The Telangana Legislative Assembly on Thursday adopted a resolution asserting that population should not be the sole yardstick for the delimitation of Lok Sabha constituencies, with Chief Minister A Revanth Reddy claiming such a criteria could lead to a six per cent drop in the representation of southern states in the Lok Sabha seats.
Moving the resolution, he said the representation of southern states in LS seats could fall from 24 per cent to 19 per cent if delimitation is carried out on a population basis.
Without naming the BJP, he alleged that the party in power at the Centre is trying to create a situation of making southern states irrelevant in formation of the Central government by reducing their representation in the Lok Sabha seats.
He appealed to the parties in Telangana to jointly speak to the Centre to safeguard the state’s interests.
“If the Centre is on the same page (to our cause) fine, otherwise, we need to build a struggle,” he said.
Revanth Reddy appealed to the chief ministers of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Karnataka to attend the meeting of political parties and people’s organisations to be organised by his government soon on delimitation.
The participants of the meeting should join forces in resolving the issues with the Centre, he said.
The comments of some union ministers that the Centre has not taken up the delimitation issue is only half true. Though the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014 spoke about increasing the number of constituencies in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, the Centre had said it would take up the delimitation of constituencies only after the 2026 Census, he said.
The Centre, however, carried out delimitation of constituencies in Jammu and Kashmir on population basis and also in Sikkim, the CM said.
He alleged that Telangana and other southern states are not getting funds from the Centre proportionate to the taxes paid by them, while states like Bihar and Uttar Pradesh get more than what they do.
The resolution said that the states which have effectively implemented the population control programme pushed by the Centre, and consequently whose population share has come down, should not be penalised. Therefore, population should not be the sole yardstick for delimitation, it said.
“It is to be noted that the purpose and intent behind the 42nd, 84th and 87th Constitutional amendments aimed at national population stabilisation are yet to be achieved,” it said.
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Hence, while continuing with the freeze on the number of parliamentary seats, taking state as a unit, redrawing the boundaries of parliamentary constituencies can be taken up, duly augmenting the SC and ST seats as per latest population and also providing reservation for women, it said.
The resolution also sought increasing the number of seats in the State Assembly from 119 to 153 as per the AP Reorganisation Act and as per latest Census. The Centre should introduce necessary constitutional amendments for the purpose, it said.
Speaker Gaddam Prasad Kumar announced that the resolution was adopted.
Revanth Reddy, who attended the meeting on delimitation convened recently by his Tamil Nadu counterpart M K Stalin in Chennai, had alleged that south India would lose its political voice if the NDA government at the Centre carried out delimitation on the population basis.
The political parties and leaders of south must oppose any such move, he said.
He then proposed holding the next meeting of southern states and Punjab in Hyderabad.
On March 22, the Stalin-led meeting had asserted that the proposed delimitation exercise based on population would not be “fair” to southern states and demanded that the Centre should extend the freeze on Parliamentary constituencies, based on the 1971 Census population, by another 25 years. It had decided to submit a joint representation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the ongoing Parliamentary session
