Notify civic body polls within 2 weeks: Supreme Court to Punjab

The directions came while hearing the Punjab government petition challenging the Punjab and Haryana high court order asking the state to declare the poll schedule for five municipal corporations and 42 municipal councils/ nagar panchayats within 15 days, without waiting for the completion of a fresh delimitation exercise.

The Supreme Court on Monday directed the Punjab government and the state election commission (SEC) to notify municipal elections in the state within two weeks from today and complete the entire process within eight weeks of the notification.

The bench also reminded the state of its constitutional obligation under Articles 243E and 243U, which mandate that municipal elections be held before the expiration of a municipality’s five-year term or within six months of its dissolution.

The directions came while hearing the Punjab government petition challenging the Punjab and Haryana high court order asking the state to declare the poll schedule for five municipal corporations (MCs) and 42 municipal councils/ nagar panchayats within 15 days, without waiting for the completion of a fresh delimitation exercise.

The government has moved the apex court to seek relief as the high court has started contempt proceedings against it for not following its directions.

The high court’s October 14 order required Punjab and SEC to announce poll schedules for five municipal corporations (Amritsar, Patiala, Jalandhar, Phagwara, and Ludhiana) and 42 municipal councils/nagar panchayats, elections which had been pending. The term of the Phagwara MC house ended in March 2020, and in other MCs in 2023. As for municipal councils and nagar panchayats, the oldest date when tenure ended is March 2020 in some cases.

The state government had sought to delay these elections, citing the ongoing delimitation process and said it needed 16 more weeks to complete the process. However, the Supreme Court bench, comprising justice Surya Kant and justice Ujjal Bhuyan, rejected this argument, pointing out that the state had failed to demonstrate significant changes in population or municipal boundaries that would necessitate a new delimitation exercise.

The court emphasised that the delay in conducting the elections was unjustified and that the state’s reliance on the pending delimitation was misplaced. The bench also reminded the state of its constitutional obligation under Articles 243E and 243U, which mandate that municipal elections be held before the expiration of a municipality’s five-year term or within six months of its dissolution.

The bench made it clear that elections should proceed without further delay, reiterating that the law required that the process begin before the expiration of the term. The court also allowed the state to approach the high court to seek a deferral of contempt proceedings.