Indias Delimitation Dilemma

TITLE: India’s Delimitation Dilemma CHANNEL: Carnegie Endowment DATE: 2026-05-06 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Unabashed, the most unpredictable becomes a headline, the most volatile outrageous behavior, unsubstantiated narratives, a battle of personalities. Welcome to Grand Tamasha, a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times. I’m your host, Milan Vaishnav. India hasn’t updated how political power is distributed across its states in five decades, and the consequences are mounting. At the heart of delimitation lies a fundamental tension. Should representation follow population or preserve a delicate federal balance? Successive governments chose to defer the question, freezing India’s electoral map even as demographic divides deepened. The Modi government’s recent push to overhaul the system brought these tensions into the open, but ultimately failed to resolve them. Recently, I sat down with Shruti Rajagopalan of the Berkley Center at George Mason University for a wide-ranging webinar on delimitation, representation, and the reshaping of Indian democracy. The two of us discussed how India reached the present impasse and what happens next. We also unpack the constitutional rules governing delimitation, the scale of malapportionment in the Lok Sabha, and the politics behind the Modi government’s failed 2026 push to overhaul the system. We end by discussing scenarios for the future. Hi Milan, it’s great to see you. Hi Shruti, thanks for having me. Yes, this is I think going to be a lot of fun. I want to first welcome all the people who are joining as we speak. I believe we have a few hundred people who registered for this conversation, which makes sense because I think delimitation is one of the great fault lines of our times. In India, it’s the political bargain that will set the tone for all other political bargains to come in the future, including constitutional, federal, and fiscal. And I can’t think of anyone better to have this conversation with other than you, Milan, because when I first started writing about this about five years ago, and I was looking for who has written about this, there there was only, you know, one paper by you and Jamie, and everything else was a little bit outdated. So, I think of you very much as the my go-to person when I want to think through the politics and the numbers and everything that’s happening with delimitation. So, it’s wonderful to have you here, and thank you so much for doing this. Well, thank you, Shruti. I mean, I have to to be straightforward and say that when you asked me, I said yes on one condition, which was that this was going to be a conversation because I’ve relied on your work on delimitation, but I also think we bring very different perspectives. You know, as a constitutional scholar and economist, you have a perspective that I simply cannot have as a political scientist. So, I actually hope fully bringing these together will be useful for us, but also for the people who are paying attention. Yeah, so maybe a good place to start is just what is delimitation in general? How does it take place in India, and what are the controversies and fault lines that, you know, for those who are not very familiar with this topic and steeped into writing it for the last few years like you and me?

[laughter] So, I mean, quite simply, you know, delimitation is what most of us would call in other democracies kind of redistricting, right? And we’re having these debates in the United States on a daily basis, literally. You know, it involves, I think, two linked processes. One is about apportionment, and the second is about delimitation in the narrow sense of constituency or district boundaries, right? So, the first apportionment is really how we allocate seats in the parliament, in the legislature, across states, and the second is within states, if you have a collection of parliamentary constituencies or state assembly constituencies, what do those boundaries look like given the overall pool of seats that you might have in the state, right? Now, in India, there is a fairly clear constitutional basis for how this is done. You have Article 81 of the Constitution, which says the allocation of Lok Sabha seats, the lower house of parliament, should be allocated across states in a way that is proportional to the population, and the ratio of every member of parliament to the population they represent should be, as practicable as possible, roughly equivalent across states, right? Now, there is an exception here, which is for very small states, those that have a population of 6 million or below, and union territories. Those don’t have to be proportional. Parliament can decide how they want to apportion those, but broadly in the main, that’s what we’re talking about. Now, Article 82, which follows, says, okay, uh there should be in a readjustment after every decennial census, right? So, in India, it’s done on the ones, by 1991, 2001, not 2011 for reasons we’ll come back to later. And after that census enumeration takes place, parliament can authorize the setting up of a of a delimitation commission, which will essentially do this work again, both in terms of thinking about seats across states as well as how to do boundaries within states, right? There are very there’s a parallel requirement, which I won’t get into in the Constitution, as you might imagine, about how this should work for state assemblies. It’s essentially the same that’s the same process, right? There’s another part of this which I think is important, which is that the size of the Lok Sabha is constitutionally capped. The cap on the number of seats the lower house can have has evolved over time. At the latest amendment, it is 550 seats maximum authorized strength. There are 543 seats currently being occupied. Um, and the ceiling again has fluctuated by amendments over the years to Article 81, right? So, any expansion of the size would require a constitutional amendment, right? There is, as I mentioned before, an independent delimitation commission authorized by parliament that is meant to essentially do the nuts and bolts work of this apportionment, of this redistricting. Its orders have the force of law. They are not questioned by the judiciary. It is set up for this purpose by an express act of of parliament, right? So, I believe the last delimitation had an act that was passed, I think, in 2002, roughly that timeframe, to set up the delimitation that happened, at least dealing with inner inner state boundaries in 2007,

2008. This is this is now getting into the weeds, and we’ll have time to get into some of this stuff. The last thing I just want to say very quickly is because I think it’s very relevant to the current debate, which is this question of reservation. Um, under the Constitution, one of the things that also gets decided by the commission is which constituencies will be reserved for two types of groups, for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes, right? Two historically disadvantaged, marginalized communities. Together, they have a quota of roughly a quarter of parliament and state assemblies. Those are meant to be given to areas which have scheduled castes and scheduled tribe populations in the greatest numbers. There’s a little bit of nuance here, but broadly, that’s true. The new wrinkle, of course, is in 2023, this government managed to get through parliament a constitutional amendment, the 106th amendment, which would reserve 1/3 of seats in the Lok Sabha and the various Vidhan Sabhas, state assemblies, for women. And in that amendment as it was passed, it essentially tied the question of the commencement of the quota with the next delimitation, the delimitation we still have not had, because that delimitation was supposed to be taking place after a census, which we also have not had. So, that I think essentially is, you know, the basic nuts and bolts. Shruti, maybe I’m going to turn the tables on you for a second, because one of the things I haven’t gotten into, but I think now is the right time to do it, is this process has not worked as cleanly or as neatly as I have just laid out, right? I mean, the Constitution is very clear. Every 10 years, you have a census, you do the delimitation, you figure out this reapportionment, redistricting. You have written this excellent piece, which we should have for our listeners in the show notes, a recently Indian Express, where you kind of traced back this history, because there’s a constitutional angle and there’s a kind of political angle. And so, I don’t know if you want to maybe elaborate on that for a second. Sure. No, that was an excellent primer. Thank you, Milan, for getting us to this point. So, the question you’re asking is how did