The debate swirling around the Delimitation Bill 2026 – which sought to expand the Lok Sabha from 543 to 850 seats and correspondingly balloon state assemblies – has been framed almost entirely as a contest between north and south India. Southern states, which successfully controlled their populations over decades, fear being punished for their discipline by losing proportional representation to the more populous Hindi heartland. This is a legitimate grievance, and the constitutional amendment bill was, in fact, voted down on April 17, 2026 – a rare parliamentary defeat for the ruling establishment.But in the frantic arithmetic of seats, share percentages, and regional pride, a far more fundamental question has been studiously ignored: Does India need more politicians at all?The answer, examined honestly, is an emphatic no. And the reason lies in understanding the true nature of the Indian political class – what it is, how it came to be, what purpose it actually serves, and who ultimately pays for it. The delimitation project, whatever its fate, holds up a mirror to one of the deepest structural contradictions of post-independence India: not the tension between Hindus and Muslims, not between upper castes and lower castes, not even between the north and the south – but between the people and the political class that claims to represent them while systematically feeding off them.The birth of a new eliteWhen India gained independence in 1947, the political class carried a certain moral weight. Freedom fighters had, in many cases, sacrificed careers, comfort, and freedom itself for the nation. The first parliament, convened in 1952 with 489 members, contained lawyers, educators, social reformers, and genuine mass leaders – men and women who had earned their standing through struggle and sacrifice.That world vanished within a generation.What replaced it was something qualitatively different: a professional political class for whom electoral politics was not a form of public service but a business model – and among the most lucrative available. Unlike medicine, law, engineering, or commerce, entry into this profession requires no certified skill, no demonstrated expertise, no formal qualification. What it requires, and what it systematically rewards, is a specific constellation of traits: the capacity for shameless self-promotion, talent for sycophancy toward those above, the ability to intimidate or cajole those below, and, most importantly, a complete detachment from the moral inhibitions that constrain ordinary human behaviour.India did not accidentally produce this class. It produced it structurally. The combination of a first-past-the-post electoral system, a caste-fragmented electorate susceptible to identity mobilisation, a weak rule of law that permits criminality to go unpunished, and the sheer scale of state patronage available to those in power – all of this created the precise ecological niche in which the modern Indian politician thrives. Seventy-five years after independence, this class has not only survived but multiplied, entrenched, and refined its methods.The anatomy of parasitismTo understand the Indian political class, one must move beyond theory to function. In theory, politicians represent citizens, legislate, and hold the executive accountable. In practice, they operate as intermediaries – positioned between citizens and the state, and between capital and public authority – extracting rent in both directions.At the bottom, the politician is a gatekeeper. Access to ration cards, licences, welfare schemes, or basic services is rarely direct; it is mediated through political brokers. This opacity is not incidental but structural – simplification would eliminate the intermediary. Digital reforms have dented this system at the margins, but its core logic remains intact.At the top, politicians are indispensable to capital. Infrastructure projects, mining leases, land acquisition, zoning and regulatory clearances all require political facilitation. This informal economy – invisible in official accounts but universally recognised – is the real site of wealth generation in politics. Data compiled by the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR), based on election affidavits, provides a rare quantified glimpse of this system.Also read: Collapsing Bridges, Crumbling Infrastructure: The Reality of Modi’s Corruption-Free IndiaThe numbers are stark. Across 4,001 MLAs, the average declared assets exceed Rs 13 crore, with total assets crossing Rs 54,000 crore – more than the combined annual budgets of Nagaland, Mizoram, and Sikkim. At the national level, the average MP holds Rs 38.33 crore in assets, with total declared wealth of Rs 29,251 crore.The trend is even more revealing. In the 18th Lok Sabha (2024), 93% of MPs are crorepatis, up from 58% in 2009. The average assets of winning candidates have tripled in a decade, from Rs 14.7 crore in 2014 to Rs 46.3 crore in 2024. Among MPs recontesting between 2019 and 2024, assets rose by 43% in just five years; for those serving across three terms, they more than doubled (110%). No legitimate profession without specialised skill produces such returns. These are rents, accumulated through access to