Chennai: Tamil Nadu chief minister M K Stalin addressed an all-party meeting in Chennai on Wednesday and warned that the Centre’s plans to carry out delimitation in 2026 will have a negative impact on all southern states. If delimitation is carried out solely on the basis of population, all southern states will see a drop in the number of representatives in both houses of Parliament, he said.
“The sword of delimitation hangs over all our heads. We need to tackle this issue together. Why should a state be made to pay for taking measures to keep population under control? Tamil Nadu will lose a number of MPs if delimitation is done solely on the basis of population,” Stalin said.
The BJP did not attend the meeting, provoking some leaders to claim that the party plans to increase the percentage of representation from Hindi speaking states, in both houses of Parliament, for its own benefit. DMK leaders believe that the representation from the southern states will fall to a meagre 19% from the present 24% if the BJP is allowed to get away with its plan.
This was one of the reasons behind Stalin’s recent clarion call to all Tamils to start ‘producing’ babies. Officials at the Centre have, however, said that the process to be followed for delimitation has not yet been decided. It has also not been decided as yet if the number of MP seats will be increased.
Stalin, however, maintained that even if the number of MP seats from across the country remains at 543, Tamil Nadu still stands to lose 7-8 MPs if population is taken as the main criteria. After all, the population growth in Tamil Nadu and other southern states has been much lower than the northern ones.
“If the number of MPs goes up to 848, then Tamil Nadu stands to get 22 more seats. However, if population is the sole criteria, the state will get only 10 more constituencies. This means that we will lose 12 seats. The Centre is pushing us Tamils towards fighting for our rights yet again,” Stalin said during the meeting