we end up here exactly in 2026, right? So, one of the quirks of the Indian Republic is typically bicameral legislatures have one of the houses which is apportioned by population, and the other house which is apportioned based on some other principle. It may not always be population. Now, in India, both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha were always apportioned on population. Of course, one you have direct representatives, and the other is indirect representatives. So, the Rajya Sabha was never the US-style Senate, or, you know, some of the other federal republics which have very particular number of people from particular ethnicities or particular minorities, and so on. So, that’s the beginning part of the problem. Now, what that means in the Indian Republic is, if you lose population share, even if the absolute numbers are growing as a share of the total population of India, if any state loses share, it loses some political voice in Parliament proportionate to that, which makes sense because that’s how democracies work. But of course in India it loses it in both houses. Now, a second quirk of the Indian Republic is right at the beginning India started as a very centralized union of states, not the typical fiscal federalism one would expect, and it only got worse, you know, as central planning kept increasing, right? So India’s purse strings have always been very tightly held by the Union Cabinet, and all the allocations have been decided by the Union Cabinet, which is of course based on Parliament. So, we reached a situation in the ’70s where the richer and more developed and the southern and western states were actually losing the proportional share in Parliament based on every decennial census. And that meant that the fiscal pie and all other major decisions of plan expenditure, welfare entitlements, everything was now going to be decided in Parliament and they had a smaller voice. And it’s useful to note that then in the 1970s more states were actually Congress governments, either because they won the election or they got rid of opposition through president’s rule, right? This was all all crazy times during the emergency. So the 42nd Amendment, which was really infamous in 1976, which did a number of things

of other things other than this. Exactly, lots of things. And the one defining feature of the 42nd Amendment was it was centralizing India more as a republic and placing more power not just in the hands of the Union Parliament, but actually in the hands of the Prime Minister’s Office and the Union Cabinet. That was really the structure of it. And where did the power get taken away from? It got taken away from the judiciary and the states and Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha and so on. Now the 44th Amendment undid most of the damage, but one of the things it didn’t undo was this freeze, delimitation freeze. Now, what does that mean? So in 1976 the amendment decided that we’re going to have population proportional representation in Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, except instead of the latest decennial census, we are going to freeze that to the 1971 census. Right? And it was for a time-bound period, it was a period of 25 years because the expectation was that poorer states that have higher fertility rates will sort of catch up in both economic growth and, you know, the fertility rates would converge and 25 years is all one needs for it. So they sort of kicked the can down the road and said in 2001 we would revisit the question of which census Parliament will be apportioned on. Now come 2001, we have the Vajpayee government. This is already the third Vajpayee government because the first one lasted a couple of weeks, the second one lasted about a year and a half when AIADMK took away support. days, 13 months. Exactly. And then the third Vajpayee government, when they took office, was a very strong coalition where the strongest partners were from the south and the west. So this is, you know, DMK, Telugu Desam Party of undivided Andhra Pradesh, so it includes both Andhra Pradesh and Telangana representation, you know, Shiv Sena in Maharashtra and so on. And basically in 2001 it was untenable to revise to 2001 numbers because one of the things that had happened thanks to liberalization was that the southern and western states grew even faster economically and their fertility rates dropped even more. So they would have really lost a larger number of seats or, you know, proportional political voice in Parliament. But India was still, you know, redistributing revenues with formula from the past. So in the ’70s, you know, the Union Government would devolve maybe a quarter of the revenues back to the states. Now I think it’s 41% Yeah. and you know, in the early 2000s it was something in the middle of these two. So that’s kind of how this whole thing happened. Now a couple of you know, nuanced additions to add to what you were saying about reservation. Now there are two parts to the puzzle. So you know, there’s uneven population growth both between states, but also within a state. So what they decided was that between states apportionment we would freeze to 1971 numbers. Right. Within state apportionment would be based on the 2001 census. Right. Right. And this is to avoid problems like, you know, there was a point in time when Gurgaon was an incredibly malapportioned district because it was growing so fast and there was a huge influx of migrants. Same with Thane more recently, right? Was the single most malapportioned district electoral district in India. So to avoid problems like that, that would be fixed on the 2001 numbers. And the same for Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe reservations, which are again based on population. So all these things got adjusted. And another thing that happened was that three new states were carved out of the erstwhile Hindi heartland states, right? So you had Uttarakhand getting carved out of Uttar Pradesh, you had Jharkhand out of Bihar, and you had Chhattisgarh out of Madhya Pradesh. But because within the state numbers were based on the 2001 census, the new states were less severely malapportioned than the parent states. So why where we are as a result of this today is that we still have a system where they kicked the can down the road another 25 years. So the Constitution currently reads that the next delimitation or redistricting exercise will be based on the first census after 2026, which should have been 2031, but of course we’ve not, as you pointed out, had the last census, so it could be any census between now and whenever, Right. so that’s where we are now, but that also means that we are apportioning our parliamentary seats based on a census which is 55 years old, which is frankly just extraordinary. And the populations have grown very unevenly, but also economic growth has not only been uneven, but in India it’s diverging. So the richer states and the poorer states both are growing economically, but the richer states are growing faster than the poorer states. So we don’t have the typical catch-up growth or convergence. So this is where we are now, and I guess I should hand this back to you now. I mean I just I mean just to add one thing, Shruti. I mean I think just it’s important to re-emphasize that the total kitty of 543 didn’t change, number one. Number two, the state-wise proportion could not change. So Uttar Pradesh had its 80, Kerala had its 20, Tamil Nadu had its

