Reservation of Constituencies

FPTP has one structural weakness: because the winner in each constituency is simply whoever gets the most votes locally, any social group that is a minority in every single constituency — even if it adds up to a sizeable number of people nationally — can end up with no representation at all. In a country with India's long history of caste-based discrimination, this risk is not abstract: without a corrective, dominant social groups could plausibly win everywhere while historically oppressed groups won nowhere.

Reserved constituencies, not separate electorates. Before Independence, the British government had tried to address this through "separate electorates" — a system in which, to elect a representative for a particular community, only voters belonging to that same community could vote at all, so each community effectively elected its own representatives in isolation from everyone else. India's Constitution-makers deliberately rejected this. Instead, they adopted reservation of constituencies: in a reserved constituency, every voter — regardless of community — can vote, but only a candidate belonging to the specific community for which that seat is reserved can contest. The difference is precisely this: separate electorates segregate the voters; reservation of constituencies restricts only the candidates, while keeping the electorate itself unified.

This choice was argued out directly in the Constituent Assembly. Tajamul Husain spoke against separate electorates on behalf of many Muslim members: "Separate electorates have been a curse to India, have done incalculable harm to this country… We (Muslims) want to merge in the nation… for God's sake keep your hands off reservation for the Muslim community." Jaipal Singh, speaking for the Adivasis, explained why his community wanted reservation rather than separate electorates: under the 1935 Act's separate-electorate-style arrangements, Adivasis had held only 24 of 1,585 seats across all the country's legislatures and not a single seat at the Centre — being kept "in a zoo," as he put it — and reservation of seats, not isolation into a separate electorate, was the way to genuinely mix into the wider political system while still guaranteeing representation.

Who decides which constituencies are reserved? An independent Delimitation Commission, appointed by the President and working with the Election Commission, draws constituency boundaries nationwide and decides which are reserved. Constituencies with the highest proportion of Scheduled Tribe population are reserved for STs. For Scheduled Castes — whose population, unlike STs, tends to be spread fairly evenly across regions rather than concentrated — the Commission both picks higher-SC-population constituencies and deliberately spreads the reserved seats across different regions of a State. Reserved constituencies are also rotated each time delimitation is carried out, rather than being fixed in the same constituencies forever. …