This week on Hafta, Manisha Pande and Anand Vardhan are joined by Pooja Prasanna of The News Minute and Sobhana K Nair, senior deputy editor of The Hindu. The panel focuses sharply on the assembly elections in Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, and the contentious issue of delimitation.

Pooja highlights Tamil Nadu’s shifting political landscape, especially the rise of actor-turned-politician Vijay’s party. 

She says, “There is no doubt that Vijay is a very, very relevant and a huge factor.” She notes that while his supporters are very vocal, many are young non-voters who are influencing families to vote. According to her, “He will eat into everybody’s vote… and maybe that consolidated vote share might be significant.”

Anand analyses Tamil Nadu as a historically bipolar state where power typically alternates. Referring to Vijay’s impact, he adds that vote share alone may not matter unless it is geographically concentrated: “Even with 20 percent votes, you can end up with very few seats.”

The conversation then moves to delimitation. Sobhana warns, “The problem (of delimitation) has been postponed for now; it has not been erased.” She explains that once the government uses census data, states like Kerala could lose seats because they successfully controlled population growth.

Additionally, Sobhana  identifies a deeper constitutional flaw: “There is a structural issue… our country has grown in two different directions, the north and the south divide.” She questions the fairness of the first-past-the-post system, observing that many votes never translate into representation.

Manisha remarks that southern states are not merely administrative units but identity-driven linguistic regions, making delimitation emotionally and politically explosive. 

The discussion concludes that unless India reforms representation more fundamentally, delimitation will remain one of the republic’s biggest unresolved tensions.

All this and more.