Confusion continued in ruling party circles on Tuesday about conflicting dates for elections to municipal bodies in the state and the impending bypolls in 18 Assembly and one Lok Sabha segments. When some Congress leaders brought the statement of Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Qureshi that the bypolls would be held before the elections for the President in July, to the notice of the Chief Minister, Mr Kiran Kumar Reddy reportedly told th-em that bypolls will be held only in August, i.e. after the Presidential election.
Meanwhile, PCC president Botsa Satyanarayana has announced that polls to municipal bodies will be held before the Presidential election. The High Court recently ordered that local body polls should be conducted within four months of the state government receiving details of the 2011 census. When contacted, sources in the State Election Commission said that so far neither it, nor the state government, received details of the 2011 census.
“Unless we receive the details from the Directorate of Census, the state government cannot take up the statutory delimitation and fix reservations for various sections like SC, ST, OBC, and women. All this will take a minimum of three months. Only then will the SEC come into the picture,” the sources said. The state government is vested with the powers to notify delimitations and reservations and without those details the SEC cannot hold elections to local bodies. The sources also said that the SEC will take another 45 days to announce the poll schedule from the date of receiving proposals from the government. In other words, there are no chances of holding local body elections before June.
With regard to the bypolls, the CEC is the only authority to decide the time. Normally, all poll schedules are of 38 days, from announcement to the day of counting. Since the Presidential elections are likely to be completed around July 20, there seems to be no time left for holding bypolls. According to Mr Qureshi, the EC is likely to hold bypolls before the Presidential election for which notification is likely to be issued around June 10. In that case, taking the 38 day poll schedule into account, announcement of the bypolls may be expected in the third week of April.