state power.Wealth is not incidental to electoral success; it is a precondition. In 2024, a crorepati candidate had a 19.6% chance of winning, compared to just 0.7% for candidates with assets below Rs 1 crore. Parliament has effectively become a closed circuit: wealth enables entry, and entry multiplies wealth.The structure also links wealth with criminality. MPs with declared criminal cases report average assets of Rs 50.03 crore, compared to Rs 30.50 crore for those without – suggesting not coincidence but shared incentives.And all these numbers are self-declared; the actuals may just be imagined!Beyond active legislators lies a growing tail of entitlement. As of 2018–19, 3,580 former MPs – along with dependents – drew pensions costing Rs 70.50 crore annually. They retain lifetime benefits: subsidised travel, comprehensive healthcare, and other privileges, regardless of personal wealth. Each election adds permanently to this stock of obligations, embedding a compounding fiscal burden into the system.The political class, in effect, does not produce value. It monetises access – to licences, land, contracts, and regulatory discretion. It is less a public service than a system of toll collection, positioned at every critical interface between citizen, state, and capital.The visible and invisible costs of ruleThe burden imposed by this system operates on two levels: visible expenditure and invisible loss.The visible costs are substantial. Each MP costs the exchequer roughly Rs 4–4.5 crore annually, including salary, allowances, travel, staff, and perks. These include a Rs 1.24 lakh monthly salary, Rs 2 lakh housing allowance, free flights, unlimited rail travel, subsidised utilities, and comprehensive medical care. Even a single term guarantees a lifetime pension of Rs 31,000 per month.MLAs replicate this structure at the state level, often at comparable or higher cost. Around each legislator grows an ecosystem of aides, security, and logistical support, multiplying expenditure. In addition, MPs control constituency development funds of about Rs 5 crore annually – discretionary resources that function largely as instruments of patronage.Expansion of legislative bodies would institutionalise these costs. A larger Lok Sabha and expanded state assemblies would add thousands of crores annually – not as one-time expenditure, but as permanent fiscal commitments.Yet these direct costs are minor compared to the invisible ones. Distorted policy decisions, delayed projects, and contracts awarded on political rather than technical criteria impose systemic inefficiencies. Informal extraction – bribes, commissions, facilitation fees – pervades everyday governance. Talent is excluded from public life unless it conforms to this system, while policy is often designed to sustain dependency rather than enable autonomy.None of these costs appear in budgets. But they define the real economic and institutional burden of the political class – borne continuously, and disproportionately, by ordinary citizens.The intermediary class: between capital and peopleThe political class in India occupies a structural position that political scientists have been reluctant to name clearly, perhaps because it is uncomfortably reminiscent of older Marxist vocabulary. Nevertheless, the reality demands description.Indian capitalism, from its post-liberalisation acceleration, has required a specific kind of political mediation. The transition from a state-controlled to a market-oriented economy did not reduce the importance of the state in economic life – it transformed its role. Instead of the state allocating resources through planning, it now allocates resources through regulation, licensing, land, and law. This makes political access, if anything, more valuable than before. The businessman who can influence regulation is worth more than the one who cannot; the contractor who can ensure a favourable tender is worth more than one relying on open competition.Into this structural requirement stepped the Indian political class, not as an accidental corruption of democracy but as a functional necessity of the system as it actually operates. The politician brokers the relationship between capital seeking returns and a state possessing the power to grant or withhold them. In exchange, the politician receives a share – in campaign financing, in post-term employment, in shareholdings held through family members, in land deals, in a hundred other forms that official investigation rarely reaches.This is why the political class, despite its public unpopularity, is so deeply stable. It is not merely powerful. It is useful – to the class above it. The angry voter who wants to “throw the rascals out” repeatedly discovers that new rascals, drawn from the same structural position, behave in essentially the same way. The problem is not individual moral failure. It is systemic function.Sycophancy as professional qualificationThere is a final dimension that must be named without euphemism: the deliberate selection, within the political class itself, for a specific personality type.Large national parties – and regional ones too – have increasingly become pyramidal structures of loyalty in which advancement depends not on