Assam, India – Islam Uddin, a 55-year-old retired teacher from Katigorah, an electoral constituency in India’s northeastern state of Assam, has been going door-to-door to urge other Muslims to vote. The area is on the border with Bangladesh, and Uddin believes it is important to send a representative who will speak for the community. “It’s about sending our representative to speak for us,” Uddin told Al Jazeera, his smile widening.

Redrawn Boundaries Alter Electoral Landscape

As Assam prepares to go to the polls on April 9 to choose a new government after five years, Uddin’s excitement is clouded by a constant worry: Will his efforts even matter? The 2023 order from the Election Commission of India to redraw the boundaries of parliamentary and state legislature constituencies in Assam has dramatically changed the electoral math of Katigorah.

Katigorah, bordered by the ancient Borail hills to the north and the Barak River to the south, previously had a nearly equal split between Hindus and Muslims. Of the state’s main parties, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which also rules Assam, would pick a Hindu candidate, while the opposition Congress would often choose a Muslim candidate, as would the All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF), the state’s third largest party, which counts Bengali-speaking Muslims among its key voters.

Now, that balance has been upended. Before delimitation, Katigorah had about 1,74,000 voters. “But about 40,000 Hindu voters from the neighbouring legislative constituencies have now been merged with Katigorah, making it a predominantly Hindu majority constituency,” Khalil Uddin Mazumder, former Katigorah legislator from the Congress party, told Al Jazeera. “The chances of electing a Muslim candidate from here have suffered significantly.”

Communal Gerrymandering Concerns

Across the state’s 126 legislative constituencies, borders have been redrawn in a way that activists like Uddin fear could politically marginalise Assam’s 11 million Muslims further. This is at a time when the ruling BJP has already targeted them through eviction drives, expulsion policies, and vitriolic rhetoric.

Muslims constitute more than 34 percent of Assam’s population. Only Jammu and Kashmir, and the island of Lakshadweep have higher proportions of Muslims, and neither is a full-fledged state, unlike Assam.

To many political analysts, Assam is the latest laboratory of the BJP’s Hindu majoritarian policies. What works in the state could offer a template for the rest of India.

Prominent poll analyst Yogendra Yadav, writing in The Indian Express newspaper, referred to the Assam model of delimitation as “communal gerrymandering”, likening it to 18th-century United States racial gerrymandering, where electoral boundaries were manipulated or redrawn to favour a dominant group or diminish marginalised groups’ electoral influence.

In Assam’s context, gerrymandering weakens the electoral influence of Muslims, Yadav argued, by deploying techniques borrowed from the US: Cracking, packing, and stacking. “Cracking” refers to the fragmentation of Muslim voters across multiple Hindu majority constituencies, therefore minimising their chance to form a majority in constituencies. In the case of “packing”, multiple Muslim-dominated pockets – which could have dominated several constituencies – were clubbed into a single seat to reduce the number of constituencies that Muslim candidates can viably win.

In parallel, Hindu population centres that were not each capable of forming a majority in a constituency were merged under a single constituency to give the community that majority. That is what Yadav described as “stacking”. The net result: Muslims formed the majority in about 35 of the state’s 126 constituencies before delimitation. That number is now down to about 20, say opposition leaders and experts.

Impact on Muslim Representation

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Suprakash Talukdar, the state’s secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), said: “Hindu areas from far-flung Muslim-dominated seats were merged into constituencies with mixed populations, while Muslims from majority seats were dispersed into Hindu-majority areas.”

The Election Commission’s manual for delimitation states that boundaries should be redrawn in a way that no area of one constituency is cut off from the rest of that constituency by being surrounded by another constituency. “Apart from contiguity, geographical features,” the manual noted, “better connectivity, means of communication … [are to be] kept in view and areas divided by rivers…forests or ravines … will not be put in the same constituency.”

But Mazumdar, the former Katigorah legislator, said this policy had been violated in Assam’s delimitation exercise. “Hindu areas from Badarpur, from far across the Barak river, were merged with Katigorah to make it a majority stronghold,” Mazumder said.

Legislative constituencies in the Muslim-majority Barak Valley’s Hailakandi district serve as examples, say experts and political leaders, of how the delimitation exercise has reshaped Assam’s landscape. In total, the legislative seats tally in Barak Valley, home to more than 1.7 million Bengali-speaking Muslims, went from 15 to 13 after delimitation.

Before the 2023 delimitation, three of the region’s seats – Algapur, Hailakandi, and Katlicherra – were represented mostly by Muslim candidates from the Congress party or the AIUDF. But now Hindu pockets were carved out from Algapur and Katlicherra and merged with Hailakandi, making it a Hindu seat,” Ahmed Tohidus Jaman, a Barak Valley-based political researcher, told Al Jazeera.

The Naoboicha seat in the state assembly has previously elected Muslim legislators thrice. But under the delimitation, its Muslim-dominated pockets have been “split into four neighbouring Hindu majority constituency seats”, Azizur Rahman, who contested for the constituency on an AIUDF ticket in 2021, told Al Jazeera. Now, the Naoboicha seat has been reserved for a Hindu candidate from a less privileged caste – several seats in India’s parliament and state assemblies are reserved for members of traditionally disadvantaged castes and tribes.

Rahman is now contesting the 2026 assembly election from a Muslim-majority seat in northern Assam. “They [the BJP] have crippled Muslim representation,” Rahman said, speaking at a rally.