Delimitation Commission for 4 NE States Illegal: SK Mendiratta

A former legal advisor to the Election Commission SK Mendiratta has termed the Centre's order of setting up a Delimitation Commission for Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Assam, and Nagaland calling it unconstitutional and illegal.

Mendiratta wrote a letter to the three election commissioners last month pointing out that the Law Ministry's notification of March 6 violates the Representation of the People Act 1950.

The letter of Mendiratta reads as, "Section 8A of the RP Act 1950, introduced by Parliament in 2008, states that delimitation in the four northeastern states, when held, would fall within the EC's remit. Hence, any delimitation exercise in Arunachal, Manipur, Assam and Nagaland by the new Delimitation Commission would be "declared void by the courts" and, subsequently, result in "wastage of huge precious public funds."

The four states had been left out of the last delimitation exercise, completed in 2008. According to sources, the EC forwarded Mendiratta's letter to the Law Ministry about two weeks ago.

Delimitation is the act of redrawing boundaries of Lok Sabha and Assembly constituencies to represent changes in population and is done on the basis of the preceding Census.

In the last delimitation exercise, completed in 2008, Arunachal, Manipur, Assam, Nagaland were kept out due to apprehensions over use of the 2001 Census. The Centre's move to club the four with J&K comes in the backdrop of unrest in the region over CAA.

Mendiratta, who left the EC in 2018, is considered an expert on delimitation and had been an adviser with the 2002 Delimitation Commission, set up under Justice Kuldip Singh. Mendiratta had also assisted the EC in delimiting Uttarakhand into 70 constituencies under the UP Reorganisation Act, 2000.

The last delimitation exercise, that started in 2002 and ended in 2008, had kept out Arunachal, Assam, Manipur, and Nagaland as the use of the 2001 Census for it had been challenged by several organizations before the Gauhati High Court, on the ground that it was riddled with defects.

The tribal communities in the four states feared that the delimitation exercise would change the composition of seats reserved for them, hurting their electoral interests. As violence erupted, the Delimitation Act of 2002 was amended on January 14, 2008, to empower the President to postpone the exercise in these states.

Subsequently, Parliament had decided that instead of creating another Delimitation Commission for the limited purpose of redrawing seat boundaries in the four northeastern states, the exercise there would be carried out by the EC. Section 8A of the RP Act 1950 was introduced for this purpose.

Parliament was guided by the fact that there is precedence of the EC being vested with the authority to redraw boundaries of constituencies – including when Delhi was delimited into 70 seats in 1991-92, and Uttarakhand into 70 seats in 2000.