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The Delhi High Court Friday sought the Delhi government’s and Centre’s response in a plea moved by Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee President Anil Kumar against the delimitation of wards of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi.
A division bench of Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Subramonium Prasad issued notice to Centre through the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Delimitation Committee of the State Election Commission and the Delhi government and listed the matter for hearing on December 14. The petition challenges the Centre’s Gazette Notification of October 17 whereby 250 wards were notified “without making the serious changes in the formation of wards” as suggested by the petitioner in his representation to the authorities concerned.
The petitioner who was represented by Senior Advocate Salman Khurshid before the bench has sought quashing of the notification of wards dated October 17 as the same is “unconstitutional and ultra vires” and further sought a direction to the respondents to make fresh delimitation of the wards as per prescribed formula.
Khurshid argued that there has been an “irrational creation of wards” and that the petitioner wants that the municipal elections to be conducted in a rational and transparent manner. He further submitted that the petitioner had made a representation to the government, however, the petitioner does not know which issues raised by him have been accepted or rejected as it was not considered.
The Delhi Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Act, 2022 has reduced the number of wards in Delhi from 272 to 250 after which a committee was constituted to assist the Centre in the delimitation of wards. As per the petition, the committee submitted its report on the draft delimitation in August. Thereafter, the Centre issued a notification on September 10 fixing the total number of seats as 250 out of which 42 seats were reserved for members of Scheduled caste in the MCD.
Subsequently, the Centre through a public notice on September 12 published the Draft Delimitation-2022 seeking suggestions/objections from the public, the plea states. The petitioner submitted his suggestions on the Draft Delimitation to the Committee by September 21 and claimed that the same were not considered and thus the action of the Committee is “biased and malafide”.
The plea states that the purpose of delimitation is to ascertain an equal number of division of the electorates in the various wards and the same has been based on the population figures as obtained from most recent Census.
“However, by promulgation of the impugned order, this very purpose behind delimitation has become redundant, as in the final draft order the notified 250 wards are not having equal number of electorates,” states the plea filed by advocates Gaurav Dua, Vikas Yadav and Sajid Chaudhary.
The plea states that the wards have been divided on community and religious lines for the best reasons known to them which is violation of basic tenets of Constitution of India; further the list of 250 wards published in the gazette notification has been done without carrying out proper field surveys/inspections of the wards to screen all the anomalies as pointed by the citizens including the petitioner.
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