Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Tuesday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to hold wider consultations with states and parties on delimitation, proposing the European Union’s “degressive proportionality” model to address concerns of southern states over representation.
Lok Sabha MP Tharoor also argued the upcoming delimitation exercise will punish southern states for successfully implementing population control measures.
“India also needs a compromise between strict democratic representation — one person, one vote — and the need to ensure smaller political entities have a meaningful voice,” Tharoor wrote on X. “This essentially means that while larger populations get more seats, the ratio of citizens to representatives increases as the population grows.”
Tharoor also likened Europe’s challenge of “small and big states coexisting in one Union” to India’s political map, suggesting the government find a “mathematical formula” fair to both high- and low-growth states, as well as large and small states.
The European Parliament uses a “minimum threshold” and “maximum ceiling”, where no member state has fewer than six seats or more than 96.
Europe follows the principle of an “inverse ratio”, where the value of a vote decreases as population rises that ensures that large EU states such as Germany, France, Italy and Spain do not override smaller states.
In India, a “floor” can be set for smaller states like Goa, Sikkim or the Northeast, where instead of a fixed ratio of about 2 million citizens per MP, the ratio would vary with population, the Thiruvananthapuram MP suggested.
“A state with 200 million people might have 2.5 million citizens per MP, while a state with 30 million might have 1 million per MP. This is to ensure no state feels disenfranchised,” Tharoor said, stressing the need to address the growing North–South divide over delimitation. “Degressive proportionality in the Lok Sabha would provide a ‘weighted’ democratic mandate that acknowledges population without penalising states for their developmental successes.”
Opposition parties, including the Congress, have lashed out at the Centre over attempts to “bulldoze” bills through Parliament in a "special session".
Congress communications in-charge Jairam Ramesh called the “special session” an assault on democracy that exposed the Prime Minister’s “bulldozer mentality”, claiming MPs have not yet received copies of the bills they are to vote on.
Parties like the Samajwadi Party and the Bahujan Samaj Party have argued that without accurate caste data, the delimitation and reservation process will be flawed and “anti-OBC”.