Lagatar24 Desk
New Delhi, Feb 12: The Delhi LG V.K. Saxena had approved calling the upcoming meeting of the MCD House for the purpose of electing a mayor on February 16.
According to sources, Saxena accepted the government’s request to hold the House session on February 16th.
The decision to grant voting rights to aldermen without having them choose the mayor, deputy mayor, and members of the civic body’s standing committee caused a disturbance and forced the adjournment of three consecutive House meetings in the past month.
The House originally met on January 6 after the December municipal elections, but it was called off after heated arguments between BJP and AAP members.
After the oath-taking ceremony, the second municipal House that was convened on January 24 was briefly adjourned; the pro tem presiding officer then deferred the meeting to the following date.
After that, a month after the first municipal House, the House was again adjourned on Monday for the third time.
The saffron party accused the Aam Aadmi Party of using pretexts to stall the mayoral election and claimed responsibility for the impasse, while the AAP said that the BJP was “strangulating democracy and the Constitution of India” and that this prevented the election from proceeding.
In the December elections, the AAP had come out on top, winning 134 wards and overthrowing the BJP’s 15-year hold on the local body. In the 250-member municipal House, the BJP won 104 seats to place second, and the Congress won nine wards.
Before being reorganised into a single MCD, which officially began operations on May 22 of last year, the civic body in Delhi had 272 wards spread among its three corporations, NDMC, SDMC, and EDMC, which operated from 2012 to 2022.
Following a controversy over the decision to allow aldermen to vote in the mayoral election, the municipal House in Delhi was unable to elect a mayor on February 6. The AAP said the BJP was engaging in a ‘planned plot’ to obstruct the election.