39. None of that could change until after 2026. But what did change, and it actually came into play in 2007-2008, Yeah. is within Uttar Pradesh’s 80 you could redraw those boundaries such that every member of Parliament roughly presided over a similarly sized constituency in terms of population, right? That’s exactly right. And and so we’re it we’re we’re we’re kind of bent out of shape in two ways now, not just the the malapportionment across states, but it’s also been quite a long time since the 2001 census. So the size of constituencies, I mean I think Gurgaon’s a great example, right? Are also now totally totally out of whack. I just want to add maybe just kind of one comparative data point I think just to this discussion cuz I think it’s worth thinking about it. You know, there are other federal democracies out there where we can think about how malapportionment in India’s lower house sort of compares. And one of the things that we’ve done, and this is a forthcoming paper that Louise Tillin from King’s College and Andy Rubinas, one of my colleagues, have coming out hopefully in a couple of weeks, is to try and do many things, but one of the things is look at this comparatively. And so in the political science literature there is this standard measure of malapportionment. It’s called the Samuel Snyder Index after these two political scientists, Samuels and Snyders. And basically what it does is it captures the share of legislative seats that are {quote} out of place, right? And so basically you just take the absolute difference between each state’s share of seats in the legislature and each state’s share of the overall population, right? And so where what that tells you if you put federal democracies kind of on a spectrum in 2025 is Argentina turns out to be the most malapportioned. Belgium turns out to be the least malapportioned. India is kind of towards the more malapportioned side, right? So the number that comes out is 8% on the Samuel Snyders Index, which means that roughly 8% of Lok Sabha seats either over or underrepresent a particular state or union territory, right? And obviously within that the two most underrepresented states would be Uttar Pradesh, Bihar. Yeah. And the two most overrepresented states would be Tamil Nadu and Kerala, right? So what that means at the end of the day is, you know, in practical terms is a vote in a southern state Yeah. carries more weight than a than one in the northern state because you’ve you’ve really departed from this foundational principle of of of one person one vote. So India is not the most malapportioned, but it is on the higher end of the spectrum. Yes. And what I think that percentage also masks a little bit is where it is malapportioned, right? So it is malapportioned in the lower house, which is typically not the the area where the malapportionment takes place in most republics, most federal republics, right? It’s typically in the upper house that you have severe malapportionment. So, this is the place where you have direct democracy, where you have the most severe malapportionment. And the numbers, as you pointed out, you know, Milan, if I remember correctly, I think it’s 3.1 million per MP in Bihar and 1.75 million per MP in Kerala. So, it’s almost twice. And of course, these are all made up numbers because I don’t have current census numbers. So, everything we discuss after 2011 is a projection. But that’s an extraordinary discrepancy while knowing that you know, all of this is based on fertility rates and the poorer the group, the later the fertility rates dropped, right? So, it is more likely that a poor person is in a severely malapportioned state versus a wealthier person. The same is true for scheduled castes and scheduled tribes because their fertility rates dropped later than the upper castes, right? The same is true for the youth. I mean, that’s fairly obvious. The later you were born, the more young you are. So, the groups that had fertility drops seen later are more likely to be in severely malapportioned districts. So, that number actually, you know, which you gave is very useful as a comparative, but India may be worse on other margins than just the average percentage of malapportionment. That’s right. And you know, I think what you said earlier about the Rajya Sabha is important, right? The upper house, which doesn’t ever get any attention in this conversation because it its seats are not subject to delimitation. So, it’s kind of it dealt with in a separate schedule of the Constitution. And I’m sure we will come back to this because we think about future scenarios, envisioning a different Rajya Sabha is very much potentially part of part of the kind of menu of options. But I I I I I I I I you can apply the same kind of methodology to looking at malapportionment across upper houses. And what you see is that India, among federal democracies, has the least malapportioned, right? Again, because it is proportional to population. Most upper chambers are not, right? I mean, the US Senate is a great example. Every state has two seats. That’s it, right? So, on that spectrum, Argentina, the the the malapportioned statistic is like upward of 40% and in India, it’s it’s it’s 12%, right? So, what that means, if you step back, is that the Rajya Sabha reinforces majoritarian outcomes to a greater degree than other comparator upper houses, right? And so, you end up with two chambers that largely mirror the kind of the the the the population, right? So, if we if we think about the Rajya Sabha as a Council of States, which is in theory what it was meant to be, this raises some interesting questions, which again, I think we can come back to. But you know, Shruti, maybe now, since we’ve kind of, you know, cleared our throats with all this background, we should say a word maybe about what the government tried to do. I mean, I think that’s why we’re all here on this call. We wouldn’t be having this conversation probably on April 24th had the government not called a special session of Parliament abruptly, with very little notice, presented three bills, which have massive consequences. The bills, of course, did not succeed, but they have kind of set the terms of the debate. Do you want to just start maybe and I can fill in a little bit on what actually the government’s stated intent was through that legislation? Yes. So, I would not frame it as the government’s stated intent or outcome. The outcome was that the bills faced the state failed. The stated intent, I can’t understand. So, I have asked this question many times. I can just base my remarks on the text of the bill, which I think is the only thing people like you and I have to go on at this point, right? So, basically, in the special session of Parliament, they introduced a Constitution Amendment Bill. This is the 131st Constitution Amendment Bill, which lost the vote, and two other bills, which would have been tabled and passed were the Constitution Amendment Bill to pass. So, right now, none of these bills are, you know, active law or haven’t passed. So, that’s the beginning point. So, what did the 131st Constitution Amendment Bill try to do? And again, constitutional interpretation is a complicated and almost fatal business in India. So, I’m going to try and be very careful, but maybe I have personally misunderstood many things. So, the first thing it did was to actually increase the number of seats in Lok Sabha from 550, which is the current limit, to 850, where 835 would go to the states and 15 would go to the union territories. Now, this is not a terrible idea in itself because in addition to being malapportioned, India also has some of the worst, you know, population to elected representative ratios. The original constitution constitution capped it at one MP for 750,000 people. We have gone very far from that, you know, it’s like three to four times that number in most constituencies. This will help stabilize that a little bit, right? So, MPs can actually serve their citizens better. So, that’s one. But the more complicated exercise was not just increasing the number, but also what would be the basis on which these 850 seats would be shared between the states, which I guess is the big question given the delimitation freeze to 1971 census numbers. So, the original phrasing of the Constitution was that delimitation exercise would be conducted upon each decennial census. And then, you know, the numbers would be adjusted to have roughly equal, you know, constituency sizes as far as practicable. Now, this actually removes that link between the most recent decennial census and delimitation. So, that’s a really important change that I want to flag. Now, what does it replace it with? Now, that is a little bit less clear. So, it replaces it with a delimitation commission, which was one of the other bills, you know, had it passed. This commission would be a new constitutional commission. The act had a number of requirements, if you know, who would serve on that commission. It’s typically a former, you know, Chief Justice of India or Supreme Court Justice, a former Election Commissioner, you know, the Lok Sabha Speaker would appoint a few MPs, and you know, so on and so forth. So, there’s a delimitation commission, which would then determine which census would be used to then apportion the seats, right? So, if you now switch gears between the Constitution Amendment and the Delimitation Commission Bill, the Delimitation Commission Bill simply says the most recent census, which happens to be 2011. But it’s important to note that in India, bills can be amended with simple majority, whereas constitutional amendments require special majority, which incidentally failed. So, by pushing the decision of which census numbers from the constitution mandate to the delimitation commission, which is based on a statute of Parliament and can be changed with simple majority, we’ve basically really switched who makes this decision from a constitutional mandate to more of a political decision-making. It also re-opened the question of intra-state constituencies boundaries, right? Which would again be based on whatever the delimitation commission decided. This was all true not just for Articles 81 and 82, which is for the Parliament, but also Article 170, which is for the state legislature. The other major aspect was to link the women’s reservation to the current exercise of delimitation. So, the original women’s reservation constitutional amendment, which was the 100 106th constitutional amendment, which amended the Constitution to add Article 334A. Sorry, guys, this

