The Delhi high court on Wednesday refused to stay the municipal elections scheduled for December 4.
A bench of Chief Justice Satish Chandra Sharma and Justice Subramonium Prasad said the State Election Commission has already issued a notification and it will remain unchanged.
"The Election Commission's notification is there. We cannot touch it now," the bench said.
The SEC announced the election schedule on November 4, according to which polling for 250 municipal wards will take place on December 4 and the results will be announced on December 7.
On Wednesday, three petitions challenging the delimitation of wards and their reservation were listed before the high court.
The bench issued notices on the petitions and asked the Centre, the Delhi government and the SEC to respond to them, while listing the pleas for further hearing on December 15.
During the hearing, the counsel for the petitioners urged the court to stay the elections till the pleas were heard.
However, the bench turned down the request, saying, "Once elections are notified, we can't stay it."
The three petitions filed by National Youth Party, a man named Sanjay Gupta and residents welfare association (RWA) of B Block Hari Nagar sought quashing of the October 17 notification issued by the Centre.
One of the petitioners Gupta said he intended to contest in the polls but has allegedly been shut out because the wards from where he wanted to contest have been allotted to either scheduled caste or scheduled tribe women.
He claimed that the SEC has reserved the municipal wards for scheduled caste population in an arbitrary manner and that the reservation order suffers from legal infirmities and has defeated the purpose of inserting Article 243T in the Constitution.
According to Article 243T, the seats reserved for the scheduled caste population may be allotted by the rotation to different constituencies or wards in a municipality.
"Whereas the respondent no. 1 (SEC) has reserved the same municipal wards in 2017 and 2022 as the basis of selection of reserved wards (that is the Census of 2011) and the formula for reservation of wards (that is highest SC population in descending order) is same. It is quite obvious that once we used the same base and same formula then the outcome/ result will remain same," it said, adding that the authorities have arbitrarily, irrationally, unintelligibly and without application of mind repeated the formula for reservation of wards for SC population.
The RWA, in its plea, raised the issue of exclusion of some houses from Hari Nagar ward and their inclusion in another ward and claimed that it was illogical, unreasonable and unwarranted.
Earlier, a petition by a Congress leader challenging the delimitation of wards came up before the court which had issued notice on it and said it will also be heard on December 15.
The petition by Anil Kumar, president of Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee, sought directions for fresh delimitation of wards while claiming that the formula adopted by the authorities for the exercise was "wholly arbitrary, irrational, unintelligible, confusing and suffered from various legal infirmities".
