Panchayat poll: No need for Constitution Bench, says SC

R Sedhuraman/Legal Correspondent

New Delhi, October 8

The Supreme Court today rejected the plea for setting up a Constitution Bench of at least five judges to go into the validity of Haryana’s new law mandating educational and other eligibility criteria for candidates contesting the panchayat elections in the state.

A Bench headed by Justice J. Chelameswar was responding to senior advocate Indira Jaisingh’s suggestion for referring a PIL against the new law to a larger Bench as the case involved interpretation of constitutional provisions pertaining to qualifications and disqualifications governing the voters and candidates contesting elections. Jaisingh was appearing for an intervener in the case.

“We will not refer it to a larger Bench at the instance of interveners,” particularly in the light of the fact that neither the three PIL petitioners nor the Haryana government had made such a plea, the Bench said. Justice AM Sapre is the other member of the Bench. The intervener is the petitioner in a similar case pending in the Rajasthan High Court.

The Bench also did not agree with another counsel Sanjay Parikh. who questioned the logic behind various states seeking to have different norms for candidates contesting elections to local bodies. Parikh was arguing for the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL).

“We don’t see any problem if a state like Kerala, the most literate in the country, wants to have educational qualifications for candidates,” the Bench remarked.

Both Jaisingh and Parikh pleaded that the educational qualifications prescribed in the Haryana Panchayati Raj (Amendment) Act, 2015, were against democratic principles laid down in the Constitution. The main principle was universal adult suffrage which prescribed only two qualifications – minimum age and Indian citizenship — for the voter and the contestant.

Parliament as well as state assemblies had no power to add further qualifications for the candidates such as the minimum level of education as this would be against democracy, the basic feature of the Constitution. Voters had the right to elect anyone as their representative in local bodies, irrespective of educational qualifications.

Parikh pleaded that there was no logic in targeting village-level bodies such as panchayats while there was no educational qualifications even for ministers at the Centre and states or for MPs and MLAs.

The PIL has been filed by three aspiring candidates rendered ineligible by the fresh conditions under which the general category contestants should have passed matriculation while women and SC men candidates should have cleared the middle-level school examination. The educational requirement for women candidates from the SC category is fifth pass.

The amended Act also debars people who have loan arrears to cooperative banks or failed to pay electricity bills and those without functional toilets at home.

Attorney-General Mukul Rohatgi will argue for Haryana on October 13.