Defeat of the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill 2026 is being interpreted, variously, as a setback for the cause of increased women's representation, and a success in preventing a brute permanent demographic majority, in Parliament.

The first contention is facetious. Women's Reservation Act 2023 provided for 33% reservation of seats for women in Lok Sabha. Implementation requires allocating a proportionate number of seats to women in the next Lok Sabha. Conflating the women's reservation question with the enlargement of Lok Sabha and delimitation is performative politics.

The second contention begs the question: whose brute majority? India is a parliamentary democracy in which every vote must have equal weight in electing an electoral representative (with a few exceptions like Lakshadweep and Puducherry). This principle has been in abeyance for over 40 yrs now. Allocation of Lok Sabha seats to states is frozen according to the population of these states in 1971.


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As the population in the north and east of India has grown faster than in south India, the former has a larger number of voters per MP, compared to south India, than in 1971. This gulf has grown over time.

Why has this happened? The core problem is divergence between economic and political power. Arvind Subramanian and Devesh Kapur note in their 2025 book, A Sixth of Humanity: Independent India's Development Odyssey, that the peninsular states of India grew as fast as China between 1980 and 2018. This growth was accompanied by a sharp rise in human development. Peninsular India is also the hub of modern manufacturing and services. Per-capita income of Tamil Nadu rivals Indonesia's. Share of manufacturing in the states' output is almost double the all-India figure.

In contrast, UP is poorer than Nepal, and its human development indicators are similar to many poor African countries. At the same time, population growth in the peninsula has been much lower than in north and east India. As a consequence, the minority of India's population that lives in peninsular India is far better off than the majority in north and east India.


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This creates a dissonance between economic prosperity and political power. India is quite singular in this respect. Brazil, Indonesia, the US and the EU all have higher populations residing in richer provinces/countries. Therefore, they are able to subsidise the lower-populated, poorer provinces in perpetuity, creating a reasonably stable political settlement.

But in the Indian case, the lower-populated, richer states are subsidising the higher-populated, poorer states. This tension leads to fears in peninsular states that delimitation would increase the political incentive to force them to subsidise the poorer states perpetually, and increasingly. The current NDA government accentuates these fears by performative actions that appeal to their base - like imposition of Hindi, and sending loudmouth governors to non-NDA southern states.

But this tension cannot be resolved by permanently depriving voters in higher-populated states of their right to an equal vote. It must be addressed at its core. The ruling dispensation has no interest in doing this as it has, so far, repeatedly cashed in on a vote-winning political formula that involves no strategy for increasing inclusive prosperity. Politically, this provides a huge opportunity for the Opposition to offer a credible alternative vision based on economic convergence between richer and poorer regions, to the benefit of all.

Yet, the Opposition chooses not to do this. It continues to play the same negative-sum game of caste-based politics NDA does. It chooses to ameliorate caste, rather than annihilate it, a game at which BJP is much better. It chooses to play competitively lazy politics - offering cash handouts and other incentives as compensation for the failure to improve prosperity, instead of offering a strategy providing merit goods, better-paid jobs and life-transforming economic opportunities that increase inclusive prosperity of all Indians.

In fact, it's the unity between north and south on this bad caste- and compensation-based political settlement that's causing the existential tension reflected in the delimitation debate. If this was broken, and a good caste-annihilating, prosperity-fostering political settlement was proposed, then there would be clearly differentiated value propositions between the ruling constellation and the Opposition.

If the Opposition lost elections on this score, it would still retain hope that its value proposition would gain electoral acceptance, as disillusionment with the tired caste-compensation offer awakens in a younger, aspirationally frustrated electorate.

With this ideological and policy armament, one can propose alternative political arrangements to the current one locked to population in states, and, hence, locked into the politics of caste, ethnicity and compensation. These could include national candidate lists where people voted nationally on an electoral platform, rather than geographically, for national and regional political actors that demonstrated capability for change rather than rent-seeking coteries.

A truly Indian politics of possibility would then make the delimitation question subordinate to the larger question - does India want an obscurantist, caste-ridden, patriarchy-hobbled, mediocre future? Or one in which inclusive prosperity fosters national unity? Alternatively (or simultaneously), a grand bargain could be proposed - one person, one vote could be reintroduced over time, contingent on convergence in economic prosperity between poorer and richer parts of India.

There are other alternatives. But all require political leaders to take national prosperity and inclusion seriously, and eschew the zero-sum politics of caste, religion and region.

The delimitation debate reflects a great tragedy - inability of India's political leadership to rise and offer the least common denominator that elected them a better future, instead of offering them the crumbs of handouts, negative-sum caste and ethnic politics, and dynastic rent-seeking.