New Delhi: The West Bengal government has told the Supreme Court that the row over the recently concluded panchayat polls in the state has led to a "constitutional crisis" since the tenure of several Panchayats were over and new bodies have not been made functional. The apex court had earlier stayed the Calcutta High Court order and directed the poll panel not to declare in the gazette the names of those candidates who had won unopposed. "The funds allotted to panchayats will go back. There is a constitutional crisis.. The development in the villages has come to a standstill," the counsel for the state government said.
The top court, said that it is a part heard matter by a three-judge bench and only when the bench is in appropriate combination, it will be taken up for hearing. It listed the matter for further hearing on August 20. The top court had on August 13 asked the West Bengal State Election Commission (WBSEC) as to whether it conducted any probe into the fact that a large number of seats in the local body elections in the state went uncontested.
Out of a total 58,692 posts for gram panchayat, zilla parishad and panchayat samiti, 20,159 had remained uncontested in the violence-marred local polls in the state held in May this year. It had said the state poll panel that the issue of huge number of uncontested seats has been bothering it.
The poll panel had argued that 33 per cent of nearly 50,000 panchayat seats going uncontested in the state was not "an alarming situation." It had cited Uttar Pradesh where almost 57 per cent panchayat seats went uncontested and the figure was 51, 67 and 27.6 per cent in Haryana, Sikkim and Andhra Pradesh respectively.
The panel had said that it cannot persuade political parties to field candidates and, moreover, it took prompt actions when it received complaints about panchayat elections and even held re-polls. The West Bengal government had said that the panchayat polls cannot be set aside on the basis of "conjecture and surmises" of some political parties as no individual candidate has approached the court with the claim that he or she has been restrained from filing nomination papers.