Wow. I’m impressed that you could say that. Right? That was supposed to be after an exercise of delimitation is undertaken for this purpose, right? So, now, it’s no longer going to be based on the most recent census. It’ll be whatever the political compromise is. Now, the third bill in this mix is one on the union territories because we’ve so far discussed the states. Union territories usually tend to be quite tiny, but there are two big ones. One is Jammu and Kashmir, which is now a union territory, you know, post all the politics of Article 370, and there is Delhi, and to a lesser extent, there is Puducherry. And Delhi and Jammu and Kashmir really have the lion’s share of the parliamentary seats. Everything else is just one or two odd seats. So, that’s the other thing that needs to be reapportioned. Those 15 seats need to be reapportioned. So, this is what the new bills tried to do. My TLDR on this is that they really shift it from the constitutional level and the parliamentary level. You know, the way we have delegated or subordinate legislation making, now we have delegated apportioning in some sense. And it’s delegated to the Delimitation Commission, which is not the most robust organization if it’s based on what will be introduced, and it can decide what census it’s based on. So, it’s not even going to be the most current numbers. A second thing, which is really hidden there and you need to see quite carefully, is it actually limits whether delimitation orders can be challenged in court. And the language very specifically says in the delimitation bill that the new delimitation with cannot or shall not be called in question in any court. So, that’s the other part of the constitutional drama. And the last part of the constitutional drama is, of course, how we apportion the reserved categories, which you pointed out is both schedule cast and schedule tribes, but also women. And the schedule cast schedule tribe is pretty straightforward. It’s based on the original constitution as it has been going based on whichever census the delimitation commission would have chosen had this bill passed, but now you have to also accommodate the women’s reservation. So, let me just see, Shruti, if I can kind of I’ll give you my TLDR and see how well it matches up, right? I mean, just because there are a lot of moving parts here, right? So, take the constitutional amendment bill. It does three things, mainly, right? One is it raises the constitutional ceiling of the Lok Sabha to 850 seats. Yes. Uh 815 for states, 35 for union territories. Yes. Uh it says that the number of seats for each state in Parliament is going to be based on its proportion in the population of states. Yes. Number three, and I think this is important, right? And this gets to the point of who is the arbiter. Is it removes the automatic post census trigger for reapportionment, right? So, it now gives Parliament the discretion to decide when delimitation will happen and which census to use, right? Which is something that had been kind of hard coded, right? When it comes to this delimitation bill, obviously, in the main it’s kind of providing the operational framework for delimitation. But there is this interesting ambiguity in there, which it says that the seat allocation, how much UP will get, how much Kerala will get, as well as the redrawing of of seats within states is going to be based on quote the latest census figures published question mark because we don’t really know what that could mean. And then there’s the UT bill, right? Which which I think one of the things it’s doing is just essentially ensuring that the kind of framework for reapportionment that would happen at the state level also happens to these three important UTs, which also have kind of, you know, state legislatures, right? And then of course there’s the the the the commencement or the kicking in of the 1/3 quota for women. I mean, I think you know, just to take a step back, there was a deliberate decision taken in 2023 when women’s reservation was introduced to tie it to delimitation and by extension to the census, right? And I mean, maybe we should just pause and talk about this for a second, Shruti, because like you know, I’m not a constitutional scholar, but it strikes me that if you go back in time to 2023, there was no real need for that to happen, right? You could have come up with an alternative legislative framework which said, we are going to take 543 seats, we’re going to reserve a third of them in time for the May 2024 general election. Yes. I think everyone’s reading of that was like, you know, nobody wants to do that because it means people’s, you know, mostly men who have those seats are going to be out of a job come next election. I mean, is that a fair assessment, do you think, of what went down in 2023? I think they were setting this up in 2023 as part of some long game. So, now let’s think through the arithmetic of it, right? So, let’s say that you’re right and it’s really self-interested men who don’t want to give up power. It’s easier to pass legislation introducing reservation than a constitutional amendment. So, the very fact that they managed to whip the votes for a constitutional amendment tells me that there was some other backroom bargain given to the very same men that, hey, if you agree to this constitutional amendment and we link it to delimitation exercise in some way, we will do this later in a way that benefits the same groups. So, I don’t see I’m I’m exactly with you. There was no need for women’s reservation in Parliament or anywhere else to be hard coded in the constitution unless they thought future governments would undo it, right? That’s literally the only reason to have done that. And it was much harder to pass the constitutional amendment. So, it’s a little bit odd. And now, in hindsight, it seems like that’s exactly what they were setting up, which is some way to bring in women’s reservation and then say that, oh, the women in Uttar Pradesh are now going to be less than women in Tamil Nadu or in Kerala. And you know, make this a hot button issue as opposed to what are the other hot button issues. So, I have a feeling it was something about narrative building. I still can’t figure it out. I mean, I think that brings us to the the question probably everybody has joined this conversation to ponder with us, which is the politics behind the special session and these bills and why now and and what is going on. And I mean, I just want to say at the outset that I think it’s fair to say you and I are both a little bit puzzled because there are a lot of theories, a lot of hypotheses. Um but, you know, I think you know, maybe maybe just to kind of break it down to first principles just to start, right? I mean, clearly, if you are a party and you are a government in search of a narrative because, you know, many other things perhaps are not going as you envisioned. The economy is not firing on all cylinders. Some of that may be because of your own doing. Some of that may be because of geopolitical factors, the Iran war, Trump’s tariffs, what have you. The emotive issues that have powered the BJP and the Sang Parivar, Article 370, uh uh Jammu and Kashmir, uh Ram Mandir are taken off the table. You still have the uniform civil code, you have the national register of citizens. You have other things, but um the the the outlook for those are is not quite as clear. Um so, if you are looking for narrative building, women’s reservation is certainly an issue that you could pick on, especially because, you know, uh the government and the ruling party have made, I think, a priority, certainly in terms of their rhetoric and some would say even in terms of their policies over the past 12 years, to try and cater to women and make that a centerpiece of their broader political strategy. And there are lots of people who have actually done some really interesting work on, you know, how the how and why the BJP has decided to do this. Now, again, let’s just assume for narrative building convenience this was what you settled on. You know, in their minds they’re setting up, I think, a very nice trap, right? Because you put out there this very constitutionally vexing question of delimitation, which has huge political ramifications. You would you