Increasing the strength of Parliament’s lower house to 850 is a “joke”, Congress leader Shashi Tharoor has said, contending that it would turn it into a ‘desi’ version of the Chinese People’s Consultative Conference, which was countered by BJP leaders. Participating in the Stanford India Conference 2026 in California on Sunday (May 10, 2026), BJP leader Tejasvi Surya argued that delimitation was a “democratic necessity” to ensure more accountability from elected representatives and termed it “absurd” to allow composition of Parliament to remain frozen in time at 543 – the current strength of the Lok Sabha. “The 1971 population cannot cater to a democracy of 140 crore people in 2026,” Mr. Surya, the Lok Sabha MP, countered Mr. Tharoor, who cited the example of the U.S. Congress which continues to have a strength of 435 members since 1929. BJP leader K. Annamalai said the delimitation exercise was a “grand bargain” between the North and South Indian States before the outcome of the ongoing Census is made public. Mr. Annamalai, the former Tamil Nadu BJP chief, …