SC blocks Laloo’s escape route on panchayat polls

In an order clarifying the issue, a bench of the apex court said “we make it clear that there is no bar on holding elections to different panchayats in accordance with the law as it stands today, which will be subject to the final decision in the pending appeals.”

The order was in response to an application filed by the Centre seeking to know if there was indeed a stay on the holding of panchayat elections in Bihar and an appeal by the Bihar government against a Patna High court orderstriking down certain provisions of the Bihar Rajya Panchayat Act, 1993.

The first court intervention came in the form of a judgement by the Patna High Court in April which made it unambiguously clear that there was no stay on the holding of elections. This knocked the bottom out of Laloo’s repeated claims of a stay order which impeded the holding of elections.

There are a few other states to give Bihar company in the list of defaulters. Assam has not held elections since 1997 and Pondicherry has never held them. Andhra Pradesh, where elections were due early this year, resorted to some clever innovations to defer polls and even arm-twisted the Centre into bringing a Constitution amendment Bill which, however, has been shelved. In Gujarat, elections were due in May this year but could not be held due to drought.

In April, the Bihar government gave an undertaking to the Patna High Court that elections would be held in February next year but true to form went back to the Supreme Court again, asking for a stay on the 1996 order of the Patna High Court.

Panchayat elections in Bihar were last held in 1978, and even after the passage of the Constitution 73rd Amendment in 1993 the state has refused to hold them on one lame excuse or the other.

Not only has the state, ruled by Laloo Yadav’s party for the past one decade,denied the people the right to elect their representatives from the village level upwards, it has also forfeited precious Central grants due to the panchayats. In 1999-2000, for instance, Bihar lost about Rs 450 crore, not a mean sum for a cash-strapped, backward state.

Bihar’s been a long saga of obfuscation of facts and misinterpretation of court orders in a bid to thwart democratic decentralisation. Though the stateenacted a new Panchayati Raj Act in 1993 in tune with the 73rd Amendment, it initiated the poll process late and then followed it up with excuse after excuse to stall the poll process.

It first said that fresh delimitation of the panchayats was necessary and referred the matter to the state election commission. Then came the issue of reservation for OBCs, which finally landed in the apex court, complicating matters and effectively blocking polls. The state government passed a law reserving certain seats for the OBCs for various posts in the panchayat bodies over and above the seats earmarked for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. This took the total reserved seats to about 75 per cent.

And when the Patna High Court struck this down on March 18, 1996, saying quotas could not exceed 50 per cent, the RJD government filed a special leave petition in the Supreme Court.