The final delimitation commission report on Jammu and Kashmir’s assembly and Lok Sabha seats is out, ending an important hurdle to holding elections in the union territory.
The panel headed by former Supreme Court judge Justice Rangana Prakash held a few meetings with top officials of the Election Commission of India and the J&K chief electoral officer before putting the final report in the public domain.
Sources say apart from accepting suggestions of parties to stick to the original names of constituencies and a bit of tweaking to the boundaries, the panel has stood firm on its initial draft that awarded six of seven new assembly seats to Jammu.
For instance, the Tangmarg assembly seat would be called Gulmarg, Zoonimar as Zadibal, Sonwar as Lal Chowk, Kathua North as Jasrota, and Khour as Chhamb, etc.
The panel has rejected the suggestions, especially from the Valley-based parties that awarding six seats to Jammu and only one to Kashmir despite having more population was not conforming to known parameters.
From the day the first draft was made public, the Kashmir parties had accused the commission of gerrymandering or, simply put, redrawing assembly segments that would benefit one community at the expense of another. The Gupkar Alliance, a forum of J&K’s strong regional parties like the National Conference and Peoples Democratic Party, had alleged that the panel was “converting a geographical majority into a political minority by culling voting constituencies to benefit the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party”.
“All that the panel has done is to ensure that the BJP gets an advantage in the elections. How is it that they have ignored the basic parameter of population to award seats?” Hasnain Masoodi, former senior judge and MP of the National Conference, told News18 recently.
The Gupkar Alliance has been maintaining that the panel has consolidated Hindu votes on one hand and splintered the majority Muslim votes on the other. In some areas, the group alleged, the panel has culled out new Hindu constituencies.
With regard to the Lok Sabha seats, the Valley parties and some social activists in Poonch and Rajouri had earlier criticized the commission for clubbing Poonch district and parts of Rajouri areas with the Anantnag Lok Sabha constituency to make it one entity. They had argued that despite huge connectivity issues between the two regions — each falls on either side of the mighty Pir Panjal mountains which remains snow-covered for five months — the panel went ahead to weld two disparate regions.
The commission had reasoned that adding Poonch and Rajouri to Anantnag was done to streamline all the five Lok Sabha seats on the basis of equitable population and district ratio. For example, the earlier Jammu comprised 10 districts had only two seats while the Valley had three with the same number of districts.
“In our meeting with the panel we had raised this issue only to be told that Lok Sabha seats in both Jammu and Kashmir will now have equal representation and not be lopsided in favor of the Valley,” an NC member told News18.
The Gupkar Alliance had earlier questioned the delimitation exercise, asking why J&K was being singled out for carrying it out when the whole country was anyhow redrawing the constituencies in 2026 as per Supreme Court directions.
The group had also said that since the matter of abrogation of J&K’s special status is in court and would be likely heard in July, the delimitation process should have waited as both issues are interconnected.
“The delimitation commission has become an extension of the BJP. We reject it as we don’t trust it. This is an attempt to disempower the people of Jammu and Kashmir,” said PDP chief Mehbooba Mufti. “What delimitation are you talking about? It has been done to benefit the BJP while flouting basic parameters like population.”
The National Conference reacted a bit more cautiously. “We have seen the final recommendations of the Delimitation Commission. We are studying the implications of these recommendations for individual assembly constituencies. No amount of gerrymandering will change the ground reality which is that whenever elections are held the voter will punish the BJP & its proxies for what they have done to J&K over the last 4 years,” it tweeted.
While the Valley parties, the Congress, and the Jammu-based Panthers Party have expressed unhappiness over the way seats have been redrawn, the BJP is not complaining. It in fact hit out at the detractors, saying they are upset because “they are opposed to the Jammu region getting its due after years of discrimination”.
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