In an important ruling on filling up of the parliamentary and Assembly vacancies arising out of the resignations of the MP and MLA within six months, the Supreme Court has held that the Election Commission is bound under the Representation of People Act to hold the byelections within six months to fill all such vacancies.
The top court further clarified that the EC was not even debarred from holding the byelection to fill those seats falling vacant due to the resignation of a member whose election was under challenge in the court of law in an election petition.
Answering for the first time to the queries of the EC about the correct interpretation of Section 151-A of RPA, which makes it mandatory to hold byelection to a vacant seat within six months, particularly in the context of pending election petitions, a bench of Justices Altamas Kabir and A.K. Patnaik ruled that the poll panel’s powers would not be “diluted” in any manner merely because there was an election petition pending in the court of law.
Declaring that once the Speaker has notified a seat vacant due to the resignation of a legislator and the EC was called upon to hold the byelection, the bench said: “In such cases, we have little hesitation in holding that such casual vacancies are not available for being filled up and the EC will have to wait for holding the election until a decision is rendered (by the court on pending petition) during the life of the house.”
The correct interpretation of Section 151-A introduced in the RPA much later arose from Telangana agitation when 12 MLAs of Andhra Pradesh had resigned and the Speaker while accepting their resignations had declared the seats vacant and asked EC to hold the byelections within six months.
But the EC faced a piquant situation regarding two seats — Vemulawada and Sircilla — as election petitions against the resigning MLAs were pending in the AP high court and poll panel’s notification regarding holding of the election for these seats was challenged on the ground that till the dispute about the previous elections was resolved, no notification for fresh election could be issued.
The HC held that Section 151-A and its preceding sections did not prescribe any time limit for the EC to conduct elections within six months to the seats regarding which the election petitions were pending.