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Andhra HC cancels local body polls, orders fresh SEC notice
Hyderabad: The Andhra Pradesh high court on Friday cancelled the elections to zilla parishads and mandal parishads (block parishads) held on April 8 and ordered the state election commission to issue fresh notification to conduct the polls again
Hyderabad: The Andhra Pradesh high court on Friday cancelled the elections to zilla parishads and mandal parishads (block parishads) held on April 8 and ordered the state election commission to issue fresh notification to conduct the polls again.
A single judge bench of the high court headed by Justice M Satyanarayana Murthy said that as per the Supreme Court ruling, there should be a gap of at least four weeks between the election notification and the polling date.
Justice Murthy set aside the notification issued by state election commissioner Neelam Sawhney on April 1 for the conduct of elections on April 8, with a gap of just one week and ordered for a fresh notification and polling.
In all, there are 660 zilla parishad territorial constituencies (ZPTCs) and 9,984 mandal parishad territorial constituencies (MPTCs) in Andhra Pradesh, of which as many as 126 ZPTCs and 2,363 MPTCs were elected unanimously in the beginning of the election process in March 2020, before it was indefinitely postponed due to outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Justice Murthy, however, ruled that the unanimously elected ZPTCs and MPTCs would continue and fresh notification could be issued for holding elections only to the remaining 534 ZPTCs and 7,621 MPTCs.
An official in the SEC, on the condition of anonymity, said the poll panel is contemplating challenging the order before the division bench of the high court or the Supreme Court after holding discussions with legal experts.
After the intensity of the pandemic subsided early this year, former SEC Nimmagadda Ramesh Kumar held elections to the gram panchayats and urban local bodies, but not to zilla parishads and mandal parishads as he stepped down from the post on his retirement on March 31.
Former chief secretary of the state Neelam Sawhney, who took over as SEC on April 1, issued the notification for the conduct of elections for ZPTCs and MPTCs on April 8.
The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Jana Sena challenged the notification in the high court on the grounds that the new SEC had not followed the Supreme Court ruling that there should be a model code of conduct for at least four weeks before polling.
Agreeing with their contentions, Justice U Durga Prasada Rao of the high court suspended the election process. The SEC moved the division bench, arguing that the four-week time for implementation of model code of conduct was not made mandatory by the Supreme Court, but was only suggestive in nature. “If the code is implemented for four weeks, all the ongoing developmental works would come to a halt,” the SEC argued.
On April 7, the division bench gave an interim order permitting the SEC to hold the elections on April 8. But it ordered that the counting of votes should not be held on April 10 and results should not be declared. The division bench referred the issue back to the single judge bench to settle the issue.
Accordingly, elections were held but the counting and results were withheld. The high court continued to hear the arguments till April 21 and reserved its judgement, which was delivered on Friday.
In a statement, TDP legislator Anagani Satyaprasad said that the high court judgement was “a slap on the face of the Jagan government, which tried to bulldoze the election process using money and muscle power”.
Jana Sena chief Pawan Kalyan, in a statement, also welcomed the high court judgement, saying it had upheld the democratic values. “At least now, the government should not go for prestige, but see that fresh notification is issued for the conduct of elections,” he said.
