Apex court okays new Uttar Pradesh district including Amethi
By IANSWednesday, September 1, 2010
NEW DELHI/LUCKNOW - The Supreme Court Wednesday cleared the decks for the Uttar Pradesh government to create a new district including Amethi parliamentary constituency represented by Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi.
The apex court set aside an interim order of the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court which stayed the state government’s July 1 notification for the creation of a new district called Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj Nagar.
The Mayawati government created the new district, the 71st in the state, after carving out areas of Amethi parliamentary constituency from the Sultanpur and Raebareli districts.
Setting aside the high court’s order, an apex court bench of Justice R.V. Raveendran and Justice H.L. Gokhale described the high court order as an act of judicial impropriety.
The apex court noted that another bench of the high court had Aug 11 heard and dismissed a petition that challenged the state government’s notification for creating Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj Nagar district.
The court said that the high court would dispose of the main petition pending before it taking into account all aspects of the case.
Solicitor General Gopal Subramanium told the apex court that the high court bench which passed the Aug 18 interim order staying the notification was aware of the Aug 11 order of the other bench of the high court that ruled in favour of the state government for creating the new district.
The solicitor general said that in both the cases the grounds and the pleadings were the same.
The apex court was told that another bench of the Lucknow bench of the high court that later stayed the “operation, implementation and execution” of the state government’s July 1 notification did so without considering the earlier judgment.
The high court by its earlier judgment had held that the state government’s Dec 22, 2009, notification putting curbs on redrawing boundaries of districts could not have an overriding affect on the July 1, 2010, notification for the creation of Chhatrapati Shahuji Maharaj Nagar district.
By its Dec 22, 2009, notification under Census Rules 1990, the state government said that there would be no change in the administrative boundaries of nagar palika, revenue villages, tehsils, police stations, development blocks, talukas, parganas and districts between Jan 1, 2010, and March 31, 2011.
Meanwhile, activists of the ruling Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in Uttar Pradesh celebrated the legal victory for the government in apex court.
“It’s a big victory for the chief minister, whose only intention was to give Amethi a higher status in view of popular demand of the local population,” party’s national general secretary Satish Chandra Misra said in Lucknow.
“We are going to give Amethi what the Gandhis failed to do in so many decades,” he said.
