The confrontation between the YSR Congress party government in Andhra Pradesh and the state electoral commission has taken a new turn with Prime Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy hinting at the enactment of an ordinance to prevent the commission from conducting elections to the organs. locals in February.
On Friday, the Jagan government presented a resolution in the state assembly suggesting that appropriate legal provisions would be incorporated into the AP Panchayat Raj Act of 1994 to prevent the SEC Nimmagadda Ramesh Kumar from holding local body elections against the wishes of the state government. .
The state government said there is a provision in Section 197 (6) of the Telangana Panchayat Raj Act that mandates that the timing and date of elections to panchayat raj institutions be decided by the SEC in agreement with the state government.
He said the Andhra Pradesh Panchayat Raj Act has no such provision and therefore it was proposed to incorporate a similar provision to see the SEC announce the election schedule only in agreement with the state government.
In defiance of the resolution, Ramesh Kumar wrote a letter to Governor Biswabhushan Harichandan on Saturday stating that the resolution adopted at the assembly was unconstitutional. He asked the governor not to enact the ordinance on the recommendation of the state government, but to refer it to legal experts.
The state health minister, Alla Kali Krishna Srinivas, alias Nani, who presented the resolution in the assembly, said that the state was obliged to guarantee the health of its citizens and, at the very least, not to initiate any activity that would compromise their life and your health.
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Therefore, the state machine has communicated to the SEC that it would be unwise to schedule elections at this time. Concern for public health cannot be a matter for competitive evaluation and the state’s good faith opinion on that matter should not have been discounted, ”he said.
In response to the SEC’s assertion that elections were being held in different parts of the country, the minister said that no two states are comparable with regard to the factual situation of the pandemic and its effects.
He said that local body elections and the legitimacy of elected members were directly related to the choice of voters. If voters fail to exercise their suffrage to elect their representatives out of fear of Covid-19, this deprives them of their fundamental right to vote and may result in an elected body not being a true representative of the people, he said. .
“Therefore, the spirit of the consultative process is broken, and appropriate legislative interventions may be needed in due course and the government should take appropriate action in this regard,” Nani said.
The minister further said that about five lakh employees were required to carry out the local body elections and that most of them had been representing not to participate in the situation by holding the elections in the near future.
He recalled that the Supreme Court questioned the SEC’s unilateralism and ordered that additional decisions on the conduct of elections for local bodies be made in consultation with the state.
In his letter to the Governor, Ramesh Kumar argued that under Article 243K of the Constitution, the SEC was an autonomous institution that had the same powers as the Election Commission of India and that it was the SEC’s duty to hold elections for local bodies. once every five years. “There is no need for the SEC to accept the consent of the state government,” he said.
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