attach it to women’s reservation, which is, I think, broadly popular, broadly all parties in theory support. Um and then when this package fails, you can blame it on the opposition as saying, you know, they never wanted women’s reservation to to begin with. And I think, you know, one of the things we were discussing before we started, but I think, you know, is true of the BJP historically is that, you know, maybe other political parties as well is often times the narrative, right, is really about the journey as much as it is about the destination, right? I mean, and and and Ram Mandir is a great example of that. I mean, that was an emotive issue that powered the party from essentially two seats in Parliament in 1984 to what it is now, right? And interestingly, once they actually got the temple built, they didn’t really see much political payoff. Really was in the agitation and narrative. They lost Ayodhya. They lost Ayodhya, right? Um so, this gives them a juicy narrative for the state elections, which are ongoing, right? Voting is just started in Tamil Nadu and in in West Bengal, as well leading all the way to to 2029. Um there’s a second reason why they may have wanted to do this, which has to do with the the concept of delimitation as a tool to redraw constituency boundaries within states, right? Um there have have been relatively few allegations uh prior to the past five years that delimitation has been used as an expressly political tool to redraw either state assembly or parliamentary constituency boundaries for political reasons. There have been a couple of political scientists who have looked at this. None of them have come away with any really convincing evidence to suggest there was some kind of tinkering going on. However, you know, we have seen um two states in recent memory, Assam and Jammu and Kashmir, which never had their boundaries redrawn as part of the overall package in the mid-2000s for different reasons given the sensitivities of those states. In both of those states now, we at least have qualitative suggestive evidence of gerrymandering of different kinds in both places. And so, if [snorts] this is part of what you want to try and bed when you think of all 28 states, um you know, this is a useful thing to do. Here is where my uh I’ve I’ve reached the limits of of of of of my knowledge, right? Which is what the plan was when it comes to state-wise representation in Parliament. Because it seems to me that they were saying and doing two entirely different things. You have the text of the constitutional amendment bill, which says very clearly, we are going to allocate seats according to population. We’re going to rip off this band-aid of this freeze that’s been set in motion since the 42nd Amendment, and you know, we’re going to see that massive divergence. The north’s going to gain a lot, the south’s going to lose a lot. Coupled with an oral guarantee, a verbal guarantee, that no, no, no, no, we don’t want to interfere at all in the state-wise allocation of seats, right? The the home minister said that, the prime minister said that, every party spokesperson said that. Um even to the point that in the final hours of the debate, Amit Shah, the home minister, said, “If you want me, I will leave here, come back in an hour with an amendment that codifies this.” Um you know, whether that was bluffing, whether that was serious, you know, is is for the kind of historians to tell us. So, this is where I’m I’m I’m confused about what their real intention was. There isn’t one argument which says [laughter] this was just all trolling, right? I mean, this was essentially they knew this wasn’t going to pass. They knew they didn’t have a 2/3 majority. You could throw out this promise of an amendment, paint the opposition as unreasonable. See, we said we were going to we would hardwire, you know, not messing with the state-wise shares, and they didn’t go along with it. Um but obviously, they must have known that, you know, these guarantees were not going to be sufficient in the way that they were communicated to really placate the states that would be on the on the on the losing end, right? So, so if you step back, maybe, you know, one thing they were simply doing was just kind of maintaining negotiating flexibility, painting a narrative that puts the opposition on the back foot, testing political reactions. You got some very useful information. You understood whether the opposition was going to hang together, how strongly the southern states were going to fight back, whether some of your own allies, like Chandrababu Naidu in the TDP, who represent a big southern state, were going to stay with you. They did stay with you. Um and this kind of sets the terms of the debate, and I expect that um you know, we’ll get to this in the end of the conversation. Future scenarios are going to kind of use what they put out as some kind of baseline. So, anyway, I would love to hear what you think about any or all of that. So, I have one question, and I think you’re the perfect person to answer it. Uh so, to me it seems like they’re in a bit of a bind, right? They want to reapportion the seats in Parliament uh based on the latest census, which means we know which states will gain. It’s really the Hindi heartland states, which are much poorer. We know that, you know, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh are all losers in this bargain. Maharashtra maybe loses one seat, and so on and so forth. Now, to me it seems like they’ve been trying to gain a foothold in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal and Kerala for a long time, and the BJP has never really succeeded in those states. So, they didn’t want to have future election campaigns to be based on BJP can’t win in the state because at the union level, they’re going to quash our language, they’re going to take away, you know, all the states’ resources and redistribute it to the Hindi heartland, and so on. So, their way out was to build a larger sort of umbrella campaign around women, which clearly didn’t work out. What do you make of that argument? Because it seems like BJP always tries to build build a broader coalition, right? So, they tried to do the same thing when it came to caste politics, which is let’s unite all Hindus under one umbrella. Is that the sort of thing going on here? That we can’t win these state elections based on language and finances and those kinds of discussions, let’s try and build a different coalition. Hey Grand Tamasha listeners, thanks for listening to the podcast. Putting this show together each week is a labor of love, but it takes a lot of work to put out a great show every week. If you’d like to support the work we do at Grand Tamasha, please visit ceip.org/donate. Don’t forget to subscribe to us on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Spotify, or on your favorite podcasting platform, so you’ll be the first to know when a new episode rolls out. I don’t know, Shruti. I mean, I I find it very hard to believe that, you know, there is this conventional wisdom out there, right? Which is this would all be great for the BJP because their strongholds are in the central states, in the northern states, which would gain. They could lose everything else, right? But if you think about their long-term project, and this has been true for decades, right? And I think it’s very much pronounced, you know, as we speak right now, you know, their long-term strategy is to build inroads, and they have built inroads, right? And maybe not as significant as they would like in the east, in the northeast, in the south, um where, you know, they continue chipping away, increasing their vote share, winning seats, some years more than others. But uh I would be surprised if they’re willing to forsake all of that work for this kind of a a victory, right? Um which is why I I have a hard time believing in their heart of hearts they really wanted this to happen. I think, you know, one of the things which which which seems more likely, and it it comes back to something we said earlier, is you have the text of this bill, but you also have the still newly empowered, super empowered, I would say, delimitation commission. And you make them the arbiter. And you seek to influence them, and they are the ones who are going to carry out uh your guarantee of state-wise shares, or not. But you appoint those people, you control them, you exercise influence as the executive. Now, as a constitutional scholar, I ask you, like, this strikes me as an incredibly legally dubious strategy, right? Because how can you how how how will that be held up eventually by the Supreme Court if the text of the bill itself is so black and white in terms of how apportionment should be done? Yeah. I It is totally legally dubious, which