Behind the Kolkata civic election case: the Kolkata Municipal Act and the constitutional bar the State relied on

Background

The Calcutta High Court's order holding back a Kolkata civic election turns on two legal instruments worth knowing separately from the dispute. The corporation is governed by the Kolkata Municipal Act, 1980, and the number and boundaries of its wards are set out in Schedule II of that Act, so a change in ward count is made by amending that Schedule. Under the amendment in dispute the city's ward count would rise to 209 from 144. Hearing an appeal filed by Dipu Das, a Division Bench of Justices Sabyasachi Bhattacharyya and Arjun Ray Mukherjee allowed it in part: the West Bengal State Election Commission may not notify a poll on the amended Schedule while the writ petition remains undecided. The Bench left the single judge's order otherwise as it stood and called its own remarks tentative. The State's defence rested on Article 243ZG of the Constitution, which belongs to Part IXA on municipalities and bars courts from calling into question the validity of a law relating to delimitation of wards or allotment of seats, and bars challenges to a municipal election except by an election petition. The State Election Commission, the authority that would notify the poll, is itself a creation of Part IXA, under Article 243ZA, which places superintendence of municipal elections with it. Those three points, the governing Act, the Schedule that carries the wards and the Article that limits judicial review of delimitation, are the durable content of this dispute.