The High Court reserved its judgment on the conduct of elections to MPTCs and ZPTCs after hearing petitions which wanted the State Election Commissioner (SEC) to hold them without further delay.
Counsel for SEC N. Ramesh Kumar contended that the latter was not answerable to court on the issue of his discretion to conduct or not to conduct the elections and that the court could not entertain a writ petition at this stage.
Advocate-General S. Sriram argued that the court’s restrained deference to the constitutional authority was not to be abused and even the inaction of Speakers on disqualification petitions was a subject matter of the review power of courts. Besides, the Supreme Court had fixed a time frame of three months even for such Constitutional law functions.
He insisted that the SEC’s approach with no scrutiny or constitutional accountability was repugnant to the Constitutional governance of the State. The court questioned if the SEC could go to the extreme of saying that it had no power to look into the matter at all.
