Elections for these urban local bodies are mandated to be held once in every five years but have been put on hold due to legal disputes or delimitation exercises.
Representational image
While the delay in elections for Bengaluru city council had recently grabbed headlines, with the matter reaching even the Supreme Court, it has come to light that six other cities in Karnataka do not have an elected council. An analysis by Bengaluru-based non-profit Janaagraha has revealed that out of 10 city corporations in the state, six district headquarters do not have a Mayor and only in one city the ward committees are in the process of being formed. HL Manjunath, Senior Associate at Janaagraha, said only Davanagere, Mangaluru, Mysuru and Tumakuru have an elected council of corporators in their respective city councils. However the remaining cities—Vijayapura, Shivamogga, Kalaburagi, Hubli-Dharwad, Belagavi and Ballari are all awaiting elections. Like all local body polls, elections for these urban local bodies are mandated to be held once in every five years but have been put on hold due to legal disputes or delimitation exercises. Speaking on the same, Sandeep Anirudhan, Founder, Citizens Agenda for Bengaluru, said, "There is a reluctance in our political class to implement the 74th Amendment in spirit, as it would lead to grass root democracy - Swaraj. That is something that our politicians, who have got used to the colonial culture of our badly designed centralised democratic structure, are unwilling to deal with. They keep misusing state power to suppress the city level third tier of governance." The 74th Amendment of the Constitution, focusses on decentralization and citizen participation in local self-governance. Other than electing local self sustaining local bodies, it gave provision for citizens to take part in local governance issues. The BBMP council was set to go for elections with the five year term for the previous council coming to an end on September 10. However, the state government had deferred the elections on account of delimitation with an amendment to the Karnataka Municipal Act and in effect increasing the number of wards to 243 from 198. While the Karnataka High Court had ordered the State Election Commission to hold elections for the BBMP polls after hearing a public interest litigation, the state government had subsequently approached the apex court successfully to postpone the elections. Narendra Pani, political scientist and professor at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, said this is not the first time that this is occurring in the state. He said, “This is a clear trend. The decentralization of the third tier governance has not happened in urban areas as effectively as it has happened in rural areas. There panchayat institutions have deep roots and it gets really difficult to postpone polls there. But in urban Karnataka the same is not true. In urban areas, it is largely controlled by the bureaucracy who function under the state government so there is a tendency to bypass elections.” “In rural areas too, the MLA will try to get his own candidate win but in urban areas there is no such consolidation as the dynamics of urban politics are not the same,” he added.
from Karnataka https://ift.tt/2KxPy40
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment