For weeks, Ponda simmered. Banners went up, canvassers fanned out across the constituency. Postal ballots were dispatched — 171 of them already cast and now counted for nothing. Security deployments were finalised, polling booths staffed, logistics locked in. The con stituency, still raw from the death of its MLA and former Chief Minister Ravi Naik on October 15 last year, was finally going to have its voice back — or so it believed. Then, less than 24 hours before voting was to begin, the Bombay High Court at Goa pulled the plug. In a terse order on Tuesday, a di vision bench of Justice Valmiki Men ezes and Justice Amit S Jamsandekar cancelled the April 9 by-election — striking down the Election Com mission of India’s notification of March 16 as ‘arbitrary’ and ‘con trary to law’. The reason — the winner, declared on May 4, would have served barely nine months before the Goa Assembly’s term ex pires on March 14, 2027 — falling short of the mandatory one-year minimum required under Section 151-A of the Representation of the People Act. The ECI’s senior advocate, S R Rivankar, pleaded for at least a fortnight’s stay to allow an appeal. The bench was unmoved. “Consid ering that we have declared the im pugned notification to be contrary to the provisions of Clause (a) of the proviso to Section 151-A,” it said, “we do not consider the prayer for stay to be tenable.” The election was dead. And the recriminations began almost immediately.
What makes the cancellation sting is not just its timing — it is its avoidability. The ECI has known since at least 2019, when the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court first ruled on identical grounds, that a by-election cannot be held if the incoming member cannot complete one year in office. The ECI was a party to those very cases. Yet when Ravi Naik died in October 2025, the Commis sion sat on the vacancy for five months before issuing its notification in March 2026. By then, the arithmetic was already damning. Former State Information Commissioner Adv Juino de Souza did not mince words. “When the seat fell vacant on October 15, 2025, why did the ECI wait five months to issue the notification? If the ECI had done its homework properly, it would have realised there was no point in holding the by-poll. Instead, it should have issued the notification much earlier — by January 2026 at the lat est — or, alternatively, held that there was no need to con duct a by-election at all,” Adv Juino de Souza opined. Senior advocate Cleofato Almeida Coutinho put it sim ply: “It is an absolute failure of the ECI in the matter.” “Whether the High Court is right or the ECI acted with lethargy, the people of Ponda are the losers because they do not have representation in the Assembly. It is a matter of interpretation whether the new MLA should get one year, or one year from the time of the death of the sitting MLA. My view is that the one-year period should be count ed from the death of the sitting MLA. When such a matter was earlier decided by the High Court and the ECI was a party to those cases, it should have acted with alacrity. The High Court judgment was delivered in 2019, and if such a view exists, then the ECI should have acted faster,” Adv Coutinho added. In Goa’s political sphere, a vacuum like this was never going to go unfilled. Within minutes of the verdict, the blame game was in full swing. Chief Minister Pramod Sawant struck a measured tone, saying the government was awaiting a fresh notification from the ECI and that whatever promises the BJP had made to the people of Ponda would be honoured under the leadership of candidate Ritesh Naik, who had reportedly expected to win by a margin of 3,000 votes. “We are discussing the issue with the party’s central leadership. The ECI had asked for a stay, and at least 24 hours’ relief should have been granted to enable an ap peal. We are now waiting for the next decision of the ECI,” Sawant said. Ritesh Naik himself was philosophical. “I respect the High Court order,” he said, “and I will continue my work for the bahujan samaj.” The Congress was considerably less restrained. GPCC president Amit Patkar called it “a black day for Goa’s polit ical system,” while AICC in-charge Manikrao Thakare went further: “The BJP has lost the election today itself. They know that the government has failed to address the issues of the people.” Leader of the Opposition Yuri Alemao alleged a conspir acy involving both the ruling party and the Election Com mission, declaring: “This is an insult to democracy and an insult to the bahujan samaj.” Trinamool Congress national spokesman Trajano D’Mel lo, who had filed an intervention application to prevent the election from being stopped, accused all three major parties — BJP, Congress and AAP — of collusion.
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“It’s a BJP Congress-AAP conspiracy, which explains why they did not intervene, though they were interested parties,” he said. Away from the press conferences and legal filings, ordi nary Ponda residents were left to absorb the whiplash. “I had been following the developments closely, and sud denly the by-election is cancelled. It’s confusing,” said Roy Fernandes. Reena Phaldesai was angrier. “A lot of arrangements must have been made — staff, security, logistics. All that effort has now gone to waste. There should be accounta bility.” Nayan Naik of Ponda was blunter still: “This is a shame for the government and the ECI. The ECI should have taken legal opinion and averted this.” Only Ashley Dias offered any consolation. “It’s better to stop it now than proceed with something that does not comply with the law,” he said. “Rules are meant to be fol lowed.” Former State Election Commissioner Prabhakar Timble struck a note of institutional unease, arguing that courts are generally expected to keep their distance once an elec tion process is in motion. “Somehow, I am unable to come to terms with this judgment,” he said. “There was no ab normal situation for the court to get seized of the matter.” He acknowledged the irony sharply. “This order, coming 24 hours before voting, provides a comic end to the Ponda by-election.
I would call the timing of the order rude and aggressive, providing no time to the ECI, candidates or po litical parties to appeal,” he said. Meanwhile, a delegation of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) led by State President Valmiki Naik, visited the office of the Chief Electoral Officer (CEO) and submitted a memoran dum urging the Election Commission of India to immedi ately approach the Supreme Court and seek a stay on the High Court order cancelling the Ponda by-election. “Can celling the election less than 24 hours before polling will lead to wastage of resources of all political parties, voters and government,” Naik reasoned. The High Court, for its part, was unapologetic. Its con clusion was clear: the ECI’s notification was issued in con travention of statutory law and was therefore liable to be quashed. That it took a public interest petition — and not the ECI’s own legal counsel — to catch the error is, per haps, the most damning verdict of all. Ponda has been without a voice in the Assembly since October. After this week, it will remain so — for how much longer, nobody knows.
