Conduct BBMP polls without further delay

Bengaluru can now claim a dubious record with the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) completing four years without an elected council. The absence of elected councillors, who are meant to represent citizens at the third level of government, where actually the rubber meets the road in terms of urban service delivery that impacts the daily lives of people, has led to a total lack of democratic accountability. Previously, the civic body had gone without an elected council for about three-and-a-half years from 2006 when the government formed the BBMP by merging 110 villages, seven city municipal councils and one town municipal council into what was then just the Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BMP).

Ever since the last council’s term ended in 2020, successive governments have adopted various delaying tactics to postpone the elections to BBMP. The then-Chief Minister B S Yediyurappa proposed a new BBMP Act to replace the Karnataka Municipal Corporations Act, which included increasing the number of wards from 198 to 225, without altering the administrative structure.

When the present Congress government faced pressure to hold the overdue elections in 2023, it proposed a new governance model for Bengaluru. Recently, Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar introduced the Greater Bengaluru Governance Bill to restructure the BBMP by breaking it down into smaller corporations and expanding its geographical boundaries. The bill has been sent to a 14-member legislative committee for review.

The delay in holding elections has been agitated before the High Court and the Supreme Court, but the state government has been successful in warding off the polls by advancing various excuses, such as delimitation of constituencies or ward-wise reservations.

Such delaying tactics run contrary to various Supreme Court orders that have held that failure to hold elections to civic bodies every five years borders on the breakdown of the rule of law. While holding that local administrators had no authority to run their localities without an elected local government, the court had observed that if the state government desired to take up delimitation or any such process, it could be done after the completion of the elections.

The government, on its part, draws comfort from the fact that it enjoys the support of almost all city MLAs cutting across party lines to postpone the elections for as long as possible. The MLAs fear that they will lose both their power base and control of the city’s purse strings if an elected body of councillors comes into place.

The State Election Commission, which has a constitutional obligation to hold elections on time, must immediately approach the apex court with a contempt petition against the state government for willful disobedience of its orders and seek directions to it to hold the elections without further delay.