BHOPAL (Madhya Pradesh): The Supreme Court, on Wednesday, turned down petition, which the Madhya Pradesh government had filed on December 17, 2021 requesting SC to recall its order in which it had instructed state government to conduct panchayat polls treating OBC seats as general seats.
Additional Advocate General Saurabh Mishra said state Government had filed petition requesting SC to recall its order. SC said that it is useless now to continue the hearing on the petition as State Election Commission has already cancelled panchayat polls and state government has withdrawn the ordinance, he added.
The state government has already informed the Supreme Court that it will conduct panchayat polls after OBC reservation.
The Supreme Court had stayed the election process on seats reserved for OBC in the local body polls and had asked state government to renotify OBC category seats as general due to lack of empirical data.
State government had issued the ordinance annuling Kamal Nath ordinance of 2019 regarding OBC reservation. After SC order, state government withdrew the ordinance.
On December 29, Madhya Pradesh State Election Commission cancelled the process for gram panchayat elections. This followed Supreme Court ruling and the state government's stand that polls should not be held without OBC reservation.
Earlier, the state assembly had passed a resolution stating that panchayat polls should not be held without reservation for OBC candidates. On the basis of this ordinance, the panchayat election process was started as per the delimitation and reservation rotation of 2014.
On December 4, the SEC had announced that polling to elect representatives on 859 posts of district panchayats across 52 districts, 6,727 posts of 313 Janpad Panchayats, sarpanches of 22,581 village panchayats and 3,62,754 posts of panch members will be held in three phases - on January 6, January 28 and February 16.
The tenure of these panchayat bodies had ended in March 2020, but elections were delayed due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The process of filing nominations for the first and second phases had started from December 13.
