J&K delimitation: Gerrymandering to the extreme

Delimitation is the act of redrawing boundaries of Lok Sabha and Assembly seats to represent changes in population. While this exercise will be conducted post-2026 for the rest of India, it has recently begun in Jammu and Kashmir and is set to be completed in 2022. In this context, there are several concerns that need to be addressed. All of these apprehensions flow from one word -- gerrymandering.

Largely an American expression, gerrymandering refers to the act of manipulating the boundaries of election districts in a way that gives an unfair edge to the ruling party. With Kashmir being India’s only Muslim-majority province, there is a strong suspicion that the BJP government will influence the delimitation process in a way that politically cripples the region’s Muslims. The way to achieve this would be to either reduce the number of Assembly seats in the Muslim-majority areas or to equalise them with the seats in the Hindu-dominated areas.

Let us unpack the underlying issues with the ongoing delimitation exercise in J&K, now a Union Territory, but awaiting its return to being a state. In all parliamentary democracies worldwide, the norm is to demarcate electoral constituencies on the basis of the distribution of population. However, the ruling BJP has demanded that area be introduced as a criterion for consideration. If we dig deeper into this seemingly innocent suggestion, the motive becomes quite clear. The Hindu-majority Jammu area has a geographically larger are, but numerically weaker population than the Muslim-dominated Kashmir Valley. If area is considered as a factor for delimitation, then there would in effect be more seats for the Hindu-dominated area vis-a-vis the Muslim regions. This would increase the possibility of installing a Hindu chief minister in the state as a significant percentage of the BJP’s voter base consists of Hindu voters.

One could probably turn a Nelson’s eye to such deceptive moves if the BJP were at least consistent in its demands. On the contrary, we see that it has insisted that population as recorded in the 2011 census be the basis for drawing the boundaries of constituencies in areas where the Hindu population is numerically stronger. This is despite BJP politician Sunil Sharma boldly claiming that the 2011 census was ‘lopsided’.

The standard manipulation techniques used by parties intending to gerrymander electoral districts are ‘packing’ and ‘cracking’. ‘Packing’ refers to concentrating the bulk of the opposing party’s voters into a few districts where the opposing party has a stronger hold. In contrast to this, ‘cracking’ means dispersing the opposition’s voters into several districts, effectively reducing them to a permanent minority in those districts. Usually, political parties aim to create more ‘cracked’ than ‘packed’ electoral districts so that they can have a better chance at winning the election and gaining control of the legislative body.

However, what the BJP is doing in J&K is different, in the sense that we see the phenomenon of ‘cracking’ in almost every district, whereas ‘packing’ is largely absent. In effect, the BJP is trying to ensure that Muslims are reduced to a political minority in every electoral constituency and that the Hindus emerge as the majority. This is the most extreme method of approaching gerrymandering, and can almost certainly guarantee the BJP a landslide victory in the upcoming elections.

Given the lack of Indian jurisprudence in this regard, the US Supreme Court’s decision in Shaw vs Reno immediately comes to mind in this situation. There, the court held that if the redistricting of an electoral map is so bizarre that one cannot explain it on grounds other than race, then the same is violative of the right to equality of the citizens.

Delimiting constituencies on the basis of religion in India is the equivalent of race-based gerrymandering in the US. The question that needs to be asked is, whether there is any way to stop the production of such gerrymandered maps.

The fix to this increasingly apparent issue in India would be to introduce a central legislation that enhances transparency, bans partisan gerrymandering, and introduces the possibility of votes challenging gerrymandered maps in courts. This is exactly what a proposed piece of legislation in the US seeks to achieve. However, it is unrealistic to expect this to happen in India given that it is the BJP that is ruling at the Centre and has a brute majority in Parliament.

Hence, a temporary solution can be found in the world of computing. Mathematicians are developing algorithms that can assess the manipulation component of an electoral map. Democratising this technology and placing it in the hands of the citizens might be the most effective way to counter gerrymandering threats. Till then, Narendra Modi’s BJP will continue with its goal of electorally engineering J&K behind the constitutionally valid facade of delimitation, and electoral constituencies will continue to look like images used for the Rorschach test.

(The writer is a student at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR), Hyderabad)