Deccan Chronicle 03.02.2011
Quota quagmire may stall local body polls
February 3rd, 2011
Hyderabad,
Feb. 2: The state government is in a fix over conducting local body
elections which are due shortly. If it holds the elections it will have
to reduce the existing quota for backward classes from 33 per cent to
27.5 per cent in order to comply with a Supreme Court order. But if it
does so, it will hurt its chances in the polls.
Elections to 100-plus municipalities and corporations that
are already due, and to thousands of gram panchayats, MPTCs and ZPTCs
for which elections must be held before June 10, have been put on the
back-burner until the government figures out what to do.
State panchayati raj minister, Mr K. Janareddy, said:
“The state government is still considering how to go about it. We want
to overcome the legal hurdles in conducting the local body polls at the
earliest.”
Political reservations for scheduled castes (15 per cent),
scheduled tribes (7.5 per cent), and backward communities (33 per cent)
have been allowed in all local body polls and in all previous elections
the total quota of reservations touched 55.5 per cent.
In the Dr K. Krishna Murthy vs Union of India case, a
five-member Constitutional Bench of the SC ruled, on May 10, 2010, that
“the upper ceiling of 50 per cent vertical reservations in favour of
SC/ST/OBCs should not be breached in the context of local
self-government.”
This specific verdict limiting political reservations to
50 per cent has forced the state government to reduce the total
reservation quota from 55.5 to 50 per cent. But any attempt to reduce
the SCs/STs existing quota (22.5 per cent) will land the government in a
great deal of trouble due to opposition from these communities.
The only other option is to reduce the backward classes
quota from 33 per cent to 27.5 per cent, but this will be equally
unpopular with the affected communities and lead to a backlash from
their leaders.
“If we implement the Supreme Court order it will be
suicidal for us. If we don’t implement it and go ahead with holding
elections with 55.5 per cent reservation quota, it will be ultra vires
in a court of law and the whole election notification may get quashed,”
said a senior minister, summing up the government’s dilemma.
Even if the government wants to implement the SC order, it
will have to change several existing legislations concerning the local
bodies, which takes time.
