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Supreme Court Dismisses Plea to Stay Delhi MCD Elections Scheduled for December 4

Savvy Thakur

Published on: 02 December 2022 at 19:47 IST

The plea challenging the Delhi High Court’s refusal to stay the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) elections, which are scheduled to take place on December 4, was dismissed by the Supreme Court stating its frivolous.

The matter was brought before bench of Justices AS Oka and Sanjay Kishan Kaul, the bench issued refusal order stating that the election is scheduled for Sunday. Due to time constraints, the petition is futile.

The Delhi High Court had refused to postpone the MCD elections on November 9, 2022. According to the Division Bench of the High Court, it is established law that the publication of an election notification cannot be stayed by the Court.

However, the High Court had issued notice in three pleas challenging the civic body’s delimitation of wards filed by the National Youth Party, Sanjay Gupta, and a resident welfare association.

Sanjay Gupta claims that the State Election Commission has erroneously allocated municipal wards to the population of Scheduled Castes. It has been argued that the reservation order violates the law and defeats the purpose of including Article 243T in the Indian Constitution.

According to Article 243T of Indian Constitution, a municipality’s Schedule Caste population is entitled to a reservation system that rotates them into various constituencies.

The plea goes on to say that “the base for delimitation of the wards in the year 2017 and 2022 is the same (i.e., the census of 2011) and the formula for reservation of the wards in the year 2017 and 2022 is also the same (i.e., taking the highest percentage of Schedule Castes in descending order) and due to said repeated formula the Municipal wards remain un-rotated and still remain reserved in 2022 for Scheduled Castes population for the MCD.

The Delhi Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Act, 2022 combined three distinct municipal corporations and reduced the number of wards in the national capital from 272 to 250.

On August 25, the Delimitation Committee completed the process and provided the Center with a draft report.

After that, on September 10, the Centre announced that there would be 250 seats in the Municipal Corporation, 42 of which would be reserved for members of Scheduled Castes. The public and others were then asked to submit any suggestions or objections regarding the aforementioned Draft Delimitation by October 3 in a public notice. On October 17, the Ministry of Home Affairs issued the final notification.

In a similar plea, the High Court had issued notice in October arguing that the delimitation exercise had been carried out “in complete ignorance of relevant factors” and without making significant changes to the formation of wards.