MCD Elections: Supreme Court issues notice to Centre, Election Commission on no delay

 

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court sought response of the Centre and the Delhi state election commission on a petition filed by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) for conducting municipal elections in the Capital without any further delay.

The petition by AAP cited the mandate under Article 243U of the Constitution requiring elections to municipal corporations to be held before expiry of its five-year tenure. AAP told the Court that the state election commission of Delhi was duty bound to hold elections. However, pursuant to the notification of the Delhi Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Act, 2022 on April 5, the State Election Commission issued notification on April 20 suspending indefinitely all preparatory efforts for the conduct of the 2022 elections.

The bench of justices AM Khanwilkar, AS Oka and JB Pardiwala issued notice to the Centre, state election commission and the special officer who is incharge the unified MCD and posted the matter for hearing on July 26.

Senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi appearing for AAP, along with advocate Shadan Farasat, pointed out that on July 8, the central government constituted a delimitation commission to redraw the map of municipal wards and the elections are now being delayed on account of this exercise.

Singhvi said, “The non-conduct and non-scheduling of the municipal elections in Delhi directly violates the mandate of Article 243U of the Constitution, Section 4 of the DMC Act, and repeated rulings of this court.”

He cited the case of local body elections in Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh this year in which the top court came down hard against civic polls being held up pending fresh delimitation exercise.

In its petition, the AAP said, “The important question of constitutional significance raised in the present petition is whether elections to municipal bodies the tenures of which have expired, may be indefinitely postponed and an unelected official designated to run the body in the interim, merely on account of pending fresh delimitation of constituencies.”

Elections to the three municipal corporations were dramatically delayed in March, when the state election commission announced during a press conference, which was called to announce the schedule for the polls, that the Centre intends to unify the three civic bodies. Elections were scheduled to be held in April.

This led to a major tussle between the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and the Bharatiya Janata Party that was ruling the three MCDs for the past three consecutive terms. The AAP questioned the timing of the move and said that the BJP was afraid of facing them in the elections. The BJP, however, said that the unification will rid the civic bodies of an acute financial crunch and improve administration.

The tenures of the North Delhi Municipal Corporation, the South Delhi Municipal Corporation and East Delhi Municipal Corporation had come to an end in May this year with elections due by April.

While unifying he Centre unified the three municipalities and amended the number of total wards from the previous 272 to not exceeding 250. This meant that a fresh delimitation exercise had to be taken up before the conduct of polls. The Centre constituted panel to undertake the delimitation exercise on July 8, but experts have said that the entire exercise to carve new municipal wards may take months. 

The AAP had criticised the Centre for not specifying the number of total municipal wards even as it constituted the delimitation panel. 

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(With input from news agency language)

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