‘Gerrymandering’ in India’s Assam cuts Muslim representation before vote

When elections are around, Islam Uddin takes it upon himself to raise awareness about the importance of casting votes. The 55-year-old retired teacher from Katigorah, an electoral constituency in India’s northeastern state of Assam that lies on the border with Bangladesh, goes door-to-door to urge other Muslims to vote.

“It’s about sending our representative to speak for us,” Uddin told Al Jazeera, his smile widening.But as Assam goes to the polls on April 9 to choose a new government after five years, Uddin’s excitement is clouded by a constant worry: Will his efforts even matter?

Following a 2023 order from the Election Commission of India to redraw the boundaries of parliamentary and state legislature constituencies in Assam, the electoral math of Katigorah – bordered by the ancient Borail hills to the north and the Barak River to the south – has dramatically changed.

The constituency’s population was previously split almost equally between Hindus and Muslims. Of the state’s main parties, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party – which also rules Assam state – would pick a Hindu candidate. The opposition Congress would often choose a Muslim candidate, as would the All India United Democratic Front, the state’s third largest party, which counts Bengali-speaking Muslims among its key voters.

Now that balance has been upended.

Before delimitation – the process of redrawing constituency boundaries is called – Katigorah had about 1,74,000 voters. “But about 40,000 Hindu voters from the neighbouring legislative constituencies have now been merged with Katigorah, making it a predominantly Hindu majority constituency,” Khalil Uddin Mazumder, former Katigorah legislator from the Congress party, told Al Jazeera. “The chances of electing a Muslim candidate from here have suffered significantly.”
Indeed, major parties have chosen Hindu candidates for Katigorah. But the constituency is not alone. Across the state’s 126 legislative constituencies, borders have been redrawn in a way that – activists like Uddin fear – could politically marginalise Assam’s 11 million Muslims further at a time when the ruling BJP has already targeted them through eviction drives, expulsion policies and vitriolic rhetoric.

Muslims constitute more than 34 percent of Assam’s population – only Jammu and Kashmir, and the island of Lakshadweep have higher proportions of Muslims, and neither is a full-fledged state, unlike Assam.

To many political analysts, Assam is the latest laboratory of the BJP’s Hindu majoritarian policies. What works in the state could offer a template for the rest of India.
‘Communal gerrymandering’
Prominent poll analyst Yogendra Yadav, writing in The Indian Express newspaper, referred to the Assam model of delimitation as “communal gerrymandering”, likening it to 18th-century United States racial gerrymandering, where electoral boundaries were manipulated or redrawn to favour a dominant group or diminish marginalised groups’ electoral influence.

In Assam’s context, gerrymandering weakens the electoral influence of Muslims, Yadav argued, by deploying techniques borrowed from the US: Cracking, packing, and stacking. “Cracking” refers to the fragmentation of Muslim voters across multiple Hindu majority constituencies, therefore minimising their chance to form a majority in constituencies. In the case of “packing”, multiple Muslim-dominated pockets – which could have dominated several constituencies – were clubbed into a single seat to reduce the number of constituencies that Muslim candidates can viably win.

In parallel, Hindu population centres that were not each capable of forming a majority in a constituency were merged under a single constituency to give the community that majority. That is what Yadav described as “stacking”. The net result: Muslims formed the majority in about 35 of the state’s 126 constituencies before delimitation. That number is now down to about 20, say opposition leaders and experts.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Suprakash Talukdar, the state’s secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), said: “Hindu areas from far-flung Muslim-dominated seats were merged into constituencies with mixed populations, while Muslims from majority seats were dispersed into Hindu-majority areas.”