A Single-Judge Vacation Bench of the High Court of Andhra Pradesh comprising Justice M. Ganga Rao on Monday granted stay till further orders on the State Election Commission’s decision to hold gram panchayat (GP) elections in 4 phases next month.
Advocate-General S. Sriram asserted that the action of the SEC was premeditated & swayed by material extraneous to record & mala fide. He insisted that the SEC treated the concerns raised by the government as adversarial but not as a participant in the process of fixing the election schedule.
The A-G said the duty to be fair, reasonable & non-arbitrary equally applied to the SEC. He observed that the SEC had said at the time of postponing the elections for MPTCs & ZPTCs that it would resume the process from where it is stopped. But, it (SEC) set the ball rolling for gram panchayat elections without making a mention of the MPTC & ZPTC elections.
Mr. Sriram said the SEC did not apply its mind to the enormity of the ground situation arising from vaccination, the involvement of many Govt departments in it & the deployment of men & resources for tackling the COVID pandemic.
Appearing for the SEC, Senior Counsel N. Ashwani Kumar said the Govt had been seeking postponement of the elections on one pretext or the other, but Justice Ganga Rao observed that the impugned order of the SEC ought to be suspended in the interest of public health.
In the plea filed by it on Saturday, the government maintained that the vaccination drive would be akin to a general election & its entire machinery would be involved in the process.
The Court-mandated consultative process was going to be a farce & an empty formality going by the tone & tenor of the letters which State Election Commissioner N. Ramesh Kumar wrote to the Chief Secretary & Principal Secretary (Panchayat Raj) regarding the conduct of elections, it was stated.
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