Strange reluctance

By vacating the stay against the high court order to enable the Karnataka government to revise the reservation matrix of the wards of Bruhat Bangalore Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) in preparation for election to the corporation, the supreme court has further complicated the exercise. Left with very little option, the state election commission has cancelled the election schedule already announced and will now await the government’s next move. The supreme court order had given the state government an excuse to seek postponement of elections yet again, a denouement preferred by a few ministers as well as by a majority of the City legislators regardless of party affiliations. The government may well argue now that it would be difficult to complete the redrawing of the reservation before Feb 1, the date on which the filing of nominations was scheduled to begin. The high court should at least get a firm commitment from the government on holding the elections latest by April.

The government has not exhibited unbridled enthusiasm to hold the elections, repeatedly postponing it on specious grounds. The term of the last elected body to rule the City ended over three years ago. Since then, the government has been exercising power in the City through the officials. This is palpably undemocratic and undesirable, and amounts to denial of popular representation to a 10th of the population of Karnataka. It is clear that the Rs 22,000 crore master plan for Bangalore unveiled last August has much to do with the reluctance of the government and the legislators to part with power in favour of new corporators.

It is very strange that over the last six months the government dilly-dallied over the reservation matrix and finally when it was submitted, it had so many loopholes that the high court was compelled to give a stay and order a fresh undertaking of the exercise. The advocate general’s earlier plea of lack of sufficient time to prepare a new reservation scheme had been strongly challenged by some opposition stalwarts who contended that a new reservation list could be prepared in a few hours since all the demographic data was available. The government is on slippery ground here. When projects totalling a budget of Rs 3,248 crore could be  finalised by the BBMP officials by burning midnight oil, how difficult could it be to redo the reservation of the wards?