competence or integrity but on the ability to subordinate oneself completely to those above. The culture of sycophancy in Indian politics is not a bug. It is a feature. It serves the purpose of concentrating power at the apex while creating a disciplined, compliant apparatus below.The legislator who asks uncomfortable questions, who votes against the party line on matters of conscience, who refuses to participate in the collective theatre of manufactured loyalty – this person does not survive in Indian political life. The system selects against independence and for compliance. The result, seen in parliament and assemblies alike, is a political class that is, in its large majority, incapable of independent thought on public matters, unwilling to take public positions that contradict the party line, and professionally invested in the perpetuation of exactly the structures that keep them in place.This class is not going to reform itself. It has no incentive to do so. The answer to every problem it faces – declining credibility, growing public cynicism, the difficulty of managing larger and more restless constituencies – is more politicians, not better ones. More seats, more intermediaries, more gatekeepers, more toll booths. Which is precisely what the Delimitation Bill, 2026 proposed.The numbers game and its real purposeThe government’s official justification for the expansion was threefold: better representation through updated population-based allocation, activation of women’s reservation under the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, and the correction of long-standing imbalances created by the post-1976 freeze on seat numbers.These are not entirely spurious arguments. India’s population has grown dramatically since the 1971 census on which the current seat allocation is based. Some correction is genuinely overdue. And women’s reservation in parliament is a legitimate democratic objective that India has been slow to achieve.But these arguments, even when valid, are arguments about redistribution and correction of representation, not about the absolute expansion of the political class. Women’s reservation, for instance, could be activated within the existing 543 seats by reserving a third of them – a decision that requires political will, not more politicians. The population-representation argument requires redrawing constituency boundaries, not multiplying them. The only argument that genuinely requires more seats is the argument that the political class needs more seats – and that argument is made implicitly, never explicitly.The real mathematics of the expansion is this: 307 new Lok Sabha members, somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 new MLAs across the country, and all the apparatus – the offices, the staff, the funds, the security, the patronage networks – that each of them will require. This is not democracy deepening. This is the political class replicating itself at public expense.Conclusion: the contradiction that will not go awayThe Delimitation Bill 2026 was defeated, at least for now. The government lacked the two-thirds majority required for a constitutional amendment and was forced to withdraw the legislation. This is, in a narrow sense, a victory – though it was driven primarily by regional anxieties about the north-south seat distribution rather than by any principled opposition to the expansion of the political class per se.The underlying pressure will return. The next census, demographic realities and the unfulfilled promise of women’s reservation will keep the question alive. The political class will find ways to revisit it, perhaps in modified form, perhaps incrementally.When it does, the debate should not be allowed to collapse again into a regional arithmetic exercise. The real issue is structural. India, seventy-five years after independence, has a political class that has grown from a nationalist movement with moral authority into a self-perpetuating caste of intermediaries whose primary function is to manage, for a price, the relationship between capital and governance on one side and between the state and the citizen on the other.This class is not the solution to India’s problems. In many important respects, it is the problem. Expanding it – adding hundreds of new seats, creating thousands of new political careers, writing billions of new rupees of structural expenditure into public budgets – does not strengthen democracy. It strengthens the political class at the expense of democracy.The fundamental contradiction in Indian public life is not between Hindus and Muslims, not between states and the Union, not between the north and the south. It is between the people and those who have made a career of claiming to represent them while systematically extracting value from the very act of representation.Until that contradiction is named, and until the people develop the political consciousness and the institutional mechanisms to resolve it, no delimitation exercise – whether it produces 543 seats or 850 – will alter the essential character of the system. It will only make it larger.Anand Teltumbde is former CEO of PIL, professor of IIT Kharagpur, and GIM, Goa. He is also a writer and civil rights activist.