Notification issued for bypolls in T'gana Legislative Council

: A notification was issued Tuesday for bye-elections to fill vacancies in Telangana Legislative Council from the Ranga Reddy, Nalgonda and Warangal Local Authorities' constituencies.

According to the schedule announced by the Election Commission, polling will be held on May 31.

The last date for filing nominations is May 14 and the last date for withdrawal of candidatures is May 17.

Counting of votes will be taken up on June 3.

The announcement of the election, however, was flayed by Congress and other opposition parties, who pointed out that rural local body polls to elect new zilla parishad territorial constituencies and mandal parishad territorial constituencies, who are the voters in the Council bye-election, are underway.

The proposed bye-election is "illegal" as voters' list in Council bypolls was not available at least till Tuesday evening, state Congress president N Uttam Kumar Reddy alleged.

He led a delegation of opposition parties to Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) Rajat Kumar.

Reddy said the outgoing MPTC and ZPTC members would be voters, according to the Election Commission.

"What we told him (CEO) is this election is illegal.The voters' list should be announced by the time of issuing notification. You check websites. Either in ceotelangana website or ECI website, there is no display of the voters' list," Reddy told reporters.

Notification should not be given without displaying the voters' list, he said and asked how nominations could be filed from Tuesday when it was not known.

The Election Commission announced the bypoll schedule Monday night when the first phase of rural local body polls concluded, he said.

The polling would be held on May 31 with the old MPTCs and ZPTCs as voters, though the process to elect new MPTCs and ZPTCs would be over by then, he said.

He alleged that the ruling TRS and Election Commission had colluded in granting the old MPTCs, ZPTCs voting rights.

The Congress, TDP and other parties demanded that the schedule of MLC elections from local bodies be extended by two weeks, voters list of newly-elected ZPTCs and MPTCs be prepared and polling for MLCs held after that.

The bye-elections were necessitated by the resignations of Patnam Narender Reddy,Komatireddy Rajagopal Reddy and Konda Muralidhar Rao respectively in December last (to contest the Assembly polls).