New Delhi, July 24
The BJP today urged the Election Commission to hold an early Assembly poll in Gujarat saying that the situation in the state was normal and “holding of elections today is a constitutional compulsion”.

A high-powered party delegation comprising President M. Venkaiah Naidu, three party general secretaries — Mr Arun Jaitley, Mr Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Mrs Anita Arya — and a few other leaders called on Chief Election Commissioner J.M. Lyngdoh and handed over a two-page memorandum, stating that “holding of elections today is a constitutional compulsion”.

Emerging from a half-an-hour-long meeting with the three-member Election Commission panel, Mr Naidu told newspersons that “the commission informed the delegation that it will discuss the demand and take an early decision.” The BJP President said the delegation told the commission that the Gujarat Government was within its right to recommend dissolution of the Assembly and the Governor rightly accepted it.

In the memorandum, the BJP argued that the mandate of Article 174 was very clear in permitting a Governor to prorogue or dissolve an Assembly. The same Article which permits a Governor to prorogue and dissolve an Assembly also mandates that more than six months shall not lapse between two sessions of the Assembly.

To say that Article 174 would be applicable only to proroguing the Assembly and not to its dissolution, was an interpretation which the Constituent Assembly did not place on the Article, the memorandum contested.

It said if the elections were indefinitely postponed and it was no longer mandatory to hold a session within six months of the last session, it would lead to two consequences. First, the state would be without a legislative body and second, a caretaker government would continue indefinitely without being responsible to the House. Therefore, holding elections earlier was to obviate these two contingencies, the memorandum said and added that the power under Article 324 could only be exercised in aid of Article 174 and not in derogation of it. The power under Article 324 could be used only when the legislative space was “unoccupied”. Here the legislative space was occupied by a constitutional mandate of Article 174, it said.

The memorandum said the Council of Ministers of Gujarat had recommended the dissolution of the state Assembly which the Governor did. It was now the constitutional and democratic imperative that elections were held in Gujarat at the earliest.