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Comment by ta_vf7xjd34cc | Hacker News Reader

The American Left:

> The most obvious result of this scheme is that individual voters in small-population states tend to have more power in choosing the President than individual voters in high-population states, and that difference can skew an election.

The Indian Left:[1]

> enlarging the numbers of lawmakers in relation to population growth in a way penalizes those states that have achieved more in terms of slowing down their demographic growth

Completely inconsistent, self-serving arguments which basically want to change the electoral system because their side is losing.

[1] Equality or Fraternity? Challenges of India’s New Constituency Delimitation (https://thediplomat.com/2021/11/equality-or-fraternity-chall...)

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Not only is this an obvious self-serving attempt to guarantee electoral victory, it argues backwards, managing to make historical demographic facts "racist" in and of themselves. It is also a naked attempt to increase the already top-heavy influence of a few cities over the national political scene, which would effectively disenfranchise voters in a majority of states.

The other side is just as self-serving.

Have you considered that slowing down demographic growth might be an important goal in Indian politics, but not so much in American politics?

When your accusations of hypocrisy are just picking two random writers who have no connection, attributing them tk two different broad diverse groups that each containing many and different viewpoints and are largely unconnected, and then arguing as if these two broad diverse groups are like a single hive mind that should have one consistent viewpoint... maybe instead of doing a hypocrisy based ad hominem against an entity you’ve invented for the purpose you should just either discuss the actual issue?

I like this comment, except the last 3 words. Not that I necessarily disagree, but it's not conducive to productive conversation (not to mention goes against HN's guidelines)

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You are right, and I have edited the original comment to remove the offending words, which were unnecessary and unhelpful.

> two random writers

You know just as well as I do that these positions are not those of two random writers, but that of the ideological Left in each country.[1][2][3] I have seen these discussed at length on tv, youtube and in print in both countries.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/06/10/1002594108/a-growing-number-o...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/12/us/politics/electoral-col...

[3] https://scroll.in/article/1049779/modis-new-parliament-could...

How is it surprising that the policies of two factions that have nothing to do with each other, who aren't even on the same continent, are potentially inconsistent with each other?

Yeah, could you even imagine an American politician talking about "achieving more in slowing down demographic growth"?

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