Karnataka - Bangalore   

Congress playing delimitation card to put off elections

Bangalore: Senior leaders of the State unit of the Congress are eager that the elections to the Legislative Assembly be postponed till November in the interests of the principles of social justice getting incorporated into the electoral process. This view has been endorsed by the two Congressmen in charge of the State in the All India Congress Committee.

In the 225-member Assembly (this includes a nominated member), the number of reserved seats (for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes) will see a quantum leap to 36 and 15 respectively taking the total to 51 under the new delimitation scheme. In the 12th Assembly, the number was 33 and two. At present, four Lok Sabha seats are reserved for SCs and none for STs. Under the delimitation scheme, the seats for the SCs will rise to five and for STs, there will be two seats.

AICC general secretary and Union Minister of State in the PMO Prithviraj Chavan, who was here recently to admit eight Janata Dal (Secular) former legislators led by the former Deputy Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, and AICC secretary Hareendra Mirdha are in favour of the postponement. Mr. Mirdha in fact had stated that he would be in the State organising the party unit for the next nine months.

Both the leaders said that it would be unfair to deprive 15 Dalit candidates of a chance to be members of the Assembly for another five years. The number of Assembly seats and Lok Sabha seats in the State rose to 224 and 28 respectively, 30 years ago.

The population of the SCs, which was around 15 per cent after the 1971 Census, went up to 16.48 per cent by the 2001 Census and that of the STs went up from a mere 0.3 per cent to 6.6 per cent during the same period. The jump in the population of the STs in the State, according to the KPCC general secretary V.S. Ugrappa, MLC, who also belongs to the Nayaka caste, was that a large number of people belonging to the Nayak, Nayaka and their synonyms were included in the category during the tenure of then Prime Ministers Chandrasekhar and P.V. Narasimha Rao.

Defending the demand for holding the elections after implementing the report of the Kuldip Singh Commission, he said , the commission was appointed only after the Supreme Court ordered the Union Government to do justice to SCs and STs. He alleged that the Government delayed holding elections to urban local bodies, though their term was over a long time ago . No one should oppose holding elections to the Assembly accommodating SCs and STs in all the 51 seats. More than this the candidates who would be elected on the existing system would neglect their constituencies.

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