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Paper short abstract

India's impending delimitation project reveals a nationalist, communal, and caste-bound demographic crisis, where the electoral demarcation of body-territories enacts restrictive and divisive zones of reproduction that define how, when, and with whom one must reproduce babies, families, and futures.

Paper long abstract

Longstanding overpopulation narratives in India now coexist with a demographic crisis around fertility and reproductive decline. The impending “delimitation” project tied to India’s population census, i.e. redrawing parliamentary constituencies based on population size to ensure fair electoral representation, has brought to the fore communal nationalism, caste hierarchies, and regional disparities as key sites of contestation in the state regulation of reproductive bodies. While delimitation has been framed as a threat to regional sovereignty in low-fertility southern India, triggering pronotalist appeals for larger families (Biswas 2024), declining fertility rates in northern India have animated unfounded fears of a dying Hindu race against the perceived rapid population growth of Muslims (Rao 2022).

Taking seriously the population-reproduction nexus within the context of far-right reproductive politics (Solinger and Nakachi 2015; Wilson 2018), I analyse delimitation through a decolonial feminist and reproductive justice lens. This electoral exercise of demarcating territorial boundaries, I argue, further enacts a political demarcation of body-territories (Chaparro-Buitrago 2024). Delimitation produces nationalist, communal, and caste-bound zones of reproduction that define how, when, and with whom one must reproduce babies, families, and futures.

Empirically, I offer case studies of four Indian states where population policies and demographic shifts have faced increased political and electoral scrutiny over the past decade. Through a critical reconceptualisation of delimitation, I demonstrate how an emergent demographic crisis in India engenders restrictive and divisive reproductive futures, marking body-territories as either excessive and threatening (the other), or depleting and threatened (by the other).