Listen to this article:

While the government failed to garner the majority required to pass The Constitution (One Hundred and Thirty-First. Amendment) Bill, 2026, the debate on delimitation is far from over. With the constitutionally mandated freeze on delimitation set to expire once the figures from the first census taken after 2026 become available, the issue of delimitation must still be addressed with some urgency. However, unless the delimitation debate is rooted properly in its federal context, it risks becoming diverted into a north versus south fight, where regional concerns around economic disparity and identity are somewhat unfairly portrayed as being set against democratic best practices, like voter equality.

To situate the delimitation debate in its proper context, it is important to highlight two aspects of the Indian polity. First, while the Constitution creates unitary citizenship, with citizens interacting directly with the Union through parliament, the strength of regional sentiment on the ground often means voters treat the state as their interlocutor with the Union. This gap – between how the Constitution imagines citizens and how citizens view themselves – creates a divergence in how citizens view concepts like “one vote, one value” and consequently, delimitation.

Second, the centralising impulse contained in the Constitution, which concentrates power at the Union hardens this tendency to view the state as an interlocutor.  Simply put, when power that should logically vest in the state, vests in the Union, representation at the Union becomes a necessity for the smooth functioning of the state.

Constitutional citizenship and regional identity

The Constitution envisages unitary citizenship, where one vote is required to have, as far as possible, the same value across the entire nation. While the Constitution provides for regional political engagement through state and local elections, the national polity and the regional polity are compartmentalised. A citizen is represented in the Lok Sabha through their parliamentary constituency, not their state.

For multiple reasons, both historic and structural, this has never truly percolated into the public imagination. In practice, citizens have continued to see their respective states as their primary polities and the Union as a second, larger polity that they engage with through their states. This redefines what “one vote, one value” comes to mean on the ground. While citizens still value the ideal of everyone, irrespective of gender, caste, religion or creed being entitled to the same vote, with the........

© The Wire