Beyond a boundary

The delimitation exercise borders on gerrymandering

Political considerations rather than constitutional proprieties appear to have influenced the delimitation of the Assembly and parliamentary constituencies in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) by the fifth Delimitation Commission, which submitted its recommendations late last week. First, it is unclear why the exercise was undertaken when there was a freeze on the readjustment of parliamentary and Assembly seats in India until 2026. In setting up the fifth Delimitation Commission, the government has chosen to sidestep this restriction by invoking a section of the J&K Reorganisation Act of 2019, which raised the number of seats in Jammu and Kashmir from 83 to 90 (to account for the fact that Ladakh was carved out as a separate Union Territory under this legislation) and sanctioned delimitation under the 2011 census.

This haste is hard to understand. The Act itself, which wrote down J&K’S special status, has been pending in appeal before the Supreme Court for well over a year. Given the multiple constitutional questions that arose during the rapid passage of the law through Parliament with the minimum of debate and without reference to the people of the state, there is a risk that the Act may be overturned. That apart, for a government that passed the law with the ostensible purpose of integrating this troubled northern region with the rest of India, this exceptionalism in redrawing electoral boundaries appears illogical. It is worth noting that the commission’s original mandate covered five states, including those in the Northeast, but these were dropped in early 2020, leaving J&K as the sole unit within its purview.

As a means of restarting a political process in J&K, the delimitation exercise has little to commend itself. So it is no surprise that the commission’s recommendations have been rejected by almost everyone in the Valley, primarily because of the seat distribution both in the Assembly and Lok Sabha. For one, it has retained the old, politically troublesome communal binaries between Jammu and Kashmir by allocating them 43 and 47 seats, respectively. In the Assembly, this new set-up skews the vote shares significantly. Now, Jammu with 44 per cent of the population will vote for 48 per cent of the seats, whereas the Kashmir division with 56 per cent of the population will vote for 52 per cent of the seats. The earlier configuration was better aligned to population share, with Jammu having 44.5 per cent of the seats, and Kashmir 55.4 per cent. The realignments of the parliamentary seats, too, have been problematic with critics viewing the restructuring of the Jammu and Anantnag seats as reducing the influence of the Kashmiri-speaking Muslim voters. All told, such apparent gerrymandering appears to have achieved little beyond sharpening the old identity politics.