Supreme Court asks Manipur, Nagaland to file fresh pleas to begin delimitation exercise
Source: The Sangai Express / Agencies

New Delhi, August 23 2014 : The Supreme Court has asked Manipur and Nagaland governments to make fresh pleas to the Centre to rescind a 2008 order deferring delimitation in these states and start the exercise.

Assam government has, however, cited the menace of infiltration from across the Bangladesh border to oppose any move to begin the exercise that the central government had put on hold in these northeastern states for exactly this reason.

Manipur and Nagaland had sought the court's intervention to have the exercise restarted, on the grounds that the law and order situation had changed since the Centre issued the order.

On Thursday, a bench comprising Chief Justice of India RM Lodha and Justices Kurian Joseph and RF Nariman disposed of the legal challenges to the Centre's decision and asked the states to make fresh representations to the new government to decide whether to defer the exercise for some more time or rescind the order taking into account the changes in the ground reality in these areas.

Justice Lodha pointed out that court was barred from reviewing the Delimitation Act, 2002, and the 2008 notification issued under it.

However, he said Section 10A of the 2002 Act provided for a situation in which the government could on its own rescind the order deferring delimitation.

"What prevents you from making a fresh representation?" he asked.

"It is the government's discretion to take a call on the ground of law and order (issues)....The notification order does not suffer from any statutory flaw.

If things have changed, let them reconsider.

The government must have had strong reasons for what it did.

Much would depend on local conditions.

We can't substitute our opinion for that of the government," he said.

If the Centre receives such representations, it will have to take a call on whether to ask the Election Commission to restart the delimitation exercise in these states and if so on the basis of which census.

But the BJP-led NDA government, which has raised red flags over Bangladeshi influx into the country, may not seem predisposed to any such move.

The central government had deferred the exercise in four states including Arunachal Pradesh and frozen delimitation in Jharkhand till 2026 through a notification issued on February 8, 2008, citing potential law and order problems in the militancy hit northeast.

The exercise was carried out in the rest of the country on the basis of the 2001 census.

The 2001 census showed abnormal growth figures regarding the population in the northeast and the central government felt at the time that any attempt to delimit parliamentary and assembly constituencies could have resulted in clashes and conflicts between affected parties.

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