The census, delimitation and election cycle is haunting Indian democracy and the crisis it has brought is starkly visible in Assam, more than any other state. While West Bengal is battling large scale voter deletions with the Special Intensive Revision, Assam went through something similar almost an election cycle ahead, in 2019, with the National Register of Citizens (NRC). What followed the NRC was the delimitation exercise in Assam in 2023, which modified its electoral boundaries in a way that calling it anything but absurd would be an understatement.The delimitation of Assam has always been controversial with the local population opposing the draft electoral boundaries proposed by the Delimitation Commission. This opposition did not just come from the Muslim population, whom the delimitation process targeted to suppress their representation. Overall, the number of constituencies where tribal populations have a population base has gone up, while the number of constituencies where Muslims live have gone down.But beyond this, the constituencies themselves have been shaped in a way that no matter how elections are held, the groups that dominate a constituency numerically cannot change. Here is an attempt to visualise these maps geographically.Geo-referenced document of the electoral boundaries of Assam. Source: Delimitation Commission of Assam.Neither the Delimitation Commission nor Election Commission of India publish electoral maps of constituencies in a scalable format. Instead, what we get are pdf documents that are not machine readable – just like the electoral rolls. The map itself has no location markers of latitudes or longitudes to indicate the exact positions of the boundaries. I took this map, geo-referenced the known borders of Assam and re-drew all the electoral boundaries of every constituency.All these files are being shared here for anyone to work on them under CC BY 4.0 Attribution 4.0 International. Any errors are regretted, and the only authenticated source for these electoral maps are the Delimitation Commission and Election Commission of India, who don’t want you to know what the maps look like.Let’s look at what these maps show us, how Assam has been gerry-mandered to make sure only dominant communities win the electoral constituencies.Gauripur-Electoral Constituency No. 7 of Assam.The Gauripur constituency of Assam, located in the Dhubri district of lower Assam division in western Assam, looks geographically heavily manipulated because it cuts through rivers and roads. An elected representative of this region cannot even visit all parts of his constituency, so erratic are its electoral boundaries.This has been a constant complaint to the Delimitation Commission from the local population: that electoral boundaries don’t even respect natural geographic boundaries of rivers and mountains.Abhyapuri-Electoral Constituency No. 16 of Assam.In Abhyapuri constituency, the corners of the electoral boundary have been so blatantly manipulated that the neighbouring constituency of Srijangram cuts into a mountainous region midway – taking one part of the mountain in Srijangram and leaving the rest in Abhyapuri.Srijangram-Electoral Constituency No. 17 of Assam.These electoral borders make no geographic sense in Srijangram. No geographer or map maker would make such a map. Unless they were made by a baby scribbling randomly, someone clearly wanted to separate certain areas from each other to ensure that the people who reside there were divided.The Mangoldai constituency doesn’t even have continuous borders. Two distinct parts, geographically separated, have been made part of a single constituency. This is a clear indication of manipulated electoral borders during the delimitation exercise in Assam. Delimitation as a process is only concerned with population based re-drawing of boundaries – and did not care how spatially irregular these electoral borders would end up.Mangaldoi-Electoral Constituency No. 50 of Assam. (Created with DataWrapper)In Hailakandi region of Assam’s Barak valley, which has a porous border with Bangladesh and concerns about populations moving across it, we see the electoral boundaries manipulated in a way that the maps look like a moving amoeba – with each corner trying to pull the body in a different direction.Hailakandi-Electoral Constituency No. 121 of AssamThe delimitation in Assam has clearly produced electoral borders that lock people into permanent geographies that won’t allow any changes to electoral representation, making the power of dominant classes of those regions permanent.India’s election process promises fair representation to all communities, with a guarantee for transparent procedural and constitutional freedoms. The delimitation of Assam takes that away completely, making elections a merely mechanical process with no way for people to exercise their constitutional rights. This is a dangerous turn in Indian democracy that will have far-reaching consequences with the proposed delimitation of all electoral constituencies across India after the ongoing 2027 Census.The delimitation of Assam was challenged in the Supreme Court by Gourav Gogoi of the Indian National Congress party, with no indication that the court will acting on this grand manipulation of electoral procedures.Srinivas Kodali is a hacktivist based in Cyberabad.