is why they’ve also embedded the can’t be challenged in court part, because I think they expected it would be challenged at court. But even before the delimitation bill, you know, I think the constitutional amendment would have been challenged in court, for which there is no you know, there’s no immunity against that because of Kesavananda Bharati and the basic structure of the constitution. I mean, the Supreme Court can at any point reopen any constitutional amendment question that it wishes to reopen. So, there I do agree with you that that it is a little bit constitutionally and legally dubious. But in all fairness to them, we have been for 55 years or 50 years in a constitutionally dubious place, right? Why should we place any higher sort of, you know, constitutional morality or imagination to this kind of crazy political bargain that happened in the middle of the emergency, the worst time of, you know, India’s democracy in some sense, uh and actually give weight to that and continue it for over five decades. So, it seems to me like we were already in some political compromise, except the political compromise was made by our grandparents’ generation, and the only real difference is now the political compromise will be made by our generation. And I I I guess, you know, we’re always more skeptical of how this will play out now because it seems a little bit less clear in terms of the legal text. Uh but if this was always going to be political, then, you know, past a point, what difference does it make? That could be one kind of, you know, attitude. Yeah, I mean, I think it might be useful just to kind of discuss kind of what the state of play is now, right? I mean, you can walk us through the numbers, really. Yeah, I mean, so like what Okay, so the government bills stand defeated. So, basically, the existing kind of ex ante constitutional framework remains intact. That imposes clear constraints on what can happen next, right? So, for now, size of the Lok Sabha remains capped at 550 seats. Long-standing freeze on reapportionment across states continues. Um you know, and crucially, there can be no uh fresh delimitation exercise until the results of the next census, which is currently underway, formally started on April 1st of this year, until those results are are published. Um you know, until then, obviously, the map will remain frozen unless the government is able to to to come back and broker some kind of compromise. Um so, when that delimitation happens, after the census results are published, um it will be population-based unless the constitution is is amended, right? And then again, that applies both to the allocation of seats across states as well as within them. And that same sequencing uh and that sense that that sort of schedule is going to apply to women’s reservation, right? Which because again, that’s implement that implementation is tied to the completion of fresh census delimitation. So, even though the government has formally notified the enactment of women’s reservation, something that happened as this debate was happening, nothing can really happen until this current census is completed and in due delimitation is is is carried out, right? So like in the short run, the opposition can claim a victory. It has stymied this rushed controversial legislation, but the underlying issues, these cross pressures between democracy, one person one vote, and how do you think of the federal compact, those issues are essentially just been deferred, right? Um and it’s the next census, again, assuming nothing happens in the interim, that’s going to set in motion a highly consequential process that’s going to determine kind of this negotiation, you know, between and within states. So, can you give us a sense of what the current map of India looks like if we use numbers from today, which are obviously projections based on the 2011 census and the 2019 projections that were based on the 2011 census and so on? Like, do you have a sense I mean, we we don’t have time to go over every single state, but sort of the the greatest hits, the the biggest winners and the losers? Yeah, so let’s just assume for instance that you have the two baselines, right? Let’s one is the baseline of the 2011 census. The second is a baseline of of what the population looks like today, which we don’t know for sure, but in 2020, the the government actually did updated their population projections. Um so, we have some sense, it’s only about 6 years old, of what the numbers would be um across the country within states as of 2026. If you use 2011 baseline, again, assume that the 543 remains untouched. Um the three biggest net losers would be Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh. Tamil Nadu would lose seven seats, Kerala would lose five seats, Andhra Pradesh would lose three. And then if you look at the flip side, who are the net gainers? Uttar Pradesh with eight, Bihar with six, Rajasthan with five, right? So, a pretty significant transfer. There are only two states, according to our calculations, that would be kind of untouched. Uh Assam and Chhattisgarh, which essentially stay the same. Otherwise, everyone at least loses one seat or gains one seat. Yeah. What happens when you use more current projections of the 2026 population? I mean, obviously, just those numbers get inflated, right? So, if Tamil Nadu lost seven before, it loses 10. Andhra Pradesh loses six. Uh excuse me, loses five. Kerala loses six. So, that’s you know, that’s 21 seats just with those three southern states that goes away. And then on the flip side, Rajasthan, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, you have 26 seats that they gain as opposed to 19 seats in 2011, right? I mean, so these are really significant shifts of power um amongst, you know, each of these states I’ve mentioned are significant, large, consequential states. Yeah. And I will add here that one of the biggest reasons why you haven’t seen the states that would, you know, gain the most say very much about it, right? So, for instance, you don’t have the chief ministers of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh and Bihar and Rajasthan sort of, you know, building the narrative that their people are getting ripped off and there isn’t one person one vote and they’re sort of losing their voice in Parliament. And the simple reason for that is the states that uh stand to gain the most are also some of the poorest states in India. And they rely heavily on fiscal transfers from the richer states. So, what we really see is some kind of political bargain has been made in the past where it says that India is very fiscally centralized, right? Parliament decides how the money pie or the fiscal pie gets split. So, the larger the voice in Parliament, the more say you have over how to split the fiscal pie, but the money is not getting generated in these states. In fact, these states are net recipients from other states. And it is really Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, who are on the losing side of the seats if we reapportion with current population numbers, who are the biggest sort of contributors to the national kitty or to the fiscal finances. So, this again plays into the politics of it, right? The narrative building has not been a north versus south because that automatically also sheds light on the rich states versus poor states. And if you want to continue taking these transfers, then you have to, in some sense, I guess give up some political voice. Uh but the core of it is not just that the numbers change, it is that it’s the it’s the economics behind the numbers and the economics are simple. The the less developed you are or the later you joined the development party post-liberalization, the later your fertility rates fell, which means the most the more malapportioned you are today based on a census from 55 years ago. And that’s just that’s the simple math of it. We can get into the more complicated math. Yeah, I mean, I think you know, it’s worth maybe saying kind of what are the scenarios that are out there and that people have kind of talked about, right? So, we’ve talked about a couple already. So, one is simply extending the freeze, right? Passing the amendment to the Constitution saying, we don’t want to touch this hot potato. We we deferred this decision from ‘76 to 2001, we deferred it again, and we’re just going to keep deferring it for another 25 years, right? Which is actually maybe not wouldn’t be a surprising outcome in many ways. That’s one. With sorry, just to add that with the caveat that within the states and for SC, ST, and women, they do it based on more recent numbers than 2001. That’s right, right. You can you can delink those two, right? Okay, the second is you move towards some full