Slamming the Shiv Sena over its proposal to extend the tenure of reservations for BMC councillor wards, in the upcoming 2022 BMC polls, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Wednesday said that these are excuses for maintaining the status quo and denying others the opportunity of contesting polls.
BMC’s 227 municipal councillor wards are freshly assigned reservations of every type through a lottery, every five years, thus regularly changing the type of reservation. The Sena now wants to extend reservations to 10 years in the same ward, thus extending the previous reservations allocated in 2017– for another term starting 2022.
The Congress, on the other hand, wants a fresh delimitation process, accusing the BJP of being partisan during the last time the ward boundaries were redrawn.
Explaining the issue, the AAP said it has always believed that the solution for bad governance in a democracy is a deeper democracy.
"Shiv Sena's demand for extending 2017 ward reservations in the BMC is incorrect. Are they saying that if the reservations won't continue, then the same wards with a different reservation will suffer?" the AAP asked.
"We need more democracy, not less of it, and certainly more opportunities across the board, at the grassroots. The Congress is as usual lost and is disconnected from realities on the ground. The AAP is all for changing reservations every five years and will write to the State Election Commission in this regard," said Preeti Sharma Menon, AAP Mumbai Prabhari.