IN the first part of this analysis, we traced the trajectory of hollowing of India's constitutional institutions including the Election Commission, the anti-defection law, the judiciary's countervailing role, the conventions of federalism. Each instrument of democratic accountability has been bent, bypassed, or broken. That, however, was only the scaffolding. In this second part we try to highlight what is being constructed on that scaffolding.

Many might perceive the idea of Hindu Rashtra as some distant aspiration reserved for shakha mornings. In reality, it is an ongoing project of legal, electoral, and territorial engineering pursued and materialised through legislation that says one thing and does another. This idea is pushed and normalised through administrative exercises hidden under the clothes of housekeeping while they perform the work of demographic sorting. Most importantly, it is also being established through a sustained assault on the constitutional firewall that alone stands between a secular republic and an open theocratic order. We must look at the functioning of these instruments in tandem with each other.

THE WOMEN'S RESERVATION BILL: A TROJAN HORSE FOR DELIMITATION

Let us begin with the Constitution (One Hundred and Sixth Amendment) Act of 2023, the so-called Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam. Its passage was celebrated across party lines, with 454 votes in the Lok Sabha and unanimous support in the Rajya Sabha.

What now demands to be stated plainly is the fact that the Act, as written, does not reserve a single seat for women until delimitation is completed, and no delimitation can occur until a census has been conducted and its data published. Home Minister Amit Shah, during the debate, confirmed that the census and delimitation would take place only after the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. The government did not even volunteer to the House that the 2021 Census has already been indefinitely postponed.

In April 2026, the government introduced three Bills – the Constitution (131st Amendment) Bill, the Delimitation Bill, 2026, and the Union Territories Laws (Amendment) Bill – which together increase the maximum strength of the Lok Sabha from 550 to 850 seats and proposed to conduct delimitation on the basis of the 2011 Census, since the 2021 Census remains incomplete. This time, women’s reservation was offered as the sweetener. Chief Ministers from the southern part of the country including CPI(M) Polit Bureau member Com Pinarayi Vijayan, M K Stalin, Siddaramaiah, and Revanth Reddy – raised their concerns against this exercise and against its timings, fearing that states which successfully implemented population control measures will face reduced representation in Parliament and will be penalised for their own developmental achievements.

Delimitation based on a population data which is skewed towards the high-growth Hindi heartland will permanently restructure the arithmetic of Parliament. It will transfer the political weight from southern and eastern India, which controlled their populations, to the BJP's core electoral geography. Using women’s reservation as the bill of lading, BJP is trying to ship the cargo of delimitation under it.

The political use of delimitation for electoral benefits by BJP is not hidden from anyone. However, what has not received commensurate attention is the more precise surgical instrument of gerrymandering that operates within it. It is the deliberate redrawing of constituency boundaries to engineer predetermined electoral outcomes. Through delimitation, BJP wants to set the total number of seats and through gerrymandering they ensure their own foul victories over the seats. Delimitation carries at least a formal accountability to population ratios, gerrymandering, on the other hand is, by design, practically non-justiciable. Orders of the Delimitation Commission cannot be challenged in a court of law. That immunity provides the accurate conditions that make gerrymandering such a lethal political weapon.

In 2023, Assam went through a delimitation exercise that acted as the laboratory for gerrymandering. The political analyst Yogendra Yadav called the tactics used in the delimitation exercise “communal gerrymandering”. The Delimitation Commission drastically reduced the number of assembly seats with Muslim majority, from approximately 35 to 20 by spreading Muslim-majority populations across Hindu-majority constituencies, and then packing residual Muslim voters into fewer seats, and stacking Hindu pockets into decisive majorities. Previous ECI guidelines required that no block or tehsil be split. However, in this case the Delimitation Commission made the village the smallest unit, which enabled panchayat-level surgical cuts. The CPI(M) paid a direct price for this exercise in Assam. In Jammu and Kashmir, five of the six new seats created by the 2020 delimitation were in Hindu-dominated areas, and the BJP won five of those six in the 2024 Assembly elections. These are the results of a cartographic model of communalism. The proposed national delimitation gives this project a canvas of an entirely different scale, with 300 new seats to be distributed.

SIR: THE ELECTORAL ROLL AS ‘CITIZENSHIP’ FILTER

The Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls is the immediate operational instrument in the long game of Delimitation. The SIR was launched in Bihar in June 2025 ahead of the state assembly elections and around 47 lakh electors (nearly 5 to 6 percent of Bihar's total electorate) were removed from the rolls following verification. Then later, this process was expanded to cover the entire country. Phase 2 of the SIR covered nine states and three Union Territories from November 2025, while Phase 3 was announced in May 2026, and it covers 16 states and three more Union Territories.

The Supreme Court upheld the legality of the exercise in its May 2026 judgement. The SC bench stated that accurate electoral rolls are foundational to free and fair elections and that the ECI’s authority under Article 324 is wide enough to sustain the exercise. It also made an observation that we cannot afford to ignore. The court directed the ECI to send the names of those who were deleted on grounds of doubtful citizenship to the Union Government for adjudication under the citizenship laws. This officially linked the electoral roll revision to citizenship determination and it is exactly this link about which concerns and warnings have been flowing from the start.

The documentary requirements of SIR are calibrated to exclude the most vulnerable. Voters enrolled after 2003 were required to produce one of eleven specified documents and to prove their parents’ identity, within a compressed timeline. Initially, this list excluded documents like Aadhaar, voter ID, and even ration cards. In our country, poverty, migration, early marriage, and illiteracy are lived conditions for tens of millions, and such criteria provide the basis for exclusion while they remain hidden behind the mask of procedure. In Karnataka, there were concerns raised that the Phase III SIR, which is set to begin enumeration in June 2026, is designed to cut votes of the Scheduled Castes, backward communities, and minorities.

