On majoritarianism, the ghost of Jinnah, and the philosophical foundations of a democracy that counts some votes more than others

John Locke, writing in his Second Treatise of Government in 1689, proposed a deceptively simple compact: that legitimate political authority derives not from the divine right of kings nor from the brute fact of military conquest, but from the consent of the governed, each individual surrendering a portion of natural liberty to a commonwealth in exchange for the protection of life, liberty, and property. The operative word, so easily passed over, is each. Not some. Not the majority. Each. The social contract, for Locke, was universal in its application, or it was nothing at all. It was a covenant, not a calculation.

Three hundred and thirty-seven years after Locke set down his quill, the results of the Assam Assembly election 2026 invite us to revisit his compact, not to celebrate it, but to measure how far the world’s largest democracy has drifted from its philosophical foundations. The numbers, examined without sentiment, produce a conclusion that is both arithmetically precise and morally uncomfortable: in Assam, not all votes are equal. Some votes, it turns out, are considerably more equal than others.

I. The Mathematics of Unequal Citizenship

The facts are not disputed. Assam’s 126 assembly constituencies were redrawn in 2023 following the first delimitation exercise in nearly five decades. The stated purpose was equity: to bring constituency sizes in line with population realities. The outcome, examined constituency by constituency, suggests something more complex and considerably less equitable.

A voter in Amri, therefore, wields three times the political weight of a voter in Dalgaon. Their representative speaks for 96,000 people; the Dalgaon MLA speaks for nearly three times that number. Locke’s each has been quietly replaced by a sliding scale. And the sliding scale, it is worth noting, does not slide randomly. It slides in a very particular direction: downward for constituencies where Muslims form the majority and upward for constituencies where they do not.

II. The Satirist’s Irony: Jinnah Was Right

It is one of history’s more exquisite ironies, the kind that would have delighted Voltaire and appalled Nehru, that the data produced by the 2026 Assam election constitutes, if one squints at it from a certain angle, a retrospective vindication of Mohammed Ali Jinnah.

Jinnah’s central argument, the one that sundered the subcontinent and cost a million lives, was this: that in a democracy defined by simple majority rule, a Muslim minority could never be structurally secure. That the arithmetic of Hindu numerical superiority would, over time and through entirely legal and democratic mechanisms, translate into the permanent political subordination of Muslim citizens. He did not argue that Hindus were evil. He argued that majorities, given sufficient institutional power and sufficient motivation, tend to use that power in the interests of majorities. He called this structural inevitability. He called it the reason for Pakistan.

The liberal consensus of independent India rejected this argument with contempt. It was communal. It was cynical. It was the reasoning of a man who preferred partition to the patience required by pluralism. Ambedkar’s India was to be different—secular, constitutional, and blind to religion in the distribution of political rights.

And yet here we are, seventy-eight years later, in a state where the delimitation exercise has reduced Muslim-majority seats from thirty-five to twenty-two, where the largest electorates cluster in Muslim-majority constituencies and the smallest in Hindu and tribal ones, and where a cabinet minister campaigned in Barpeta by stating openly that the boundaries had been drawn to ensure that “miyas” could not win the seat—and won. Jinnah, one imagines, would not have been surprised. He would merely have noted, with the thin satisfaction of the vindicated prophet, that he had said as much.

Let us be precise about what is being said here, because precision matters in philosophy as it does in electoral arithmetic. This is not an argument for Pakistan. It is not an argument that Jinnah’s solution was correct. The partition was a catastrophe. The two-nation theory was morally bankrupt. These things remain true.

What is being said is narrower and more uncomfortable: that Jinnah’s diagnosis—not his prescription—has found its evidence in the constituency maps of Assam, 2026. That a democracy that consistently arranges its institutions to dilute the political weight of a minority has ceased, in the Lockean sense, to be a democracy at all.

III. Majoritarianism Is Not Democracy

This distinction between democracy and majoritarianism is one that political philosophers have been drawing with increasing urgency since at least Alexis de Tocqueville, who warned in 1835 of the “tyranny of the majority” as democracy’s most seductive and most dangerous internal corruption. De Tocqueville was writing about the United States of America and its treatment of Black citizens—a context not entirely without resonance for our purposes. His insight was that a system in which fifty-one percent of the population can legally, procedurally, and with full democratic sanction systematically disadvantage the remaining forty-nine percent is not a free society. It is an elective despotism.

