New Delhi: The Lok Sabha on Friday approved a 39-member joint parliamentary committee (JPC) to examine The Constitution (One Hundred and Twenty-Ninth Amendment) Bill, 2024 and the amendments to the Government of Union Territories Act, 1963, the twin bills that aim to usher in simultaneous state and national elections.
The panel, earlier planned for 31 members, will now have 39 members after some smaller parties met Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla and demanded their inclusion in the important committee. There are 27 Lok Sabha MPs and 12 Rajya Sabha lawmakers in it.
“The government agreed that the matter is very important and it relates to the reformation of the election process of our country, so we agreed to include most of the prominent political parties,” said parliamentary affairs minister Kiren Rijiju .
He said there was no limit on the size of the JPC and pointed out that one parliamentary panel examining centre-state relations had 51 members.
“The resolutions have been passed by the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha today and the Speaker will issue the formal order of constitution of the JPC,” Rijiju said.
The 12 members from Rajya sabha nominated for the JPC were the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Ghanshyam Tiwari, K Laxman, Bhubaneswar Kalita and Kavita Patidar; the Trinamool Congress’s Saket Gokhale; Janata Dal (United)’s Sanjay Jha; Aam Aadmi Party’s Sanjay Singh; Congress’s Mukul Wasnik and Randeep Surjewala; Biju Janata Dal’s Manas Ranjan Mangaraj; Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s P Wilson and YSR Congress Party’s Vijaysai Reddy.
The members will include Congress’s newly-elected MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, BJP lawmakers Bansuri Swaraj, Anurag Thakur, and Bhartruhari Mahtab among the members.
Officials said former minister and senior BJP MP PP Chaudhary has been appointed as the chairman of the joint panel. BJP’s CM Ramesh, Parshottambhai Rupala, Vishnu Dayal Ram, Sambit Patra, Anil Baluni, Baijayant Panda, Sanjay Jaiswal and Vishnu Datt Sharma will be among the members of the panel.
The Congress lawmakers Priyanka Gandhi, Manish Tewari and Sukhdeo Bhagat will be in the panel.
Samajwadi Party’s Dharmendra Yadav, Trinamool Congress’s Kalyan Banerjee, Dravida Munnetra K’s T.M. Selvaganapathi’s names are also included in the proposal for the JPC.
Samajwadi Party’s Dharmendra Yadav, Trinamool Congress’s Kalyan Banerjee, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam’s TM Selvaganapathi’s names were also included in the proposal for the JPC.
Telugu Desam Party’s GM Harish Balayogi, Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) leader Supriya Sule, Shiv Sena’s Shrikant Eknath Shinde, Lok Janshakti Party’s Shambhavi, Rashtriya Lok Dal’s Chandan Chauhan and Janasena’s Balashowry Vallabhaneni were the other members.
The panel is scheduled to complete a report by the first day of the last week of the 2025 budget session.
A senior Opposition leader didn’t rule out political divisions along the party lines in the panel as all Opposition parties opposed the bills during its introduction. The two could only be introduced after taking votes or division in the House.
The the bills are the first step towards implementing sweeping changes in the way polls are conducted in the world’s largest democracy, but the National Democratic Alliance faces a stiff challenge to pass it in the House where the ruling dispensation doesn’t have two-thirds majority, a condition to pass a Constitution amendment.
Union home minister Amit Shah had announced in the House that the Prime Minister Narendra Modi wanted the two bills to be sent to a JPC for detailed review after the Opposition forced voting over the scope of the bills’ introduction. As many as 263 members voted in favour of the bill and 198 against it.
The proposal to align elections – known colloquially as one nation, one poll (ONOP) – was a part of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s 2024 poll manifesto and is backed by Modi, who argues that it will trim election costs and give more time for development.
But the proposal is fiercely opposed by a raft of political parties and activists who allege that it will hurt democratic accountability and federalism. The bills propose the alignment process to begin in 2029 and the first simultaneous elections in 2034.