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Election Commission to defer bypolls in Telangana, Andhra Pradesh

Notification for August 21 by-elections in 4 states to be issued today

Hyderabad: Bypolls to the three vacant seats in Telangana State and Andhra Pradesh are presently being deferred from the list of 18 Assembly segments in four states for which notification will be issued on Saturday.

Presently, there is one Lok Sabha seat in Telangana and two Assembly segments in Andhra Pradesh that have been declared vacant. They are the Medak Lok Sabha constituency, vacated by Telangana Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao (upon his election from the Gajwel Assembly seat), the Allagadda Assembly seat following the death of YSR Congress MLA Sobha Nagireddy, and the Nandigama Assembly seat due to the death of Telugu Desam MLA Tangirala Prabhakar.

Though the state election authorities have sent the details of the vacant seats, the EC has announced bypolls to 18 vacant Assembly seats in Bihar (10), Karnataka (3), Madhya Pradesh (3) and Punjab (2) on August 21, for which notification is going to be issued on Saturday.

It is normal practice for the Election Commission to conduct bypolls to all the existing vacant seats in one go and state leaders were also expecting simultaneous bypolls to the three vacancies in Telangana and AP.

“We had passed on the information long back about the existing vacancies, we don’t know when the EC will conduct the bypolls,” said a senior official.

When contacted, Election Commissioner H.S. Brahma told this newspaper on Friday that the EC was presently verifying whether there were any pending cases in the courts like election petitions etc. “We will hold bypolls to Medak Lok Sabha, Allagadda and Nandigama Assembly segments soon, there is no hurdle before us for not holding the bypolls, we will verify the records and soon announce notification,” he said.

Section 151 (A) of Representation of People’s Act mandates the Election Commission to hold the bypoll for a segment within six months from the date of occurrence of vacancy.

( Source : dc )
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