Congress takes BMC, Maha govt to HC over ward reservation

Mumbai: While a battered Shiv Sena is trying to save its government, its ally Congress has approached the Bombay high court with a writ petition against the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) and the Maharashtra government alleging that the ward-wise lottery for reserving electoral seats for the civic elections were done in an unfair manner leading to marking of sitting Congress corporators’ seats into seats reserved for women candidates.

The BMC, along with the State Election Commission (SEC), carried out the ward-wise lottery for seats on May 31. Following this, Congress corporators alleged that BMC deliberately changed seats of as many as 21 corporators of the total 28 into reserved categories.

Ravi Raja, a former corporator and Leader of Opposition (LoP) and one of the petitioners, blamed the civic administration. “The changing of seats is an arbitrary and deliberate attempt that has been done by the ruling Sena along with the civic administration in order to dismantle the Congress party which was in the opposition and always kept civic management in check,” Raja had said.

A total of six corporators have filed the petition which includes Raja, Dhyanraj Nikam, Winei D’souza, Sufiyan Niyaz and Babbu Khan and Asif Zakaria.

“The BMC has followed mechanism which was followed in previous elections. In the election held in 2012, the boundaries of the wards were the same as in the election held in 2007. Hence the seats were reserved on basis of rotation and not on the lottery. However, after the number of seats was increased by six during the 2017 elections, from 221 to 227, a fresh lottery for seats was done. However, contrary to 2017, after the number of seats was increased by nine seats in 2022 to 236 from 227, then lottery for seat reservations was carried out for only 63 seats, against the total 236 seats,” said the petition.

Asif Zakaria, one of the petitioners and former municipal corporator from Bandra west, said that all the wards reserved for general women should have been kept in one category.

“Instead of drawing lotteries for 100 plus seats that are currently reserved for women, the BMC carried lottery for only 63 seats. This is a direct violation of the law. The BMC has acted without any transparency when it came to seat reservation and this has been a deliberate attempt,” said Zakaria.

Meanwhile, civic officials have asserted that the entire procedure of ward reservation has been carried out with utmost transparency. Municipal Commissioner, Iqbal Singh Chahal has dismissed the claims. “There were more than two thousand people present in the auditorium during the lottery, the tokens for the lottery were made using A-4 sized paper and were drawn by children from municipal schools and each paper was displayed to the audience and media after they were taken out from the box. This was the best possible transparent method that was followed during the lottery,” Chahal told HT.