population-based reapportionment. You could do that with the current size. I’ve kind of given you those numbers. You could also do it with some expanded size, you know, you could take the the the 850 seats the government envisioned in in imagine what the interstate allocation would look like. There’s also a a kind of, you know, one one idea that’s been put forward in the past is kind of what what we call Louis and I and I in this paper kind of moderated expansion. So, like this is what they did, I I believe the principle they followed in the delimitation exercise after the ‘71 census, where they said, okay, we’re going to expand the Lok Sabha just enough to ensure that no single state loses seats, right? So, underrepresented states are going to gain additional seats to bring their representation closer to the population share, but we’re not going to take away any seats from any any state, right? We’re just going to enlarge the pie. So, in in in if you if you kind of use the the the standard, what’s called the Webster method, you use your updated population projections, you kind of do the math, that requires expanding the Lok Sabha to about 775 members. So, smaller somewhat than what the government envisioned, but still obviously 200 plus from what it is today. Now, what are the pros of that approach? Well, one is it’s political, right? No state would lose a a seat. So, um you wouldn’t have to lose seat share. They do, of course, right? No person currently occupying the seat Occupying, exactly, which is important, actually. That’s an important element. which would get thrown out. Um uh the second, I guess, is a little bit of a kind of normative thing, right? Where you’re kind of moving towards population parity without fully resetting the system. So, you do get closer to one person one vote, but it it’s not the sharpest discontinuity, right? Um and, you know, by stopping short of that larger expansion, you you you maybe also kind of avoid some of the unintended consequences of moving to like a really jumbo house with 850 members. I mean, some would say 775 is still pretty jumbo, but um you know what I mean. Now, obviously, the the the downside is what you said, right? Which is that is this really going to satisfy the concerns of southern states? They they want to preserve their the federal influence as it exists today. Um you know, even if they’re not losing seats in absolute terms, certainly the shares would diverge in in relative terms. So, there are another set of options which people have thrown out which are kind of hybrid formulas, right? So, one option is what people have called degressive proportionality, where basically more populous states receive more seats, but with kind of diminishing returns. So, you don’t move you don’t make the adjustment linear with in proportion to the population. Um so, again, that’s kind of a systematic compromise. You could come up with the with a scheme that says, okay, there’s a floor, no no state is going to fall below the floor, but then on top of that, we’re going to move to some kind of proportionality. Um you know, there’s there’s also something which I know has come into discussion in the Finance Commission context, which is let’s use a blended census formula. Rather than going from ‘71 to 2011 or to 2027, whenever the census is done, let’s use some complicated arithmetic to kind of smooth out some of the rough edges. Yeah. Yeah, and but you know, none of them really get to the heart of the problem, I think, even now, which is India in 1976 was a socialist state, but it wasn’t a welfare state in the manner it is today, mainly because it didn’t have the money or the revenues to be a welfare state. India really became a welfare state after 1991, when, you know, state revenue started pouring in and economic growth took off. And a very large part of the reason to be in political power is to be able to redistribute. And a very large part of getting to be in political power is making promises that you or keeping the promises of redistribution in the past. So, if you just look at, you know, what is happening in each state, especially the poorest states. And you know, Arvind and Devesh’s most recent book, A Sixth of Humanity, is fantastic at documenting this at how much we rely on welfare transfers as opposed to building, you know, good old physical and human capital. So, every interest group starts getting a welfare transfer, right? The women are the latest and largest of the interest groups, as you pointed out earlier in the conversation. But to be able to do that, you need money. And to be able to have money, you need economic growth. And it doesn’t look like some of these larger and poorer states have really gotten their act together in in recent times, or even in the last 30 years. So, I still think we need to pay attention to the economics of it, because if we look at the current Finance Commission devolution, and this is not the proposals that we might have, this is literally what the commission says, there are two ways said the report has just been tabled. Exactly. Uh and the Finance Commission has two methods of devolution, one is vertical and one is horizontal, right? Uh so, in terms of vertical devolution of the divisible pool, right? Which is center and the states contribute to a particular divisible pool, and that pool then gets split up between the union and the states, and that’s not equal. The states get about 41% from that divisible pool, and the union gets the remaining. So, that’s one part of the split, but the second part is the horizontal devolution. I get shared by states? Exactly. So, now that 41% how it gets shared by state is based on a kind of weighted average formula, and the weights are poverty and population, right? The two things that basically uh sort of uh stack the odds in favor of the poorer states. Uh and when I say poorer states, I just mean they’re the ones who rely on intergovernmental transfers. So, from the overall kitty and from the richer states, you have basically this movement of revenue going to these poorer states, and it’s going again in proportion of population and poverty, which is exactly what the malapportionment problem was about, too. It was based on population and poverty, because poorer groups saw their fertility rates drop later. So, the whole thing seemed a little too interlinked for us to ignore the economics of it. So, I would put one more proposal on the table, which is today, I think, you know, most countries don’t have states with equal representation in Parliament, right? As states lose population numbers, they they have lower representation, and that seems fair. But in most other federal republics, you don’t have this kind of centralized distribution of finances. So, if you allow more states to keep their finances, if the union state vertical devolution was, you know, uh 90 devolved to the states and 10 left with the union, you would not have the southern states kick off such a big fuss uh because, you know, their people lose, too. Like, you know, I mean, let’s not forget that they also have poorer groups. They also have marginalized groups which suffer from having constituencies delimited from a 55-year-old census and so on. They are the more progressive states. So, I would also want to put that very much on the table, because I feel like if we don’t solve the fiscal bargain in some way, we can’t solve the constitutional bargain, you know, the way in a way that would reflect the principle of one person, one vote. Yeah, I I I mean, I think that’s exactly I think that’s exactly right. Um and you know, it also require without going into too much of the details, right? I mean, that divisible pool that you mentioned, which is essentially the money that then gets divvied up, the union government has also worked assiduously to try and shrink that divisible pool by having cesses and surcharges and other things which go around that. So, you would have to have a kind of cleaning up of of all of that, including maybe increasing the number um So, you know, I I I think you raised the larger point, which is you have four, at least, crosscurrents going on, right? At the same time, and we have been talking about them largely in isolation, including much of this conversation. One is this question of political representation and how that squares with population, right? I mean, that’s a ticking time bomb in some sense. The second is this feeling of resentment around fiscal transfers and, you know, uh rich state puts in so much into the kitty and they only get so much out. It’s unfair cuz we’re subsidizing poorly governed states that can’t get their act together, right? Yeah. That that clearly that sense is building up. The third is the nature of taxation has changed. You now have a unified goods