What the BJP should learn from Trump’s redistricting failure

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has lessons to draw from the Republican Party in the United States in its attempts to undertake a hurried, hushed and partisan redrawing of the country’s electoral map. The BJP has been planning for an out-of-cycle Census and a delimitation exercise by delaying the 2021 Census until 2026. The Republican Party redrew Congressional district boundaries across eight States under the direction of President Donald J. Trump in the hope of flipping seats currently held by Democrats. But they lost most of them and, in addition, lost seats they had hoped to retain, as their heartlands such as Texas and Florida slipped away.

Gerrymandering, the practice of redrawing electoral boundaries by packing or cracking particular social groups, assumes that voting preferences remain unchanged between election cycles. But when the traditional supporters of a party turn against it, constituency maps matter little. The Bankipur by-election in Bihar in August had proved the same point. The constituency is perfectly tailored for a BJP victory, going by its demographic composition. But when the upper-caste supporters of the party changed their minds, the BJP was decimated.