The West Bengal experience must be placed on record in its full horror. Approximately 91 lakh names were removed from the electoral rolls in West Bengal following the SIR. The state recorded multiple deaths, including suicides and stress-related fatalities, among people who feared the SIR would strip them of their established citizenship. These deaths became the human cost of treating citizenship as a provisional grant instead of the constitutional right that it is.

BJP leaders in West Bengal told Hindu migrants excluded by the SIR that they need not worry and that they could apply for citizenship under the Citizenship Amendment Act. But the Election Commission had said no such thing, and the CAA itself requires documentation that most migrants cannot produce. SIR deletes names. CAA offers a conditional reinstatement to some who belong to the right religion. NRC is the eventual settling of accounts. Read in sequence, this shows that the CAA connection is the stated architecture of the BJP-RSS project.

The BJP-ruled government of West Bengal has taken this logic further. The Annapurna Yojana, a cash-transfer scheme for women, requires a ten-page form linking Aadhaar, ration cards, voter ID, PAN, GST records, asset ownership, and CAA status, building what one analysis describes as a digital panopticon primed for future exclusions and political profiling. Ineligibility for this scheme has also been linked to SIR deletions. The rightful benefits provided by the Union and state governments are slowly being converted into rewards for authenticated belonging where anyone whose belonging to the state cannot be authenticated is simply excluded.

THE 1991 ACT AND THE ASSAULT ON THE SECULAR SPACE

There is one more front which is the most openly civilisational, and the most dangerous for the constitutional order’s long-term survival. The Places of Worship (Special Provisions) Act, 1991 served as Parliament’s legislative firewall. Its object was to prohibit the conversion of any place of worship and to maintain the religious character of every such place as it stood on the August 15, 1947. This Act acted as a line drawn under centuries of contested history, as a declaration that India would not re-litigate the past. The sole exception was Ram Janmabhoomi. The scars left by the demolition of the Babri Masjid should have ensured that this 1991 Act serves as the Parliament’s declaration that there would be no further Ayodhyas.

This declaration is going through a brutal assault for some time now. In May 2026, the Madhya Pradesh High Court ruled that the Bhojshala-Kamal Maula Mosque complex in Dhar was historically a Hindu temple. This complex had functioned as a mosque for centuries, with an arrangement since 2003 allowing Muslim prayers on Fridays and Hindu worship on Tuesdays. The court further suggested that Muslims could seek alternative land from the government elsewhere in the district. A logic eerily similar to Ayodhya that was framed around historical grievance, ASI survey, judicial determination, dispossession etc was applied in this case too.

In 2022, the Supreme Court said during the Gyanvapi hearings that “ascertaining the religious character” of a place of worship is not barred by the 1991 Act, even though conversion is. This interpretive crack opened a floodgate of petitions targeting mosques across the country. In practice, the distinction between “ascertaining” and “converting” has proved to be illusory. Judicial interpretation initiates surveys, surveys generate findings, findings lead to litigation, litigation results in mobilisation and ultimately the mobilisation begets violence that scars lives for generations. The Sambhal killings of November 2024 are a recent example – from a long list of reminders – of where these surveys ultimately end.

The RSS-BJP project requires an endless supply of “disputes” to sustain communal polarisation as an electoral resource. The 1991 Act stands in the way of this polarisation. Repealing such an act legislatively would be too visible and hence the assault upon it is being mounted through judicial interpretation, administrative surveys, and the slow accumulation of precedents that render the Act’s protection illusory.

THE SYNTHESIS

When read together, the above-mentioned shed light on a coherent programme. Delimitation restructures the arithmetic of Parliament in favour of the BJP’s core states. SIR purges the rolls of those most likely to vote against the BJP including the poor, the migrant, the Muslim, and the dalits. CAA offers a back-door for religious sorting. The model used in the Annapurna scheme fuses rightful benefits of the people with citizenship verification, and makes state support conditional on authenticated belonging. The assault on the 1991 Act generates the communal charge that keeps the Manuvaadi-Hindutva coalition together. And the constitutional institutions that should check all of this have been systematically compromised, as we saw in the first part of this analysis.

Interestingly, when taken separately, each of them appears defensible in procedural terms. SIR is about electoral roll accuracy. Delimitation is a constitutional requirement. The Bhojshala verdict is a court ruling. One doesn’t have to look too carefully to understand how this authoritarian consolidation proceeds in a formally democratic system. It happens through the patient accumulation of procedural legitimacies that, in aggregate, provide a disruptive and groundbreaking moment for the neo-fascist forces ruling us.

Again, in the words of Marx and Engels, the executive of the modern state is a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie. In India today, that committee has gone further to manage not only the affairs of a specific fraction of capital, but the reengineering of the political nation itself, including its geography, its demography, its citizenship, its places of worship, and its constitutional identity. That is exactly what the CPI(M) and the Left are fighting against. We are fighting for the defence of the constitutional framework within which the working class, peasantry, rural and urban poor, dalits, adivasis, minorities (linguistic, religious and sexual), women, students, youth and the other section of democratic forces can still organise, still agitate, and still alter the course of history.

We must not forget that the fight against Hindutva cannot be separated from the struggle against caste and the broader struggle against social oppression. Undertaking these struggles also includes taking the fight to the cultural fronts, because the Hindtuva fascist forces make systematic use of the cultural attire to hide their true character. This is what differentiates us from our liberal friends who are content with the re-establishment of the status-quo that itself was deeply flawed. That possibility, the concrete possibility of transformative politics, is what is being foreclosed. It must not be.