on others, and the possible formulas that might soften the impact. That debate is both legitimate and necessary.
What has received far less sustained attention is a prior institutional question: once any new formula is settled, who will translate it into actual constituency boundaries, under what constraints, and with what degree of continuity?
India's settled practice has been to create a Delimitation Commission by special statute, assign it a finite task, and dissolve it once the work is completed. This pattern has been repeated across successive exercises. Between commissions, the institutional capacity itself largely disappears — no standing secretariat, no accumulating body of reasoned decisions, no continuously refined methodology. Recent legislative efforts followed the same template rather than departing from it.
Although this is not a constitutional necessity, Article 82 leaves the authority and manner of readjustment to be determined by Parliament through ordinary law. In the Constituent Assembly, BR Ambedkar was clear that, while the Constitution laid down the underlying principles, the machinery for drawing constituencies was deliberately left flexible so that future legislatures could adapt it to changing circumstances. The recurring preference for temporary, single-purpose bodies is therefore a policy choice, not an inevitable feature of the constitutional design.
Temporary bodies have inherent limitations. They do not accumulate institutional memory. They do not refine methods across successive cycles. They do not leave behind a growing, citable archive of reasoned decisions against which later choices can be measured. Recent delimitation exercises have included public consultation and the publication of draft orders, which is to their credit. Yet, without standing numerical benchmarks and a continuing obligation to justify departures from them, the process remains less open to disciplined scrutiny than a body with institutional continuity would allow.
Other parliamentary democracies have made a different institutional bet. The United Kingdom's Boundary Commissions are permanent statutory bodies that review constituencies on a fixed cycle. Canadian commissions, though constituted after each census, operate under standing statutory rules that require published reasons when they deviate from strict population equality. Australia links redistribution to statutory triggers and defined thresholds of malapportionment. None of these arrangements has eliminated political conflict over boundaries. What they have done is treat the capacity to draw electoral lines as a continuing public function rather than an instrument assembled afresh under conditions of maximum political pressure.
There is a further difficulty of sequencing. To construct a permanent delimitation authority at the precise moment when the distribution of political power among states is being renegotiated is to build the institution inside the conflict it will later be asked to referee. Institutions created under acute distributive pressure often absorb the anxieties of that moment into their design. The risk is not merely technical; it is a risk to the long-run legitimacy of the body itself.
An alternative path is available that does not require the seat-share dispute to be resolved first. Parliament could, by ordinary legislation, establish a permanent technical delimitation authority whose initial mandate is limited to maintaining demographic data, developing and publishing methodology, and reporting to Parliament — without the power to alter any boundary. After the next census, that authority could conduct a fully transparent, non-binding technical exercise, placing its numbers and reasoning in the public domain for scrutiny. Only after the constitutional question of the freeze has been settled would its substantive powers be activated.
Such sequencing would keep the distributive decision where it belongs: in the realm of elected politics, argued openly. It would also ensure that the technical instrument already exists, tested and trusted, rather than being forged in the heat of the next contest.
The disagreement over relative seat shares among states is real and must be confronted directly. As Amitabh Kundu, Santosh Mehrotra and others have carefully shown, the delimitation question is not a simple contest between democracy and federalism. It concerns the appropriate balance between two legitimate objectives — electoral equality and territorial accommodation within a federal polity. Population should remain the dominant criterion, but it need not be the sole criterion. Institutional design does not dissolve that disagreement. What it offers is a steadier procedural framework within which the disagreement can be addressed.
The next delimitation, whenever it happens, will reshape the weight of citizenship and the balance among regions for a generation. The numbers on the map will matter. The authority we grant to those who draw the map may matter more — precisely because it is the part of the argument that receives least attention until it is too late to redesign.
The writer is a PhD scholar at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His research focuses on institutions and the political economy of international relations; Views presented are personal.