India’s Demographic Nervous System: Partition, Federalism, and the Fear of Muslim Majority Provinces

King Khan — I don’t think it’s irrelevant that Muslim-majority regions would have been liminal. Literally.

The previous post got me thinking about demographic engineering, and how it has quietly shaped post-Partition India — not just at the borders, but deep inside the Union itself. When Qureishi redefined the demographic weightage of the Indo-Gangetic, I was reminded of how states like Madhya Pradesh (I’ve had a post waiting on this for months), Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar — the so-called “giants” of India’s federal structure — were similarly calibrated. Even the historical Andhra Pradesh (before Telangana split), Kerala, and distant territories like the Lakshadweep Islands show signs of internal rebalancing. The logic? To prevent the consolidation of another Muslim-majority province — something the Indian state has remained deeply wary of since Kashmir’s accession crisis in 1947–48.

The anxiety over Muslim-majority units lies at the core of why Kashmir remains “special” — not spiritually, but politically. Its sovereign ambiguity and constitutional exceptionalism stem directly from the post-Partition plebiscite logic, which India initially welcomed. At the time, Nehru and the Congress were confident of winning that vote. Quaid-e-Azam had thoroughly alienated Sheikh Abdullah, by backing the non-consequential “Muslim Conference” and the National Conference had significantly diverged from the Muslim League. The shift didn’t come until later — particularly after the rigged 1987 elections and the spillover from the Afghan jihad, which together detonated the insurgency.

This raises an unsettling but important question:

What if India had five or six internal Muslim-majority provinces today?

Would we see the same structure of state power? Would secularism look the same? Or would the politics of 80% majoritarianism — so essential to the BJP’s moral arithmetic — start to wobble?

There’s an analogy here with Israel — both India and Israel fiercely protect a symbolic “80% majority” threshold to preserve their respective civilisational cores. But beneath the surface, both polities have had to navigate messy demographic realities — often with tools that resemble internal gerrymandering more than organic state-building.

I’m not passing judgment — I’m exploring this academically (X.T.M’s current incarnation, as a Brown Pundit, is about incision not passion). What interests me is how postcolonial federalism operates not just through maps, but through demographic logic: keeping certain numbers stable, certain provinces subdued, and certain identities always just shy of full power.