Explained | Assam’s delimitation test

The story so far: On June 20, the Election Commission (EC) released a draft proposal on the delimitation of the Assembly and Lok Sabha constituencies in Assam. The number of Assembly and Parliamentary seats remains unchanged at 126 and 14 but many constituencies were proposed to be reshaped and the number of reserved seats has been increased. This has led to a churning among various organisations and political parties, including the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its allies, with the fortunes of many MLAs likely to be affected.

Delimitation is the process of redrawing boundaries of Lok Sabha and State Assembly constituencies based on a recent Census to ensure each seat has an almost equal number of voters. It is ideally carried out every few years after a Census by an independent Delimitation Commission formed under the provisions of the Delimitation Commission Act. Such panels were set up in 1952, 1962, and 1972 before the exercise was suspended in 1976 due to the family planning programme. Before the exercise of the next panel could be completed in 2008, the delimitation of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Jammu and Kashmir, Manipur, and Nagaland was deferred due to “security risks” through presidential orders. In the case of Assam, many entities including the BJP wanted the delimitation done only after the National Register of Citizens (NRC) was updated to weed out “illegal immigrants”. The Centre reconstituted the Delimitation Commission for the four north-eastern States and the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir on March 6, 2020. The EC notified the initiation of Assam’s delimitation on December 27, 2022, following which four districts were re-merged with the ones they were carved out of.