Using area as a criteria for delimitation will have anarchic implications not just in J & K but within Jammu region and across the country.
Haseeb A. Drabu
K B Jandial, the veteran spin doctor for many Governments in the past has reiterated the well-known Jammu viewpoint on the delimitation of constituencies (Will Delimitation Panel end Jammu’s Political Disempowerment? Daily Excelsior, 8th July, 2021). He has, however, gone further and suggested the Commission examine a “solution”proposed by “three enterprising advocates, Khajuria – Sumer, Anil and Sunil,” of Jammu to end the perceived discrimination in legislative representation of Jammu.
To be fair, Jandial has stopped short of endorsing the so called “solution”. Having been a bureaucrat, he is trained to hedge his bets. But more importantly, having been a part of the system for three decades and more, he knows better. Certainly better than the three advocates whose proposal he deems worthy of serious consideration.
The core of their solution is simple to the point of being simple minded: use area as a criteria to delimit constituencies. Presto! The perceived imbalance and injustice with Jammu will be redressed. This is not the first time that area as a criteria for delimitation has emanated from Jammu; nor will it be last. For a contrary view, read my four part series on delimitation published in Greater Kashmir in April 2019.
Setting aside for a moment the mundane matters of principles, practice and policy of delimitation across the world and in the country, let us examine the implication of using area as a criteria on the existing and future representative structure in J&K.
In the J&K prior to August 5th, 2019, how would the constituencies have been distributed across the three provinces had area been used as the sole criteria? The number of constituencies in Kashmir province would reduce from 46 to 14. The number for Jammu Province would have declined from 37 to 22 seats, while Ladakh would have had 51 instead of 4 seats!
But all that is history now. So why bother with what was. Let us look at what is. As a Union Territory, the area of J&K has now shrunk to 61,849 sq kilometres. Of this, 62 per cent is Jammu province and 38 per cent is Kashmir province. Out of the 90 seats now allocated to the legislative assembly, if area is the sole criteria, then 56 seats will go to Jammu and 34 seat will go to Kashmir Province. This is the one part of the solution that Jandial wants the Delimitation Commission to frame its recommendations in.
So be it! But, should it end there.
It might be instructive to go further down this “area-based-allocation” line of reasoning. If area as the criteria is applied to the whole of the UT, then it has to be applied to the regions within Jammu Province also. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
The geography of Jammu is a mix of the Ravi-TawiKandi plains, Sivalik and Pir-Panchal mountains, and the Chenab valley. These distinctive terrains of topography, also overlap with the religious, ethnic and linguistic affiliations of their inhabitants.Using area as a criteria for apportioning seats 56 seats within Jammu Province will result in the existing 21 out of 37 seats for Jammu plains being reduced to 18 out of 56. Chenab, which had 9 assembly segments out of 37, will now get 29 out of 56 while Pir Panchal will gain 2 seats.Let alone making any political, governance or administrative sense, does this distribution make any practical sense?
To drill down deeper, what does using area as a criteria, mean for the cardinal non-negotiable principle of electoral representation of “one man one vote”. Here, look at how this principle get mauled if area criteria is used.
In the last assembly elections, an average of about 1,45,000 people would elect their representative from Jammu plains and a lower number of 1,02,000 people from Chenab would elect theirs. Now, were area to be the basis, only 32,000 people will elect their MLA in Chenab while in Jammu plains 1,85,000 people will choose one MLA. What this means is that the one person of Chenab is electorally equal to six people from the Jammu plains! This will be the new model of political empowerment for Jammu and its people. A Jammu voter will, it axiomatically follows, have one sixth the electoral influence of his Chenab counterpart. Not even 1 per cent of this anomaly has existed in J&K so far.
So the cure suggested by the three wise legal minds is worse than the disease.
Jandial and company have made much about the fact that Jammu constituencies have a higher average of people whereas Kashmir has less. Even though there is a difference, not only is it marginal, it is also well within the stipulated global tolerance levels. In any case, even if the voter per constituency is higher in Jammu than in Kashmir, is this situation unique to Jammu Province? Let us look around in the country.
Jodhpur, which is the largest administrative division by area in Rajasthan accounting for 34 per cent of the state area, it has only 16 per cent share in the legislative assembly; 32 MLAs out of 200. Another example is Kutch in Gujarat. It accounts for 21 per cent of the total area of state, but has just 3 per cent representation in the Gujarat Assembly. On the other hand, Central Gujarat which accounts for 17 per cent of the area of the state has 31 per cent share in MLAs.
Compared to the distribution of seat across all states in India – we have given just two examples – Jammu having 26 per cent of erstwhile J&K’s area had 42.5 per cent of the seats in the legislative assembly of the state. And that has been presented as discrimination.
Nationally too, on the basis of the projections made by the Technical Group on Population, the Gangetic MP, what will represent close to 3 million people even as other MPs represent 2.3 million people. In puritan terms of ‘one person, one vote’, this presents a dichotomy far more serious than the situation in J&K. As such, the criteria that will be adopted by the Delimitation Commission for J&K will have repercussions all over the country.
It should be obvious to anyone that using area as a criteria is not just empiricallyimpractical, but also theoretically untenable. First, using area as a criteria violates the basic concept of representation since MLAs represent people even as they are from a particular place. It is common sense that the legislative assembly is a house of representatives of the people who live in different part of the state and not land per se. The basic idea of delimitation is to ensure equal “representation of people”.
Second, by way precedents, area as a basis of delimitation flies in the face of all established national and international practices. All over the country, indeed, the world over delimitation or a reapportionment of the seats in the legislatures is only based on the population census.
Technically speaking, area is a cartographic consideration, as clearly laid out in Section 60, Clause 2, sub-clause (b) of the J&K Reorganisation Act, 2019 but not the criteria for allocation and apportionment of people’s representatives.
Perhaps realising this, the three advocates who have authored the solution which Jandial has propagated, have added the concept of electorates and backwardness to tone down the anomalous results for representation.Even these two criteria are suspect. Again, delimitation is not meant to be a policy intervention for redressing developmental imbalances. That is the role of economic, development and public expenditure policy. As regards use of the norm of electors will entail a change in the Representation of Peoples Act 1950 which sets the framework for democratic representation. Besides, there can be many reasons for the electors to population ration being different; these may range from administrative bias to the stage of demographic transition. As such it can’t be the basis of delimitation.
While the concerns of “hard areas” is genuine, the way to resolve it is to invoke the concept of density of population, which is a product of population and area. It could be used as a weight, in a statistical sense, to give additional importance to less represented regions that have large geographical area.
Tail piece:
In their understandable zeal to get more constituencies for Jammu, the three advocates have not only used data like a drunk man uses a lamp post — more for support than for illumination — but have also committed a serious statistical sin. They have combined two normal distribution variables with a highly asymmetric variable and calculated the average based on the mean. This gives Jammu the edge in the number of constituencies, 46 as against 44 seats for the Valley. Obviously the asymmetric variable, which is area, distorts the mean. It is school standard statistics that in such cases median works better than the mean for calculating the average. When the more robust statistical method of median is used, the distribution of constituencies from their own data throws up only 42 seats for Jammu and 48 for Kashmir. More than suggesting that this should be the distribution, what this points to is the fragility of the data and fickleness of the methods used by the three advocates.
(The author is former Finance Minister of Jammu and Kashmir)
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