The Supreme Court recently directed the Panchayat members in Maharashtra elected from reserved category seats to be diligent in submitting caste validity certificates within the prescribed time to avoid disqualification.
A bench of Justice Vikram Nath and Justice KV Viswanathan noted that the submission of such documents is required under Section 10-1A of the 1959 Maharashtra Village Panchayats Act.
The court added that the legislature expects a person claiming the benefit of contesting from a reserved post to be in possession of both a caste certificate and a validity certificate at the time of filing the nomination. The Court further explained how electoral candidates who wait till their filing of nominations to even apply for caste validity certificates are expected to act.
The bench underlined that under the Caste Certificate Act, 2000, the certificate attains finality only if it is authenticated with a Validity Certificate. It added that those who aspire to contest for a reserved seat and who take a risk of applying for the validity certificate by filing an application before the date of nomination, it is prudent to expect that they will show utmost due diligence in the prosecution of their application. This would mean that they are expected to do all that is within their control to do and submit with the Scrutiny Committee a valid application for their consideration,the bench mentioned.
The apex court was dealing with a case where the litigant had successfully contested in the Jambulan village Gram Panchayat elections in 2020 from a seat reserved for Other Backward Castes (OBC). The candidate had a caste certificate indicating that he belonged to the Lonari caste (an OBC caste) which was issued in 2013. Nonetheless, the rules require a validity certificate to also be submitted to support the genuineness of the caste certificate. The validity certificate is issued after an examination by a scrutiny committee.
Reportedly, the appellant before the Court had applied for this caste validity certificate on the day when he filed for his nomination to the panchayat post in 2020. The candidate was elected to the post in 2021 and he did not submit the caste validity certificate on time, leading to his retrospective disqualification from the panchayat post.
The appellant moved the Supreme Court after he failed to secure any relief from the High Court.