The Election Commission may have announced December 12 as the date for elections in Gujarat—but it didn’t have to. It had time until January 19.This is thanks to a new power conferred today by the Supreme Court on the EC while answering the Presidential reference on Gujarat. The EC now has more leeway than it thought it had in determining when the poll should be held in the event of premature dissolution of an Assembly.A Consitution bench, headed by Chief Justice of India B N Kirpal, held that the poll in such a case should be held within six months ‘‘from the date of dissolution of the Legislative Assembly.’’This gives an entirely different twist to the controversy over Narendra Modi’s decision on July 19 to dissolve the Gujarat Assembly so that there could be an early election under the shadow of the prolonged communal riots in the state. The BJP made out that the next Assembly would have to be convened in the first week of October to comply with Article 174 of the Constitution which stipulates that there should not be a gap of more than six months between two legislative sessions. The dissolved Assembly had last met on April 3. Though it scuttled the BJP’s ploy to force an early election, the EC agreed with the ruling party’s view that Article 174 required it to hold the poll within six months from the last sitting of the Assembly. The only reason it gave for disregarding the six-month rule of Article 174 was that it was no position to hold a free and fair election at that stage. But the five-judge bench of the apex court today unanimously held Article 174 had nothing to do with elections and that the six-month rule prescribed by that provision applied only to ‘‘an existing, live and functional Legislative Assembly and not to a dissolved Assembly.’’ Contrary to the view taken by the EC and the BJP, the Supreme Court said that Article 174 ‘‘does not provide for any period of limitation for holding fresh elections for constituting Legislative Assembly on premature dissolution of the Assembly.’’ But to ensure that the EC does not have an unfettered power to put off elections in such a situation, the bench laid down a new six-month rule taking into the account ‘‘the scheme of the Constitution and the Representation of the People Act.’’ It said that the six months should be counted not from the last sitting of the dissolved Assembly but from the date on which the Assembly was dissolved. Interestingly, this is exactly the position the Congress party took before the court during the hearings of the Gujarat reference. Kapil Sibal raised eyebrows by arguing that Article 174 was irrelevant to the election question and that the EC was obliged to hold the poll within six months of the date of dissolution of the Assembly.Thus, if the BJP and the EC have been proved wrong in their own different ways, the Congress party has emerged as a surprise winner in the Gujarat reference.