John Stuart Mill, writing a generation later, was more precise still. In Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Mill argued that a genuine democracy requires not merely that majorities prevail, but that minorities are represented—that their voices reach the legislature in proportion to their numbers, that their interests are heard, and that the system does not structurally exclude them from political power. A system that fails this test is, in Mill’s formulation, not representative government. It is a majority government—a meaningfully different and considerably lesser thing.

The Assam data meets Mill’s test for majority government with uncomfortable precision. Of the twenty-two seats that Congress won in 2026, all but one are constituencies with Muslim voter pluralities. The party that claims to represent pluralism, secularism, and inclusive nationhood is, in effect, the party of Muslim constituencies—because the delimitation and its consequences have made winning Hindu-majority seats structurally improbable for any non-BJP formation. The political landscape has been sorted, constituency by constituency, into two almost hermetically separate worlds.

IV. The Philosophical Case for Hope

And yet. And yet.

The same philosophical tradition that furnishes our critique also furnishes our reason for hope; and it would be a philosophical dereliction to invoke Locke and Mill only in accusation without also invoking them in aspiration.

Locke’s social contract was not a description of what governments are. It was a prescription for what they ought to be — and, crucially, a theory of what happens when they fail. When a government violates the compact, when it ceases to protect the natural rights of all it governs, the people retain what Locke called the “right of revolution”—not necessarily violent revolution, but the right to withdraw consent, to reconstitute authority, and to demand a more perfect covenant. In constitutional democracies, this right is exercised through courts, through civil society, through journalism, and through the slow accumulation of moral pressure on institutions.

India’s Supreme Court has, in the past, demonstrated a capacity for structural intervention in electoral matters that most constitutional courts would envy. The very delimitation exercise under scrutiny was supervised by the Election Commission: an institution whose independence, though tested in recent years, remains constitutionally guaranteed and civically defended. The data we have examined in this essay is public. It is being written about, argued over, and contested. That contestation is itself a form of democratic life.

Amartya Sen, India’s greatest living contribution to political philosophy, has argued throughout his career that democracy is not merely a mechanism for aggregating preferences—it is a practice of public reasoning. A society that reasons publicly about its own injustices, that names them, measures them, and argues about them, has not abandoned the democratic project. It is, in Sen’s formulation, engaged in its most essential activity.

The voters of Assam—all of them, Hindu and Muslim, Assamese and Bengali, tribal and plains-dweller—deserve a system in which their franchise carries equal weight. That is not a partisan demand. It is not a Congress demand or a BJP demand. It is a Lockean demand, a Millian demand, a human demand, and a fair and equitable demand that flows from the first principles of the political philosophy on which the Indian Constitution was constructed and democracy itself rests.

“India did not choose democracy because it was expedient. It chose democracy because it believed, with Locke, that legitimate authority can only rest on equal consent. That belief has not been repealed. It has merely been tested.”

The ghost of Jinnah should not be allowed the last word in a conversation about India’s democracy. He was right about the danger. He was catastrophically wrong about the remedy. The remedy—the only remedy that does not cost a million lives—is the patient, stubborn insistence on the equal political weight of every citizen, regardless of which side of a redrawn boundary line they happen to live on.

Assam’s rivers have been bridged. Its roads have been built. Its economy has grown. These things are real, and they matter. But a state whose largest constituencies are three times the size of its smallest, whose delimitation reduces minority representation by a third, and whose cabinet ministers campaign openly on the exclusion of communities from political power has a bridge yet to build—one that no chief minister’s inauguration speech will suffice for.

It is the bridge between the India that exists and the India that Locke, Ambedkar, and Patel—and yes, even the India that Jinnah feared would never come—would recognize as worthy of the name democracy.

That bridge is not impossible. It is merely unbuilt. And in a democracy, the unbuilt is always still only a matter of political will and public understanding. The status quo can only be sustained by an unbothered or brainwashed citizenry.

Note: The views expressed invoke the philosophical traditions of Locke, Mill, de Tocqueville, and Sen in the service of democratic accountability and not partisan advantage.