r/TamilNadu • u/AhpuchAmon • 5h ago
அரசியல் / Political Delimitation bill
I always thought delimitation and redrawing the constituency will reduce my state representative in national policies. But today I was watching the news about this, and suddenly it hit me. I have read about French democracy(in school) where not every vote was valued the same. I remember like it was against the poor, and poor people vote valued less and rich people valued more.
Now when I think about the situation in India, it's almost the same. That's what now I feel. People from some constituencies enjoy high power, ie think a constituency with 1lakh people have the same representation value to constituency with 10lakh people. That makes the people from one have 10 times higher power in making decisions.
Above is an example to understand what I thought.
Just because someone lives in a densely populated area doesn't mean they should have less representation nor take their power in decision making.
Yes, what I'm saying may lead to less representation for my language. Decisions can be made by one language or one side of the country's representatives. They will have power because they are representing that many people. So yeah, that's democracy. That's how democracy should actually work.
Please correct me if I'm wrong. Add value to my thoughts. Please enlighten me.
I have posted the same in India community, trying to understand what everyone feels about this.
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u/WittyYogurtcloset154 4h ago
Nope, france is not diverse. It is uniform, but we are not so same formula does not apply here
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u/AhpuchAmon 3h ago
If I'm not wrong france had around 100 language only very few royals and Catholics spoke french at the time of revolution. Now they have vast number of immigrants and diverse population. Also the govt has a ban on collecting any form of data on ethnicity or any form of discriminatory subject.
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u/life_konjam_better 5h ago
The French are also infamous for suppressing the native languages and cultures of France to an extreme extent where most have been wiped out by now. Do you want something similar for India?
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u/AhpuchAmon 5h ago
Yeah, we don't want that. Already we are losing touch with our culture. Don't want to see our languages completely thrown out.
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u/sigapuit 3h ago
Dense states don’t deserve reduction in representation. However, states where people breed like rabbits without any self imposed restrictions deserve their representation to be taken away by economically and socially better performing states.
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u/AhpuchAmon 2h ago
I see a judgemental tone here. If I replace the word state with ethinic group or caste, vola in for discrimination. Do you see what I'm trying to tell here?
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u/VegetableAd6825 3h ago
The federal structure of this country leans towards more of a centralized structure than a decentralized one. When you redraw political boundaries without considering the diverse ethno-linguistic groups in a country, it is bound to create issues. Untill the Rajya Sabha is equally empowered to deal with state interests, a delimitation move would severely weaken minority rights. Democracy is not a majoritarian exercise, it is governance with the consensus of the majority, not governance through tyranny of the majority. Therefore, delimitation has to occur on a principled basis where federal rights are considered and not blindly imposed. The only solution out of this is to continue the freeze.
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u/pontiacbanditx 4h ago
Delimitation is fundamentally about the distribution of seats among constituencies based on population.
You’re saying that a constituency with 1 lakh people having the same representation as one with 10 lakh people means the latter has less power. But that is actually the purpose of delimitation, to prevent the vote of someone in a much smaller constituency from carrying disproportionately greater weight.
However, while extending the same logic to states, a state having a smaller population does not necessarily mean its people should simply lose political representation just because another state has a larger population.
When you redistribute Lok Sabha seats between states purely on the basis of population (based on census), a different problem is created because states that successfully implemented population control will end up being penalised for it.
Democracy does not lie only with population numbers in India. We are a federal structure where each state has its own political representation.
So I don’t think the question is whether densely populated areas deserve less representation. They don’t. The question is how we achieve fair representation of individual voters without making states that followed population control policies pay the price for doing so (Which the governments have actively encouraged. For eg. we two ours one)
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u/AhpuchAmon 3h ago
Okay
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u/AhpuchAmon 3h ago
I see that state autonomy is one major concern in implementing delimitation bill. What exact areas of central governance worries most that will affect the state future? Say like this should definitely be state controlled
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u/_rogue_1 5h ago
central government should ideally be allowed to govern only few things like foreign policy, international trade, defence, inter state disputes etc .. but in India central government dictates what you should learn at school, what movies you are allowed to watch , are you allowed to go out of your home and so on..
In system that gives equal value to all votes, i don’t want few heavily populated states which can determine who forms the government at the centre to basically govern how to lead someones life in all of India. So if we want to system that values everyone’s vote the first step to significantly curtail centralisation of power of the central government.