Kishansing Tomar v Municipal Corporation of the City of Ahmedabad

Facts

• The five year term of a Municipal Corporation was due to expire.
• Elections were not held before that date, and were postponed to a later time.
• The State Government pleaded that the delimitation of wards had not been completed, that reservation of seats had yet to be worked out, and that there was a shortage of staff, machinery and funds for conducting the poll.
• In the interval no elected body was in place, and the affairs of the Corporation were conducted otherwise than by elected representatives.
• The appellant contended that Art.243U is mandatory in its terms and that the State could not create by its own default the very difficulty on which it relied.
• Questions also arose as to the respective responsibilities of the State Government and the State Election Commission in the conduct of local elections.

Issue

1. Whether the requirement that elections be completed before the expiry of the five year term is mandatory, and what the position and powers of the State Election Commission are.

Held

• The requirement is mandatory. Elections must be so conducted that the new body is constituted before the expiry of the outgoing body's five year term, and where a body is dissolved earlier, within six months of dissolution. The Court held expressly that pending delimitation, administrative difficulty, and want of funds, staff or machinery are not valid grounds for postponement, since a State cannot rely on its own failure to prepare in time. Only in the most extraordinary circumstances, such as a natural calamity or a comparable emergency making a poll impossible, may an election be deferred, and even then only for the shortest necessary period. The Court further held that the State Election Commission under Arts.243K and 243ZA stands on the same footing as the Election Commission of India, that its directions in the matter of elections are binding, and that the State Government is under an obligation to make available the officers, staff and funds it requires.

Ratio Decidendi

The whole purpose of giving local government constitutional status in 1992 was to end the practice of superseding elected bodies and governing through administrators for indefinite periods. If the timetable could be displaced by administrative convenience, the guarantee would be worthless, because the State would always be able to plead unpreparedness. Treating the provision as mandatory therefore gives effect to the object of the amendments, and placing the State Election Commission on the footing of the national Commission removes the conduct of the poll from the control of the government whose tenure the poll may affect.