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Max's election maps and assorted others

List of off-the-cuff ideas to be written, or else not

Full TL length
- AHD part one (nearly finished on ah.com; to be cleaned up and republished on here)
- AHD parts two and three
- Lands of Red and Gold but it's Cavorite Barsoom

TLIAPOT length
- No partition of India (discussion thread started)
- Sweden post-WW2 in a Nazi victory world
- Carl I. Hagen stays in Britain and becomes a Tory MP

(to be added and/or redacted later)
 
OK. What led to the split between the All-India Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and is it as petty as I think it is?
 
Made a quick and dirty calculation of a parliamentary seat distribution in an India including Pakistan and Bangladesh. Overall size is 700, which is about commensurate with the constituency size of the OTL Lok Sabha. This is based on the 2001 Indian and Bangladeshi censuses, the 1998 Census of Pakistan for the four Pakistani provinces and the 2017 Census of Pakistan for Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan (which weren't counted in 1998 - no census of Pakistan was conducted in the 2000s).

Code:
Uttar Pradesh        90
Maharashtra            52
Bihar                45
West Bengal            43
Andhra Pradesh        40
Tamil Nadu            33
Madhya Pradesh        33
Rajasthan            31
Karnataka            28
Gujarat                27
Odisha                20
Kerala                17
Jharkhand            14
Assam                14
Punjab (East)        13        (OTL Indian Punjab)
Haryana                11
Chhattisgarh        11
Jammu and Kashmir    8        (including OTL Azad Kashmir and Gilgit-Baltistan)
Uttarakhand            5
Himachal Pradesh    3
Tripura                2
Meghalaya            1
Manipur                1
Nagaland            1
Goa                    1
Arunachal Pradesh    1
Mizoram                1
Sikkim                1
Punjab (West)        40        (OTL Pakistani Punjab)
NWFP                11        (OTL Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and FATA)
Sindh                16
Balochistan            3
East Bengal            70        (OTL Bangladesh)

Delhi                7
Puducherry            1
Chandigarh            1
Andaman and Nicobar    1
Dadra and N.H.        1
Daman and Diu        1
Lakhshadweep        1

Total                700
 
Are you going to try and make a map out of that calculation? Because that'd be awesome.
I don't know. I think the hardest part would be reconfiguring the seats within India itself - drawing lines on a map of Pakistan is relatively easy, turning 42 seats in West Bengal into 43 could be really fucking hard.
 
I've been descending into cabin fever and general madness over the past few weeks, and as proof, have a map of general constituencies for legislative assemblies in the Provinces of Madras, Bombay, Central Provinces, United Provinces, Orissa and Bihar, as delimited in 1936.

Because of Ramsay Macdonald's Communal Award of 1932, the Indian legislatures were chosen from separate electorates for Muslims, Sikhs (in Punjab), Indian Christians (in provinces with substantial numbers of those), Europeans, Anglo-Indians and economic interests in addition to the general seats. As a result, these mainly represent the Hindu population, although "backward" groups (also called "aboriginals"), scheduled castes and Marathas (in Bombay) were given reserved seats within general constituencies. A separate electorate for scheduled castes was originally floated, but after the Poona Pact was concluded between the INC (represented by Mahatma Gandhi) and the Scheduled Castes Federation (represented by B. R. Ambedkar), the Indian political scene united in opposition to this and support for reservation, forcing the Delimitation Commission to change their policy.

Most constituencies in most provinces were single-seat, but in Madras and Bombay multi-member constituencies were adopted on the recommendation of the local governments. The standard voting system for multi-member seats was the cumulative vote, which was seen as providing more of a chance for minority groups to elect their candidates than straight bloc vote. A few named exceptions used single non-transferable vote.

The urban-rural split was different in different provinces, with Bihar (along with Bengal and Punjab, neither of which I've covered) counting every single municipality as urban, CP and UP giving representation to all cities above a specific size, Madras recommending only sixteen towns with "predominantly urban character" for separate representation, Bombay opting for almost no urban representation outside the provincial capital (Sindh as well, but again, that's in Pakistan now), and Orissa specifically advising against creating urban seats at all (although the Cuttack seat was small enough to be predominantly urban).

india-1936.png
 
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Managed to get Punjab and a chunk of Bengal added - don't get too attached to what I have in Bengal, because that is absolutely going to need an inset to fit the urban seats in.

india-1936.png

And because I think Punjab requires them, the Muslim-roll seats:

india-1936-muslim.png

The "general" roll was, of course, only for those who didn't qualify for one of the religious community rolls. Which means, in practice, that it was for Hindus, Jains and Buddhists. Punjab had a Sikh roll as well as a Muslim one, but as that one only existed in Punjab, it's going to get made after I'm done with the two major rolls.
 
Bengal is coming along nicely.

india-1936.png
As you can see there were a lot of multi-member seats - this is because of the exceedingly high SC population in Bengal, which sometimes amounted to two thirds of general-roll voters. The Delimitation Commission felt that reserving single-member seats would be impossible, and while I would never stoop to the level of accusing the British of caste favouritism, it's worth noting that when B. R. Ambedkar, a Dalit, was put in charge of writing the constitution, it suddenly became a lot less impossible.

Note that the cities are not done on this - group 5 should include the Mymensingh district municipalities, and group 6 the Dhaka division south of the river plus the entire Chittagong division.

The Muslim-roll seats:

india-1936-muslim.png

On this, the cities are done. Judging from the census reports I drew the list of municipalities from, Bengali cities tended to be majority Hindu, but only narrowly. I'm not sure what prompted them to be represented separately for Hindus but not Muslims - maybe the urban Hindus were higher castes than rural ones and therefore were felt to warrant separation?
 
Calcutta 1923 (wards)
An unexpected byproduct of the Indian mapping: the wards of Calcutta set out in the Municipal Act 1923. I don't know when these were replaced, but these boundaries (excepting the Kushita region southeast of the city centre) were the ones used until 1984, when the corporation was extended to cover most of the southern suburbs. By that point the number of wards was 100, turned to 141 by the extension, but in 1923 there were 32. The number was reduced to 31 when Garden Reach was split off as a separate municipality in 1932 and then brought back up to 32 by the bifurcation of Alipur ward later the same year, giving us a ward 22A but no 26.

I will make some reservations regarding the southwestern boundary, as it was based on "the southern boundary of the land acquired by the Port Commissioners for the Dock extension" and "the southern edge of the line of the old Taratala Road", neither of which is that easy to parse. I was able to figure out most of the colonial-era street names though, so the actual ward boundaries should be fairly authoritative.

kolkata-wards-1936.png
 
Bengal is finished!
india-1936.png
india-1936-muslim.png

The Chittagong Hill Tracts weren't represented in the Bengal Assembly, because... because tribals, I guess? Note also the different coastline around Noakhali - the Meghna River changed its course in 1951, causing flooding which destroyed Noakhali town and forced the district seat to move inland.

This is about 90% of India, as you can tell. The only actual assemblies remaining are North-West Frontier Province, for which I've got no good basemap, and Assam, whose census report I can't access and which is therefore going to be a bit of a challenge. Baluchistan was divided between a chief commissioner's province along the Afghan border in the north (whose population was IIRC majority Pashtun) and a number of princely states in the south, neither of which had responsible government. It's still going on there for completeness.
 
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