5 Assam minority bastions now reserved SC/ST seats | India News – Times of India

GUWAHATI: Assam‘s first delimitation exercise since 1976 culminated Friday with the Election Commission notifying the redrawn geographical boundaries of 14 Lok Sabha and 126 assembly constituencies along with paired or new identities for some of them, including a Lok Sabha seat (Kaziranga) and an assembly segment (Manas) each named after the state’s two tiger-rich Unesco World Heritage sites.

Five assembly constituencies that have always elected legislators from the minority community have now been reserved for SCs and STs. This takes the total number of seats for STs from 16 to 19, and those for SCs from six to eight.
Chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma had been maintaining all along that the delimitation exercise would ensure that the political rights of indigenous communities were protected. Delimitation on the basis of the 2001 census had been one of BJP‘s poll promises before the 2021 vote that gave the saffron party a second consecutive mandate.

Congress MP Gaurav Gogoi tweeted, “EC publishes delimitation of Assam in 2023, based on 22-year-old census. Hence, no benefit to Assam in terms of increase in Lok Sabha seats. The result is a reorganisation of existing seats to suit BJP voting trends. No wonder BJP doesn’t want the CJI to select ECs.”
The EC’s seal on the draft came after exhaustive consultations with stakeholders, including three days of public hearings in Guwahati last month. The EC said it received conflicting representations from the public, political parties and organisations on the proposed changes in the nomenclature of some parliamentary and assembly constituencies to highlight their historical, cultural, political and ethnic significance.
Appreciating the fact that different groups presented these conflicting views “in a respectful and friendly manner, without creating confrontations or hostility”, the poll panel said a decision was taken to revise the names of 19 assembly constituencies and one Lok Sabha seat.
A second Lok Sabha seat and a few assembly constituencies were given paired names such as Darrang-Udalgiri, Hajo-Sualkuchi, Boko-Chaygaon, Nagaon-Batadraba, Bhowanipur-Sorbhog and Algapur-Katlichera in keeping with public sentiments, the poll panel said.
The idea was to keep all constituencies as geographically compact as possible, taking into account physical features, density of population, existing boundaries of administrative units, communication infrastructure, and public convenience.
The poll panel said that while some districts had shown significant population growth since the last delimitation, there were also those with less increase in numbers than expected.