Politics Raghavan S Rao Apr 16, 2026 | Updated Apr 17, 2026, 09:47 AM GMT+5:30 Save & read from anywhere! Bookmark stories for easy access on any device or the Swarajya app. When the Modi government tabled bills in April 2026 to expand the Lok Sabha from 543 to 850 seats and implement women’s reservation, southern chief ministers revolted, Congress cried gerrymandering, and the DMK threatened to shut Tamil Nadu down. The charge — that the BJP is redrawing the map to entrench itself — is not frivolous. Delimitation is inherently political: whoever draws the boundaries shapes the outcome. But the debate so far has been entirely about who benefits and who loses. That is the wrong frame. The right frame is to ask what principles a fair delimitation should follow — and to judge the current map, and any proposed replacement, against those principles. Three stand out. One, urban India must get proportional representation. Two, no community should hold a geographic veto over electoral outcomes. And three, boundaries must make sense on the ground, not just on a spreadsheet. India’s existing map fails all three. Spectacularly. Start with the first. India’s constituency boundaries were last allocated in the early 1970s and frozen in 1976 — during the Emergency, by a Congress government ruling by decree with opposition leaders in jail. The stated rationale was that southern states which had controlled population growth should not lose seats to faster-growing northern ones. The unstated reality was that Congress had governed India during all three prior delimitation exercises — 1952, 1963, 1973 — and had won, in 1971, its most commanding mandate: 352 of 518 seats, a two-thirds supermajority built on the map its own commissions had drawn. The freeze ensured that map could never be disturbed. A government that had drawn