West Bengal’s opposition parties on Friday welcomed a Calcutta high court vacation bench’s interim stay on the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) elections, saying they would await a single bench ruling on petitions challenging the delimitation exercise that increased the number of municipal wards from 144 to 209.
With the KMC polls deferred, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has apparently decided to wait and watch, since the state election commission announced on Thursday that the new electoral roll would not be published on November 12. Former Bengal Congress president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said, “From our experience in the recent assembly polls we can assume that the civic polls won’t be fair. The court’s order restrains the state election commission from notifying the polls until the petition is decided. Opposition parties have challenged the state government’s decision to increase the number of KMC wards, arguing that the delimitation exercise was carried out without adequate public consultation. Let the court review the entire scenario. The councillors had controlled the civic body. Bhattacharya further argued that although the delimitation was carried out on the grounds that all wards would more or less have an equal number of citizens, the actual focus was on the distribution of voters to help a specific political party. He argued that such a delimitation amounted to gerrymandering, which the Supreme Court does not permit. “We will follow the court’s order.
Union minister of state and former state BJP president Sukanta Majumdar told the media that his party would follow whatever order the Calcutta high court passes. However, it must be borne in mind that civic administration will suffer in the long absence of elected representatives,” Majumdar said. Bhattacharya argued before the vacation bench on Thursday that the delimitation notification was issued on the recommendation of KMC commissioner Smita Pandey, who was appointed as the administrator after Trinamool Congress councillors, including mayor Firhad Hakim, resigned en masse following their party’s defeat in the assembly polls in May.
