The minimum definition of democracy is one that offers an unhindered right to the demos — the citizens who constitute the nation — to elect a government of their choice, with every vote cast in the process having equal value. In India, the colonial legislations of 1861 and 1892 provided for ‘Councils’, for which the term, ‘elect’, meant just ‘to appoint’. The 1901 Act permitted an element of election, with a Central Legislative Council of 68 members of whom 27 were ‘elected’, though the electorate was restricted to a few ‘select’ bodies and individuals. The roots of the bicameral system of Parliament can be traced back to the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919, which provided for a Council of States with 60 members, of whom 34 were to be elected, and a Central Legislative Assembly made up of 145 members, of whom 105 were to be elected. The term of the Council was five years. In 1935, the British agreed to create a federal structure with assemblies for the provinces of Assam, Bengal, Bihar, the United Provinces, Bombay and Madras. The Legislative Councils — the upper Houses — were to be permanent chambers with one-third members retiring every third year. When the Constituent Assembly worked from 1946 to 1949 towards formulating the Constitution, the general structure of a parliamentary democracy was very much in the consciousness of the political class in India. The formulation of the Constitution which enabled the transition from the pre-Independence Councils to the first general elections to Parliament was a giant leap forward. The Constitution provided every adult Indian with an inviolable right to vote for constituting the ‘House of the People’, the Lok Sabha. The universal voting right, with every vote having equal value, is the cornerstone of India’s democracy. Since 1952, 18 general elections have been held within that non-negotiable, constitutional, democratic framework.
The process of determining and adjusting the exact number of people’s representatives in Parliament as well as the precise area of the voters’ constituencies has been institutionalised in the Constitution by providing for a Delimitation Commission. Parliament is empowered to constitute the Delimitation Commission after every general election in order to ensure that the ratio between the population of a state and the number of MLAs in the state assembly and the number of MPs it sends to Parliament is near-equal in the case of all states. The Delimitation Commission demarcates the voter constituencies, decides the number of elected representatives, and determines the number of reserved constituencies. The total strength of Lok Sabha MPs was increased three times — in 1952, 1962, and 1972 — by the respective Delimitation Commissions created under the Delimitation Acts. Since then, the number of MPs has remained unchanged. In 2002, the then Delimitation Commission did not increase the number but ruled that it could be increased through a fresh delimitation following the first census carried out after 2026.
The 1961 Census had reported 43.89 crore people to be India’s population and the delimitation process had determined 494 to be the number of MPs in the Lok Sabha; that is a little less than one million people per parliamentary constituency. In 1971, the census had placed the population figure at 548 million and there were 521 MPs in the Lok Sabha, bringing the average population per constituency to a little over one million. Later, the number was adjusted to 543 in view of the 1971 Census, making the ratio almost one MP for every million people. The 2011 Census had placed the Indian population at 121.01 crore. No census was carried out in 2021. It appears that an MP now represents close to 2.4 million people. Going by the statistics of voters in the 2024 general election, with qualified voters being 96.8 crore, every Lok Sabha MP represents close to 1.8 million voters. These figures determine the context of the next delimitation process. If the total population is taken as the base for the 2029 election, and if the number of MPs is not increased, the ration will be an MP per three million people, or one MP for nearly 2.3 million voters. The next Delimitation Commission may, therefore, look at substantially increasing the number of MPs. The question is, will the process be conducted impartially? Will it leave the federal structure of the Republic untrammeled? Will it improve the quality of representation or rather work towards ensuring a continued and unquestioned rule of a single party, increasing the political heft of only a few states? The delimitation process is entirely dependent on the population data ascertained through the census. Will the census data be unexceptionable and as per the United Nation’s guidelines laid down in the Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses (Revision 4, March 2025) to which India is a signatory?
We have already begun with the violation of the UN recommendation of carrying out a census in the Zero Year of a decade and for the data to be made available in the first year of the next decade. All censuses in India had followed the time series by carrying out censuses in the first year of a decade, from 1951 to 2011. If the Covid epidemic thwarted the 2021 Census exercise, it should have been completed in 2023 and declared as an e2021 Census; or else the exercise should have been postponed to 2031. The government’s declaration of the census in 2026-27, making March 1, 2027 as its reference date, appears to be an arbitrary decision. The data can hardly be used for gaining an international or intra-national perspective. No explanation has been offered by the government as to why the decision was made in blatant violation of universal census principles.
The only logical explanation for the absurd decision is that the 2002 Act and the 2003 supplementary Act of delimitation state that increasing the number of MPs can be considered subsequent to any census taking place after 2026. It appears that the government is determined to complete it before the 2029 general election, possibly also the year when India may be forced to adopt ‘One Nation, One Election’, now endorsed by the Kovind Committee Report. Normally, the delimitation process is fairly elaborate and may take several years. However, there is no guarantee that it shall be so in every future instance. With sophisticated information technology at hand, the time taken to complete the process can be significantly shortened. The Delimitation Commission is made up of three effective members — a retired Supreme Court judge, an election commissioner nominated by the chief election commissioner (in one exceptional past instance, a CEC had nominated himself), and the election commissioner of the respective state (limited to that state). The others are only ‘associated members’ with neither vote nor veto. Considering the recent decline in the credibility of the Election Commission of India and the absurdity of the 2027 Census, and considering the timings of the Special Intensive Revision of the electoral rolls, the census and delimitation, the worst fears of every India at this juncture would be whether the next delimitation leaves forever changed the entire political landscape and India’s democracy.
G.N. Devy is an academic and cultural activist