Shruti Rajagopalan and Milan Vaishnav on India's Delimitation Dilemma

Today we are releasing a webinar recording from April 24th where Milan Vaishnav and I had a conversation on delimitation in India. Milan is a senior fellow and the director of the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is also the host of the excellent Grand Tamasha podcast where this recording will be simultaneously released.  We talked about the failure to pass the 131st constitutional amendment bill in Parliament, the government's intention to reapportion and increase the size of the Lok Sabha, the delimitation freeze pegged to the 1971 census that has survived five decades, why the fiscal bargain between states matters as much as the political bargain, and much more. Recorded April 24th, 2026. Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links. Connect with Ideas of India Follow us on X Follow Shruti on X Follow Milan on X Click here for the latest Ideas of India episodes sent straight to your inbox. Timestamps (00:00:00) - Intro (00:01:24) - What is Delimitation? (00:35:03) - The Politics Behind the Constitutional Amendment (00:47:38) - The Political Arithmetic (00:51:53) - The Financial Bargain (01:30:21) - Outro