The Congress party has appealed to activist Sonam Wangchuk to end his ongoing hunger strike, even as senior party leaders continue to publicly back the cause behind his protest. The appeal underscores a delicate balancing act within the party, which supports the substance of Wangchuk's demand while expressing concern over the toll a prolonged fast could take on him.
Wangchuk's hunger strike is tied to a demand for the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. The demand stems from allegations of irregularities in the NEET examination and other assessments, issues that have genuinely unsettled students, parents and educators across the country. The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, widely known as NEET, is the standardized examination used to determine admission into medical and dental colleges in India, and any suggestion of tampering or leaks in such a high-stakes test tends to generate widespread public anxiety given the sheer number of aspirants who depend on a fair process to secure their academic futures.
Congress leaders including Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge have openly supported Wangchuk's cause for some time. At the same time, the party is urging him to call off the strike, a combination of solidarity and caution that reflects the sensitive position political parties often find themselves in when an activist takes a personal health risk to press a demand they broadly endorse. Hunger strikes have long been used in India as a form of civil protest to draw attention to grievances, and calls to end them typically reflect concern for the individual's well-being rather than disagreement with the underlying cause.
Separately, party communication in-charge Jairam Ramesh recently outlined the Congress agenda for the upcoming monsoon session of Parliament during a meeting held in New Delhi. The session is set to begin on July 17, 2026, and the list of issues the party plans to raise is extensive. Monsoon sessions of Parliament typically run for several weeks and serve as a key venue for opposition parties to question the government on policy, spending and pending legislation, making the agenda-setting stage an important indicator of what debates lie ahead.
Among the matters Congress intends to raise are allegations around the alleged theft of donations meant for the Ram Temple, the implementation of ethanol-blended fuels, and a broader trend of question paper leaks affecting competitive examinations nationwide. Each of these issues carries the potential to spark serious debate on its own, and their combined presence on a single session's agenda suggests the upcoming weeks in Parliament could be unusually contentious.
Going into the session, Congress has laid out several clear positions:
- The party is prepared to oppose any delimitation Bill that the government may attempt to introduce.
- Congress is pushing for the immediate enactment of the Women's Reservation Bill, which has been stalled for a long time.
- The party is demanding that the government provide clearer information about proposed legislation before discussions begin.
Delimitation refers to the process of redrawing the boundaries of electoral constituencies and reallocating the number of seats in legislative bodies such as the Lok Sabha, typically based on updated population data. Because such changes can shift the balance of political representation among states and regions, delimitation exercises are historically among the most politically sensitive undertakings a government can pursue, often prompting concerns from states that fear losing influence relative to others. The Women's Reservation Bill, for its part, has been a long-pending piece of legislation aimed at reserving a share of seats in legislative bodies for women, and its repeated delays over the years have made its enactment a recurring point of contention among parties advocating for greater gender representation in politics.
Ramesh also noted that, despite some divisions within the opposition, Congress remains firm on upholding constitutional integrity. He pointed out that the Bharatiya Janata Party is unlikely to secure a two-thirds majority, a threshold that matters significantly because constitutional amendments in India require such a supermajority in Parliament to pass. This arithmetic, Ramesh suggested, makes opposition unity even more important in the coming sessions, since a united opposition front would have greater leverage in shaping or blocking amendment bills that require broad legislative consensus.
Adding another layer to the pre-session maneuvering, Kharge wrote directly to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, calling for an all-party meeting to discuss proposed amendments related to delimitation before any bills are formally tabled in Parliament. In the letter, he expressed frustration that previous requests for such consultations had gone entirely unanswered. Calls for all-party meetings ahead of major legislative changes are a longstanding convention in Indian parliamentary practice, intended to build cross-party consensus on matters that touch the structure of representation itself, and Kharge's letter frames the absence of a response as a breakdown of that norm.
Kharge's letter comes amid reports that the government is planning to reintroduce a revised 131st Amendment Bill, which could significantly alter the composition of Lok Sabha seats. Such a change would not be minor; it would affect political representation at a fundamental level, potentially reshaping how power is distributed among states and constituencies for years to come. As the monsoon session approaches, Congress appears intent on pressing on multiple fronts simultaneously — education, electoral integrity, social justice, delimitation and the Women's Reservation Bill among them — leaving open the question of whether the opposition can maintain enough unity to force meaningful engagement on any of these fronts, or whether the sheer volume of issues will dilute the impact of each.
