BJP looks to US redistricting flop as it plans delayed census and delimitation

India’s Bharatiya Janata Party is eyeing a delayed census and a new delimitation exercise after seeing how a similar redistricting push by the U.S. Republican Party under President Donald J. Trump backfired. The BJP has been preparing for an out‑of‑cycle census by pushing the 2021 Census to 2026, aiming to redraw constituency boundaries before the next general election. In the United States, the Republican Party redrew congressional districts in eight states at Trump’s direction, hoping to turn Democratic seats and protect its own, but it lost most of the targeted seats and even saw traditional strongholds such as Texas and Florida slip away. Analysts note that gerrymandering works only if voter preferences stay the same; when a party’s core supporters change their minds, map changes matter little. The Bankipur by‑election in Bihar in August illustrated this point: the seat was demographically designed for a BJP win, yet upper‑caste voters turned against the party and the BJP suffered a crushing defeat. ## Context The BJP’s push reflects a broader trend of governments seeking to use census data for political advantage, while the Bankipur result underscores that voter sentiment can overturn even carefully engineered electoral maps.