A constitutional body created precisely for moments like this one has been gathering dust for decades — and Congress MP Dr. Shashi Tharoor wants that to change. Writing in his latest TharoorThink column on Friday, 31 October 2026, the Thiruvananthapuram MP argues that the politically charged question of delimitation cannot be resolved by Parliament acting alone, and that India's federal architecture already has the tool to handle it: the long-dormant Inter-State Council.

What the Inter-State Council is — and why it has barely met

Established under Article 263 of the Constitution, the Inter-State Council was designed to investigate and discuss subjects of common interest between the Centre and the states. It sat as a theoretical provision for over four decades before the Sarkaria Commission (1988) — set up to examine centre-state relations — formally recommended activating it. The VP Singh government finally constituted the body in 1990.

Since then, the Council has convened only a handful of times, with meetings growing increasingly infrequent after its first active decade. Critics have long argued that successive governments — regardless of party — have preferred bilateral negotiations or parliamentary majorities over the slower, more inclusive forum that the Council provides. Tharoor's column lands that charge squarely at the current dispensation.

Delimitation and the north-south fault line

The urgency behind Tharoor's argument is directly tied to a constitutional clock. The 84th Constitutional Amendment of 2001 froze the delimitation of Lok Sabha and Assembly constituencies until after the first census conducted post-2026. That window is now opening, and southern states are watching with anxiety.

The fear is straightforward: southern states that invested heavily in population control over decades could see their parliamentary representation shrink relative to northern states with higher population growth, if seats are redrawn purely on headcount. This is not a hypothetical grievance — it has animated federal politics for years, and any fresh delimitation exercise will force the question into the open.

That asymmetry is precisely why Tharoor argues a parliamentary majority alone cannot — and should not — settle the matter. The Inter-State Council, with its mandate to bring state governments into deliberation, offers a constitutionally grounded path to consensus rather than imposition.

The mechanism that a census exercise demands

What to watch now: whether any state government formally echoes the call for an Inter-State Council meeting, and whether the Centre responds with a scheduled session or a formal agenda ahead of the post-2026 census exercise. Parliamentary or state assembly resolutions demanding Council convocation would significantly raise the political stakes.

Tharoor's intervention, timed as the delimitation debate moves from abstract to imminent, puts the federal governance question at the centre of a conversation that will define India's parliamentary map for a generation. Neglecting Article 263 once more is no longer a procedural choice — it is a political one, and the country's southern states will be watching every step of the way.