CONSTITUTIONAL CLOCKS THAT JUST STARTED TICKING

The 131st amendment was imperfect. But the constitutional mechanisms on seat allocation and women’s reservation that will now automatically unfold will not help states that checked population rise

- K B S SIDHU

THE failure of the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill to garner the requisite two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha, and the consequential withdrawal of the Delimitation Bill and Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill, are being celebrated in some quarters as a victory for fairer federalism. It is nothing of the sort. On careful constitutional reading, it is the beginning of a process far more disruptive than the passage of the Bills would have been. The public debate has been charged with rhetoric. What will actually unfold has found little mention.

Some constitutional history is essential. The current Lok Sabha seat allocation—39 for Tamil Nadu, 20 for Kerala, 28 for Karnataka, 25 each for Andhra Pradesh and Rajasthan, 80 for Uttar Pradesh—is derived from the 1971 census. The Constitution (42nd Amendment) Act, 1976 froze the allocation of Lok Sabha seats on the basis of 1971 population figures. The Constitution (84th Amendment) Act, 2001 extended that freeze— keeping every state’s proportional share as it was in 1971—until the relevant figures for the first census taken after the year 2026 are published. The Kuldip Singh Delimitation Commission, constituted in 2002, worked entirely within this mandate. It redrew the internal boundaries of Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha constituencies using 2001 census figures, but was constitutionally prohibited from altering a state’s seat total.