“I see no threat to south India.”
That’s how Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu is framing the delimitation debate today.
At a time when several southern leaders are raising concerns about losing political representation, Naidu is taking a very different line.
He didn’t just play down those concerns — he dismissed them.
He said delimitation will be fair.
That no state will lose out.
And that fears around political representation are misplaced.
His confidence comes from what Home Minister Amit Shah said in Parliament — that there would be a 50% proportional increase in seats for all states
and that population criteria would be delinked.
But here’s the catch.
That 50% assurance is not part of any law. It is not written into any bill.
And Naidu is not a first-time politician. He knows that when it comes to something as consequential as delimitation, what matters is not what is said, but what is guaranteed.
How is the TDP chief justifying his stand? And why is it hard to take at face value?
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Back to Chandrababu Naidu
Now rewind a few months.
Naidu was making a very different argument on delimitation.
He was urging people to have “two or more children,” and proposing a population policy to maintain demographic balance.
Standing in the Andhra Pradesh Assembly in March 2026, he laid out the concern clearly.
The state’s Total Fertility Rate had fallen to 1.5 — well below the replacement level of 2.1 needed to maintain population stability.
And then came the policy pitch:
“We will give ₹25,000 to parents having a second child or more at the time of delivery itself. This will be a big game-changer.”
This wasn’t just rhetoric.
It marked a reversal of decades of population control policy.
A state that once disqualified people with more than two children from contesting local body elections was now moving to remove that restriction.
Naidu himself acknowledged the shift:
“Before 2004 we incentivised family planning… Today, there’s a need to amend the law to allow those with more than two children to contest.”
The goal was explicit — to push fertility back to 2.1 and prevent long-term population decline.
Naidu did not frame this as just an economic issue.
He linked it directly to political consequences.
Even before the delimitation debate reached Parliament, Naidu argued that the number of Lok Sabha seats should not be linked to the Census.
He warned that such a system would disadvantage southern states that had successfully reduced fertility and invested in development.
But when the delimitation question eventually came up in Parliament, Naidu did not insist that this safeguard be written into law.
Instead, his party supported a Constitution Amendment Bill that continues to link seat allocation to the latest Census
Section 8 makes that clear.
And Article 81 of the Constitution — which mandates population-based representation — remains unchanged.
Which means the core principle Naidu once opposed is still intact.
Even more significantly, the earlier freeze on seat redistribution — in place since 2001 — is being removed.
That freeze was introduced precisely to protect states like Andhra Pradesh that had implemented population control.
Naidu was part of the political ecosystem that supported that safeguard at the time.
Now, it is gone.
What replaces it?
A verbal political assurance by Amit Shah.
That all states will receive a 50% increase in seats.
There are many experts who agree that an equal 50% increase of seats for all states could be a compromise formula- But that assurance is not in the law.
And Naidu understands the implications of relying on assurances.
Because Andhra Pradesh has seen this before.
During bifurcation, a promise was made in Parliament that the state would receive Special Category Status.
That promise became the basis for acceptance.
But it was never implemented — because it was never written into law.
In fact on March 2 2014, Manmohan Singh’s cabinet directed the Planning Commission to implement the decision to grant Special Category Status to Andhra Pradesh.
For four years, the next Prime Minister- Narendra Modi kept saying the same and finally did not implement it. This made TDP, al ally of the NDa to move a no-confidence motion in Parliament against the BJP
That was TDP MP Jayadev Galla’s speech asking what good is an assurance. Does the same logic not extend to the delimitation assurance?
Look, such change of positions is not new in politics and we have seen this happen many times before.
In Naidu’s case, he has also opened up new conversations.
Recently he countered Tamil Nadu CM MK Stalin’s charge that Hindi is being imposed on people.
Naidu claimed Hindi is a national language- well, no it isn’t. I feel like a tape recorder saying this again and again.
He also said that Hindi is not being imposed on anyone and that the union government is promoting different mother tongues.
There is enough data to show that the union government has spent disproportionate amounts on promoting Sanskrit, Urdu and Hindi- compared to languages that Naidu listed- including Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam and Telugu.
But to be fair, unlike politicians in Tamil Nadu, Naidu has never been a part of language politics. So one can’t accuse him of any u-turns.
It is now that he is speaking up, and taking a clear line.
And Naidu's positions and counter positions are not very surprising.
Moving out of the NDA in 2018 and then being an extremely strong critic of the BJP and Narendra Modi had consequences. Back in the Chief Minister’s chair, Naidu believes that it’s best to climb the boat than rock it.
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Producer: Nikhil Sekhar ET, Megha Mukundan, Script: Pooja Prasanna, Inputs: Jahnavi, Editor: Nikhil Sekhar ET