Election Commission told to complete civic polls by May 14

A division bench comprising Justice Nooty Ramamohana Rao and Justice S M Subramaniam in an interim order on Tuesday, said “Entire election process to be completed latest by May 14. All the directions of the single judge shall be truthfully implemented.” 

The bench also observing that the issue cannot be dragged further as it involves governance of a society, directed the state government to cooperate and provide necessary infrastructure to SEC. However, the appeal moved by the SEC would be taken up for final hearing from March 6 on a daily basis.

Earlier, after a lengthy bout of arguments on the veracity of the original poll notification issued on September 26, 2016, which the single judge found fault with and stayed the elections, the bench sought to know as to why the polls can’t be held earlier instead of waiting until May. 

The SEC counsel B Kumar submitted that the present schedule has been worked out keeping in mind the school examinations and evaluation of answer sheets in April following which the bench came up with the interim order. 

It may be noted that the poll schedule has come about after two rounds of litigations spread over five months. In fact, at one stage the division bench peeved over the inordinate delay by SEC in coming out with an election schedule slammed the SEC of neither being interested in conducting the election nor the case. As per the original poll notification issued on September 26, 2016, elections were to be held in two phases on October 17 and 19, 2016. But the matter was dragged to the court by the DMK and others who said that the notification process indicated that SEC’s preparations were known to the ruling AIADMK as it had come out with the entire candidate list within hours of the notification. The plea had also challenged the process of delimitation and reservation-related issues. 

A single judge of the court quashed the notification citing non-compliance of Tamil Nadu Panchayat (Elections) Rules, 1995 and asked the state government to complete the process by December 31, 2016 after setting right the anomalies cited in the writ petition. Assailing the order, the SEC filed the present appeals.