Gerrymandering, Delhi Style: How Congress Redrew Okhla To Win But Lost Anyway

In 2008, under the Congress government, Delhi’s electoral map was redrawn in the name of delimitation. What was officially billed as a democratic exercise to balance population and representation quietly became a tool of political convenience.

There were two primary strategies Congress used to redraw Delhi’s boundaries:

First, they consolidated their own strongholds, often merging favorable vote banks to create fortress seats.

Second, they strategically invaded BJP-dominated areas, relocating clusters of jhuggi (slum) dwellers—many of them loyal Congress voters—to dilute opposition margins. We will take the first scenario extensively in this article.

One of the clearest examples of this quiet cartographic strategy was the transformation of Okhla, a small constituency on Delhi’s fringes, suddenly elevated into an electoral heavyweight.

Rather than let Okhla remain a marginal seat, the Congress-led delimitation effort expanded it dramatically, absorbing nearly 40–45% of Badarpur, and chunks of Kalkaji and Tughlakabad. This is just one of many such examples.

In this article, I’ll walk you through the case of Okhla to show how delimitation was used not to ensure fairness, but to entrench advantage—a story of how boundaries were redrawn not to reflect the people, but to benefit the party.

At its core, delimitation is meant to uphold electoral fairness. The idea is simple: as populations grow and shift, the boundaries of constituencies must be adjusted to ensure that each vote carries roughly equal weight.

The 2008 delimitation in Delhi was carried out based on the 2001 Census data. It came after a long freeze on boundary changes since the 1970s, and by the time the process resumed, the political landscape had evolved dramatically.

But under the Congress-led UPA, what should have been a neutral exercise turned strategic. Populations hadn’t just shifted—so had vote banks.

Before 2008, Okhla was a relatively small but politically stable constituency with a consistent Congress leaning. It covered a compact area and had a modest population footprint, much like another neighboring undersized seat at the time, Minto Road.

In an honest delimitation process, these two underpopulated constituencies could have been rationalized together—for instance, by merging Okhla (population of 55,000 electors pre-2008) with parts of Minto Road (now Jangpura, population of 44,000 electors pre-2008), while distributing voters more equitably across neighboring seats like Badarpur.

Instead, the opposite happened.

Rather than being balanced or merged for demographic parity, Okhla was strategically inflated. Nearly 40–45% of Badarpur was absorbed, along with handpicked segments of Kalkaji and Tughlakabad.

The merged localities weren’t random—they were Muslim-majority areas which generally favour Congress, like Jamia Nagar, Batla House, Shaheen Bagh, Abul Fazal Enclave, and Noor Nagar.

This wasn’t a coincidence—it was consolidation.

Today, as a result, Okhla stands as one of the most populous Assembly constituencies in Delhi after Matiala (another Muslim-dominated seat), while others like Jangpura and Chandni Chowk remain relatively underweight population-wise.

What was once a mixed-population seat became a super-sized Muslim stronghold, while adjacent constituencies lost chunks of key demographics, altering their electoral balance.

Before 2008, Okhla was a straight contest between the Congress and BJP. In the 2003 Assembly election, Congress won comfortably, while BJP polled a steady 15,000-odd votes.

After delimitation, though the seat was tailor-made to benefit Congress by concentrating minority voters, the 2008 election delivered a surprise.

There was no pre-poll alliance among Congress, RJD, and BSP—all three popular among Muslim voters, now dominant in the expanded Okhla. The result? Vote-splitting on communal lines.

Congress managed just 28.53% of the vote, barely ahead of RJD (28%) and trailed closely by BSP (22%). The vote bank it had counted on split down the middle. Still, the BJP remained a non-factor, holding at its historical average of around 10,000–15,000 votes, unchanged since 1993.

In 2013, Congress slightly recovered because RJD and BSP both were not participating on the seat. They polled 36.34% and won the Okhla seat—but the rise of AAP was already brewing.

In 2015, AAP’s anti-establishment wave swept Delhi, Okhla included. The party won a landslide 62.56% here, while Congress collapsed to 12% and BJP inched up to 23%.

Five years later, in 2020, the trend deepened. AAP surged to 66%, BJP held at 29%, and Congress was reduced to a negligible 2%.

But the 2025 election brought a new disruptor — AIMIM. Targeting the same Muslim vote bank that Congress once built and AAP had inherited, AIMIM cut into AAP’s margins, winning nearly 19% of the vote.

AAP’s vote share fell to 42%, while BJP rose to 31%, marking its best-ever performance in Okhla.

Had Congress pursued honest delimitation—merging Okhla with Minto Road and balancing the population fairly—today’s landscape may have looked different. Instead, what they designed to secure power is now itching them back. Okhla has turned from an asset into a liability.

Okhla isn’t an exception; it's a window into the entire 2008 delimitation process.

A total of 40 seats were redrawn not to correct population imbalance, but to strategically distribute loyal voters. Some constituencies were inflated, others trimmed. And all of it was done under the guise of electoral fairness.

What this tells us is simple: delimitation, when misused, becomes just another form of gerrymandering cloaked in constitutional legitimacy—but motivated by pure political calculus.

And here’s the kicker: today, the Congress party is warning the public that an upcoming delimitation exercise could be “unfair,” accusing the ruling government of plotting to increase seats only where it’s electorally strong.

The irony? They pioneered the very playbook they now claim to oppose.

If the Congress is worried about weaponized delimitation, it would do well to look at its own handiwork. Okhla is just one piece of a much larger puzzle—a case study in how maps can be manipulated, and how that manipulation eventually unravels.

Let’s not forget: delimitation exists to serve the people, not the politicians. Its purpose is to ensure that every elected representative speaks for roughly the same number of citizens.

That’s the cornerstone of representative democracy: one MLA, one voice, one weight. But what happened in Delhi was far from that ideal. Today, constituencies like Jangpura (born from Minto Road) have just around 1.4 lakh voters, while Okhla has over 3.7 lakh.

In some cases, the disparity is even starker, with some MLAs representing nearly three times as many people as others. This means one citizen’s vote in a smaller constituency carries more weight than someone’s in an overcrowded one.

That’s not just undemocratic—it's institutionalized inequality.