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In December last year, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma ordered the merging of recently forged four administrative districts with their parent districts. The controversial decision ahead of a delimitation exercise raised eyebrows and has led to accusations of “gerrymandering” to consolidate the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) power and weaken the influence of Muslim voters in certain constituencies.
Last year’s delimitation in Jammu and Kashmir generated similar controversy after a delimitation commission approved the addition of six new constituencies in Jammu and only one new constituency in Kashmir, even though the population of Kashmir is substantially larger.
In recent years, gerrymandering of Congressional boundaries has given the Republican Party a competitive advantage in elections by weakening the political power of voters from racial and ethnic minority groups who tend to vote for Democrats.
While the concept of gerrymandering can mean many different things to many people, the heart of the idea is that by manipulating the geographic boundaries (eg the shapes) of election constituencies, politicians are able to achieve outcomes that help their personal or political interests.
Critics of the map remarked that the shape of the boundaries looked like a mythological salamander, and coined the map “Gerry’s Salamander.” Since then, “gerrymandering” has become shorthand for the rigging of constituency shapes as a way to achieve power.
In the United States, the practice has become widespread. Every ten years, after the national census is completed, state governments are required by law to revise their congressional and state assembly constituency boundaries so that they are approximately equal in population size and achieve minority representation, among other goals (the precise requirements vary from state to state). This process in the United States is called “redistricting.”
In 2011, the vast majority of these gerrymanders benefited the conservative Republican Party. However, during the last redistricting cycle, which occurred in 2021-2022, the left-of-centre Democratic Party appear to have approved several new gerrymanders.
Gerrymandering occurs almost exclusively in democracies that use single-member districts – that is, when geographic constituencies are assigned one seat each in an assembly. This arrangement often serves the goal of providing local representation in a large and diverse democracy (like India or Canada, for example).
However, it can lead to extreme biases that can help or hurt political parties. Because each consistency only gets one seat, this means that the party that wins the election gets 100% of the seat, while the second-place party gets none.
In the United States, this has happened a number of times in recent years. During the 2012 US House of Representatives election, Democratic candidates won more than a million more votes than Republicans; yet Republicans managed to win a comfortable majority of seats.
Similarly, in the 2018 elections in Wisconsin, Democratic candidates won a clear majority of votes. Nevertheless, Republicans ended up winning five out of the eight congressional seats up for grabs and won large majorities in the state assembly and state senate elections.
In general, people who support Democrats, like college-educated voters and racial and ethnic minorities, tend to live in and around major cities, such as Milwaukee. For this reason, Republicans are able to gerrymander Democrats out of power by “packing” Democratic voters into a small number of districts where they win with very large majorities (eg 70-80%). This ends up “wasting” Democratic votes, so Republicans do better in neighbouring districts.
However, political geography alone is not enough to cause gerrymandering.
However, in recent years, a number of states have changed their laws to take control away from politicians by establishing so-called “independent” commissions, staffed by citizens or judges, to draw the district boundaries. Not surprisingly, these states tend to have much less gerrymandering.
The design of democracy in India is similar in many ways to democracy in the US. Both systems use single-member districts to represent geographic constituencies, and both employ a form of federalism, where power is shared between the national and state/territorial governments.
One critical difference is that, while in the US each state is given the freedom to determine its own legislative boundaries (and often they give politicians the power to do this), in India delimitation is controlled by the Election Commission of India (ECI), which establishes an independent delimitation commission, typically staffed by judges – not politicians.
However, depending on which population data is used, this can lead to dramatically different outcomes. For example, in J&K, the ECI used data from the 2011 census – the most recent results available.
However, in Assam, it will use 2001 population data, which the opposition has charged will lead to an underrepresentation of Muslims, given the rise of the Muslim population in the region in the last two decades. Critiques charge the move is meant to strengthen the power of BJP’s coalition.
As well, the ECI takes into account a region’s geography and administrative districts. This was the justification given for the decision to create six new assembly seats in Jammu (which has a Hindu majority) and only one new assembly seat in Kashmir (which has a Muslim majority), even though the population of Kashmir is larger than that of Jammu.
A similar move was made in December last year when Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma approved an order merging four administrative districts with their parent districts. The timing of this decision raised eyebrows because the districts were only recently created, and because it occurred less than 24 hours before the ECI’s freeze on the redrawing of administrative districts in advance of the delimitation of Assam’s Assembly and Parliamentary constituencies.
In many states in the US, politicians have rigged congressional and state assembly boundaries to give their political party a competitive edge in elections. Both of the two major political parties – the Democratic Party and the Republican Party – are guilty of this practice; however, the Republican Party’s gerrymandering has had the most far-reaching consequences.
By weakening the power of minority voters on election outcomes, gerrymandering reduces their role in the exercise, thus threatening democracy itself.
As the examples of delimitation in J&K and Assam suggest, even though the ECI is less prone to produce gerrymanders because judges (rather than politicians) draw the boundaries, this alone is not enough to eliminate gerrymandering altogether.
This could allow several parties to win some share of seats in an election depending on their vote share. And if smaller constituencies were merged into larger multi-seat constituencies, this would reduce the number of boundaries to be drawn, limiting the effects of gerrymandering.
However, as we have seen in the US, achieving reforms is an uphill battle. This is particularly true when the ruling party stands to lose power if reforms are adopted.
(Alex Keena is an assistant professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in the United States. A PhD from the University of California, Irvine, he has co-authored two books on gerrymandering in the United States. The views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
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Published: 02 Feb 2023,07:03 PM IST