and services tax, right? Which has limited the degree of state autonomy in terms of tax reform, tax innovation, because now you’re all you’ve cast your lot with this with this new system where you don’t have as much autonomy or sovereignty, right? You have a kind of pooled sovereignty where you share tax jurisdiction with the with the with the center. And then the last thing is, of course, the interstate migration, right? Where you see uh a lot of people moving from poorer places to richer places, whether that’s Maharashtra, Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, you know, you name it. Um and that has Now, that has helped the economies of certain states, you could argue, but it’s also put pressure on them in terms of inadequate infrastructure, welfare, transportation, led to a lot of calls for kind of, you know, job reservations for locals, for sons of the soil, quote unquote, and so on and so forth. So, there all of these things, and they’re all inextricably linked. And so, it seems to me that you know, you you were at a moment akin to another people have kind of said this of of a kind of states reorganization commission-like moment, which is not just about state boundaries, but really has to be part of this kind of broader conversation. Yeah, no, I could not agree more. And I think in addition to the GST Council and the splitting of finances and so on, there is another conversation to be had about portability of benefits and what kinds of subsidies we give, right? If most of the subsidies are being given to agriculture, which are highly local and trap people in a particular state, and those benefits are not portable, then what you end up seeing is that the money is leaving the richer southern states, it’s remaining locked and trapped in these poor agrarian regions in the northern states, plus you have, you know, all these uh seasonal workers and so on moving to the southern states. And that’s what causes this kind of NIMBYism. If we fundamentally adjust and make these benefits very portable, maybe the southern states would also feel very differently about who’s coming to their states, right? And Yamini Aiyar has made this point about making, you know, welfare entitlements more portable. Lots of people have talked about this, but that seems another piece of the puzzle where maybe migration will take care of it, but for that we again need to solve the fiscal puzzle. I can Can we just go back for 1 second to something which which I wanted to circle back to? It’s come up a couple times, which is the Rajya Sabha, right? Which I think it is important also in this conversation to think about what the objective of this house is and how to make it a more effective representative of states’ interests, right? I mean, after all, it is meant to be a council of states, and I think most people would agree that is not the way [laughter] that it’s that it’s turned out, right? So, there are things that one could do there. Um number one, right? You could think about, I mean, it’s a radical reform, but changing the composition of the Rajya Sabha to reflect the equality of states Uh rather than Uh their relative size. You take it out of that proportional ball game. Um [snorts] kind of like the US Senate. The downside, uh Madhavan has a has a great piece on this in the Hindu, which is, you know, it you can’t just give each state two, because remember, there are times when you’re going to have a joint sitting of Parliament when all of a sudden you’re going to have a really shrunken Rajya Sabha and potentially a really long Lok Sabha. And you you you know, it’s fine if the Lok Sabha has the upper hand, but it can’t be so out of whack. So, you’d have to think about what that equalizing number would be. No, but even more than just the equalizing number, Milan, I think it’s also we can’t give states equal numbers, because in India, you can just create a state very very easily. We created states by voice vote in the past, right? Which is Article 3. So, we also, if we’re going to go the US Senate way, where we Let’s say we give them 15 seats each to solve the Madhavan problem, uh you still need to adjust how states can be created and destroyed, and we can turn states into union territories, and we have. So, I think those sorts of things also need to be baked into the constitutional design. Sorry, please continue. No, no, totally. Absolutely. And then, you know, uh uh another thing, which again people have talked about, what I think is really important, is there was a 2003 amendment to the representation of the people act, which essentially dispensed with the notion that if you were a Rajya Sabha member, you had to be domiciled in the state that you represent. Now, that had already been hollowed out. I mean, I think famously, uh it was Manmohan Singh was in Assam uh Rajya Sabha MP. Um so, you would have to not just reinstate the domicile requirement, but do something even even stronger, right? Uh One solution to that, it’s indirect, is to say, well, actually, make these people directly elected and make them accountable to you as opposed to just indirectly chosen. Um but there may be other administrative ways of doing it. There’s one final thing to mention and this is actually relates to a question that somebody has asked in the audience, which is about the 10th schedule, right? Which is commonly known as the anti-defection law, which, you know, most people on this call would know is is a is a amendment to the constitution passed in 1985, which just says, in short, that if you are a legislator at the state or national levels and you defy a party whip, which is basically to say you vote in a way that’s contrary to how your party has ordered you to vote, not only can you be kicked out of the party, you can be disqualified from from parliament, right? And so what that has done over time, it’s done many things, but one of the things it’s done is really concentrated power in the hands of party leaders, right? And really taken away agency from ordinary representatives. And so, the question that was asked is, you know, what does it matter if we increase the number of MPs really can’t vote for themselves. And I think that this is particularly an issue in the Rajya Sabha, right? Because if you want it to be reflective of state interest, these people then have to be able to say, “Okay, actually it’s in Rajasthan’s interest or Punjab’s interest or so on and so forth.” And right now, you really can’t do that because you will lose your seat. But you know, the only purpose of being an elected representative is not just voting in parliament and voting your conscience. There’s also a lot of things done on the ground. There are things like MP LAD, which is the money that is dispersed, which is given at a constituent constituency level. It is also about aggregating preferences. So let’s say they’re not voting their conscience in parliament, but if they’re self-interested politicians, at the very least they’re taking the preferences within their constituency to the party, right? So I do think it is important to have better representation notwithstanding the the problems caused by delimitation. But to go back to your Rajya Sabha point, I think the most important reform we need in the Rajya Sabha, and this is a irrespective of the delimitation stuff, is we need to make money bills be required to pass in Rajya Sabha. This is essential, right? Money bills can just bypass Rajya Sabha. And of course, the downstream consequence of that is whenever the government doesn’t have the votes to pass something, they add a budget’s or appropriations element to it and they turn it into a money bill, which is what they did with the Aadhaar bill. Remember, Aadhaar was passed as a money bill, which is a little bit hilarious. But if money bills under Article 109 are not required to be tabled and passed in Rajya Sabha, then we have a very big problem when it comes to the the representation of states when it comes to how we split the fiscal pie for this centralized. I hope you enjoyed that conversation on delimitation with Truth Theory Rajagopalan. I want to thank the Mercatus Center for putting the event together and the Carnegie Communications team, especially Azim Famaletti, Tim Martin, and Cameron Zotter for their technical help. As usual, we’ll see you next week. Grand Tamasha is a co-production of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Hindustan Times. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Don’t forget to rate and review. It helps other people find the show more easily. For more information about the show, to support the work we do on Grand Tamasha, and to find the writing we mentioned on this week’s episode, visit our website grandtamasha.com. 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