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This is the full speech delivered by former chief election commissioner S.Y. Qureshi on delimitation and the future of the Indian Union at the 41st Puchalapalli Sundaraiah Memorial Lecture, Hyderabad. 

It is always a pleasure to be in Hyderabad. Few cities capture the idea of India better than this one. Hyderabad has never believed in rigid compartments. It comfortably carries North and South, Urdu and Telugu, biryani and technology, old-world grace and global ambition, all at the same time.

It is a particular honour to deliver the 41st memorial lecture in the name of Comrade Puchalapalli Sundaraiah — founding leader of the Communist Party of India, parliamentarian, and one of the most principled voices for the rights of ordinary Indians that this country has produced. Sundaraiah understood that democracy is not merely about elections. It is about whether the structures of power genuinely serve the powerless. He fought for linguistic reorganisation, for federal equity, for the dignity of those whom the system had left behind. The question I place before you today — how India balances democratic equality with federal fairness — is one that Sundaraiah would have engaged with passion and rigour. I hope this lecture does some justice to that tradition.

Hyderabad is the ideal place to discuss what may soon become the most sensitive question in Indian federalism: delimitation.

Until recently, delimitation sounded like the sort of topic guaranteed to empty a conference hall in ten minutes. It belonged to constitutional lawyers, retired bureaucrats and election officials like me. Suddenly, it has become politically explosive – discussed in legislative assemblies, television studios, academic seminars, and increasingly, in ordinary conversations across southern India.

Because several southern states fear that success itself may become a political disadvantage. States that invested early in education, healthcare and population stabilisation now worry they may lose influence in Parliament precisely because they implemented national goals. That is a paradox worthy of serious national attention.

At the same time, northern states ask an equally legitimate question: how long can India rely on population figures from another era? Can a democracy of 1.4 billion people base its parliamentary arithmetic on a census conducted when its population was barely 548 million?

Both arguments carry democratic legitimacy. That is why delimitation is not merely a technical exercise. It is about the future balance of the Indian Union.

This should not become a North-versus-South confrontation. That framing is dangerous and reductive. Every large federation faces tensions between demographic change and political balance. India has faced this dilemma for half a century, and has so far managed it with considerable wisdom.

Many Indians do not realise that our parliamentary map is still based on the 1971 Census. The inter-state distribution of Lok Sabha seats has effectively remained frozen since 1976. This was not an accident. It was a conscious political and moral decision.

India recognised that if representation were tied strictly to population growth, states that controlled fertility would be punished politically. So parliament froze redistribution first until 2001, then through the 84th Constitutional Amendment extended the freeze until “the first Census taken after the year 2026.”

That constitutional moment is now approaching rapidly.

The next Census, expected in 2027, will trigger the most consequential redistribution of political power since Independence. When this freeze began, India’s population was around 548 million. Today we are approaching 1.5 billion. Yet representation still rests on the arithmetic of another India – an India........

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