EC nod awaited, Delhi LG yet to appoint presiding officer

Six councillors on Thursday filed their nominations for the April 26 elections to the posts of mayor and deputy mayor in the Municipal Corporation of Delhi. However, senior officials in the civic body have said that several question marks still persist over whether the polls can be held.
According to the officials, MCD is still to receive consent from the Election Commission of India (EC) to hold the elections as they will overlap with the model code of conduct period for the Lok Sabha polls and a presiding officer to oversee the election is yet to be appointed.
A senior MCD official associated with the poll process said that EC has the power to delay the mayoral polls till the the Lok Sabha elections are completed.
“Elections cannot happen unless EC gives a go-ahead. A file was moved to the Delhi’s chief electoral officer on April 8, but we have not received a response,” the official said, on condition of anonymity.
“Even if the elections are delayed, the candidates who filed nominations today would remain the final candidates,” the official added.
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With the candidates now finalised, the elections file will now go to Delhi’s urban development department for the appointment of the presiding officer. Officials said that the convention is that the file then goes to the lieutenant governor (LG) through the urban development minister and chief minister, even though this is not stated in law. The process to appoint the presiding officer is started after the nomination process as the candidates cannot preside over the elections. The LG has the discretion to appoint the presiding officer from the remaining members.
Anil Gupta, former MCD chief law officer, said it still remains unclear if chief minister Arvind Kejriwal’s arrest will have a bearing on the finalisation of the election schedule. “Section 77 of the Delhi Municipal Corporation (DMC) Act states that at a meeting for the election of a mayor, the administrator shall nominate a councillor who is not a candidate for such election to preside over the meeting. The power vests with the LG, and the Act does not mention the chief minister in this process,” Gupta said.
The LG office did not comment on the matter.
A government spokesperson said that there will be no separate presiding officer.
“The mayor is the presiding officer. It was only in the first election that there was a pro-tem mayor to preside,” the spokesperson said.
MCD officials and experts, however, disagreed with the view. The MCD official quoted above said that the presiding officer is decided by the LG, and in the past, there have been multiple instances where the outgoing mayor was not the presiding officer in the next elections.