Members of Parliament from southern states have argued, with genuine democratic force, that delimitation of Lok Sabha constituencies based on current population data would penalise states. The Union government has responded in kind. Both sides have invoked the sanctity of the one-citizen-one-value principle with conviction. And both sides, in doing so, have revealed the full extent of their selective commitment to it. Neither has acknowledged the three systematic violations of the same principle at the grassroots level.

The first violation: Merging villages without consent

Across India, gram panchayats — constitutionally elected, locally accountable, the institutional embodiment of community self-governance — are being absorbed into urban local bodies. This is happening by executive notification, without public hearing, without gram sabha resolution, and without any independent assessment of whether the merger serves the interests of the affected community.

The legal architecture governing such mergers is conspicuously permissive. State municipal laws vest the power of territorial expansion entirely in the state government. A village that has existed as an autonomous self-governing unit for generations can be dissolved into a city corporation by gazette notification. The gram sabha — the assembly of every adult voter in the village, recognised by the Constitution as democracy’s most direct expression — has no legally enforceable right to be consulted, let alone to consent or refuse.

The consequences are immediate and severe. Property taxes rise sharply. Village common lands, previously under panchayat stewardship, become vulnerable to reclassification and diversion. The responsive, community-rooted governance of a panchayat is replaced by the remote administration of a city corporation where the former village is one ward among hundreds. Most critically, the political value of the village citizen’s vote — already one among millions in state and national elections — is further diminished in an urban body where their specific interests register as statistical noise.

This is the parliamentary delimitation grievance translated to the village level, enacted daily, without the national outrage. The political weight of a community is being redrawn without process, without consent, and in ways that serve administrative convenience and real estate interests rather than democratic principle.

The second violation: Wards drawn by political arithmetic

Within existing urban local bodies, the creation and redrawing of municipal wards — the fundamental unit of urban democratic representation — has become in many states an openly political exercise. 

Ward boundaries are drawn and redrawn to serve incumbents, to fragment communities........

© The News Minute