Rejecting a plea seeking directions to the Centre to start the process for delimitation of constituencies in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, the Supreme Court has said that granting relief would be “contrary to the letter and spirit of constitutional design”.
A bench of Justices Surya Kant and N K Singh said this while dismissing a plea which said that holding the exercise only for UT of J&K while leaving out Andhra Pradesh and Telangana “reeks of arbitrariness”. It urged the top court to direct the Centre to operationalise Section 26 of the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, which deals with the delimitation of constituencies.
Rejecting the request, the bench said the “exclusion of the States of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana from the purview of the delimitation process under the impugned notifications does not suffer from the vice of arbitrariness or discrimination.” On the delimitation in J&K, the bench held that the provisions regarding the delimitation of states and UTs were different.
“Article 170 has no application to Union Territories, including the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir. The Petitioner(s), therefore, cannot claim parity between the position of Jammu and Kashmir and that of the States of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, which remain subject to the constitutional scheme governing States. The delimitation exercise carried out in J&K — being governed by a distinct constitutional and statutory regime — cannot be analogically extended to States that are explicitly bound by the constitutional restraint imposed under Article 170(3). The impugned notifications thus do not violate Article 14 of the Constitution,” said the SC.
The SC said that “a plain and harmonious reading of the statutory and constitutional provisions makes it evident that Section 26 of the AP Reorganisation Act is expressly made subject to the provisions in Article 170 of the Constitution. There is no dispute regarding the operation of the proviso to Article 170 (3) which categorically and overarchingly provides that it shall not be necessary to readjust the allocation of seats in the legislative assembly of each state including the division of each state into territorial constituencies until the relevant figures for the first census which takes place after 2026 have been published.”
It added that an even more compelling reason to turn down the request is “the inevitable consequence that will follow if the relief sought in the writ petitions were to be granted”.
The court said allowing the plea “would open the flood gates to similar demands from other states each seeking early delimitation on the ground of parity or administrative convenience. Granting such relief in contravention of the constitutional timeline provided under Article 170(3) of the Constitution will not only destabilise the uniform electoral framework envisaged by the Constitution but also blur the clear demarcation of the constitutional prescription and political distribution.”
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It said that “permitting such isolated departures from the constitutional embargo would also amount to an impermissible deviation from the equality principle embedded in Article 14 of the Constitution, and would amount to a facially discriminatory practice without any valid classification.”
