Mumbai: Lashing out at its coalition partner Shiv Sena and the civic administration over the reservation of wards in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), the Congress charged that 21 of the 29 seats held by the party were reserved for women.
The city unit of Congress has threatened to approach the court if their concerns were not addressed by the BMC administration. The Mumbai Regional Congress Committee (MRCC) has also warned the Shiv Sena against taking the party “for granted” saying it would contest the civic polls due later this year alone and not as part of the larger Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA).
Speaking to the media on Thursday, Bhai Jagtap, president of MRCC, said that 21 of the 29 civic wards held by the party in the outgoing civic body had been reserved for women. “This is not a co-incidence… It may not be an exaggeration to claim that the Shiv Sena may be trying to trouble the Congress by reserving these wards,” charged Jagtap.
He pointed to how a ward represented by a Congress corporator in the island city had been reserved for the scheduled castes (SC) though it had just 10% of the SC population. However, neighbouring wards, which had 27% and 26% SC strength, were left for those from the open category.
“The reservation process is biased and prejudiced,” alleged Jagtap, blaming BMC commissioner and administrator Iqbal Singh Chahal for “acting at the behest of the Shiv Sena”.
Jagtap said that the Mumbai Congress will submit its objections to the civic body by 6 June, and if these were not acted upon, they would approach the court.
“Do not take the Congress for granted… we took a decision (to join hands with the Shiv Sena in the MVA) to keep the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) away. But, do not take the Congress for granted,” he warned.
Jagtap reiterated that Congress will contest the BMC polls on its strength. “We have decided that we will contest all 236 seats in Mumbai,” said Jagtap, adding that though the MVA was a coalition government, this did not mean that all constituents would contest all elections together.
On Tuesday, the BMC had held the lottery for reservations in all the 236 municipal wards, including nine new electoral wards, that were created after the BMC carried out a fresh delimitation exercise of all municipal wards in February. After the delimitation drive, an electronic mapping of all the 236 electoral wards was carried out to create enumeration blocks.
According to the State Election Commission (SEC) notification, the seats that were unreserved during the 2007, 2012 and 2017 elections have been kept in the reservation category this year as per a rotational policy. For example, an unreserved seat from the last election has been reserved for a woman candidate this year as per the rotational drive.
The BMC rules also state that if the population of any electoral constituency is more than 50% of the entire municipal ward then that constituency will not be kept under the reservation category. Based on this formula the BMC has reserved seats for women under the Open, SC and ST categories.
Out of the 236 wards, 118 seats have been reserved for women candidates, out of which 109 are for open category women, eight are for women candidates from the SC quota and one seat under the ST quota.
Out of the 109 open seats that are reserved only for women, 86 were selected on a rotational basis from the previous elections, while the remaining 23 seats were chosen by conducting the lottery on Tuesday. The remaining women’s seats for SC and ST candidates were also chosen through the lottery.
Chahal dismissed the claims made by Congress leaders and asserted that the lottery for the reservation of seats was carried out transparently. “There were more than two thousand people present in the auditorium during the lottery, the tokens for the lottery were made using A-4 sized paper and were drawn by children from municipal schools and each paper was displayed to the audience and media after they were taken out from the box. This was the best possible transparent method that was followed during the lottery,” Chahal told HT.
“More than 26 senior corporators lost their seats, including Prabhakar Shinde from BJP and Yeshwant Jadhav from Shiv Sena. This is part of the process, and the lottery was carried out under the supervision and watch of state election commission officers. Blaming the BMC administration for this is baseless,” he said.
Shiv Sena legislator and spokesperson Manisha Kayande too denied the allegations. “The reservations were imposed through a lottery. How can a lottery be manipulated? Even many of our incumbent corporators have lost out in the exercise,” she added.