Introduction

Electoral contests are usually viewed in terms of strategies for winning a plurality or majority of votes. These contests can also be waged at the stages of the choice of electoral system and delimitation of constituencies. The latter involves the choice of rules governing delimitation and the demarcation of constituencies under the rules, both of which are susceptible to political interference. The manipulation of demographic data with the objective of influencing delimitation is another possibility.

A stable constitution and an independent judiciary have meant that the basic structure of India's electoral system is very difficult to change. As a result, political manoeuvring has been restricted to delimitation and electoral contests. Interstate delimitation was frozen in the 1970s and will remain so until the first census taken after 2026. The extended suspension of the interstate delimitation, which was aimed at avoiding interstate conflicts, has shifted the locus of redistributive conflicts to sub-state levels of aggregation and opened up space for intercommunity and inter-district contests. The 2002 delimitation that was supposed to redistribute parliamentary and assembly constituencies within states and also redistribute seats between scheduled and non-scheduled communities on the basis of the 2001 Census faced strong opposition in the country's ethnogeographic periphery dominated by the Scheduled Tribes (STs) and religious minorities (Maps 1.2 and 7.4). In Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Jharkhand, Manipur and Nagaland, politically influential communities/ regions forced the postponement of the delimitation until after the first census taken after 2026. In Chhattisgarh, Meghalaya, Sikkim and Uttarakhand, the delimitation criteria had to be relaxed in favour of the indigenous communities. In all these cases, concessions were achieved through constitutional amendments, amendments to delimitation and other relevant legislation or through a departure from the prescribed guidelines at the time of demarcation of constituencies. It is also noteworthy that the government delayed the release of Post-Enumeration Survey (PES) for the 2001 Census ‘to avoid needless political controversies’ while delimitation was in progress (Bose 2008: 16). In other words, it feared that dissatisfied communities/administrative units could demand adjustments based on the errors identified by the PES. Indeed, some of the aggrieved communities demanded that the Delimitation Commission should adjust census population estimates using the PES data (CPO et al. 2003).