A Supreme Court vacation bench led by Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana has frozen the Andhra Pradesh urban local bodies election candidate list until October 25 after hearing a petition from the Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party. The bench told the Andhra Pradesh state election commission to go through the party’s complaint and act on it.
YSRCP told the court that many of its nominees could not submit nomination papers for polls to about one hundred urban local bodies. The party blamed intimidation and physical clashes for blocking access to the nomination process.
The commission must also do whatever is needed to ease worries among YSRCP nominees and other contestants about whether the state poll will stay free and fair, the order said. The bench linked safe nomination filing to the integrity of the overall election exercise.
Justices Bagchi and Mohana ordered the Andhra Pradesh Director General of Police to arrange enough protection for candidates and for election offices while paperwork continues. The court treated nomination submission as a non‑negotiable step in a fair poll.
The bench said confidence in how elections are run matters for upholding constitutional democracy. It added that it was not taking over the poll machinery itself.
Instead, the state election commission may study the YSRCP grievance and choose its own response, the court said. That framing leaves the timetable for nominations in the commission’s hands once the review is done.
The nominee list stays under court restraint through October 25 under the interim directions from this hearing. No further date beyond that cutoff appears in the directions the bench issued on the petition.
Urban local body elections across roughly a hundred municipalities and similar bodies sit behind the dispute YSRCP raised in its plea. The security mandate to the DGP runs alongside the commission’s task of weighing the party’s allegations before the held list can move ahead.
