The election date for the seven Bombay Parsi Punchayet (BPP) trusteeship seats draws nearer with possibly the final hearing regarding proposed amendments to the election scheme before the Bombay High Court (BHC) Justices Sharukh Kathawalla and Milind Jadhav set for February 22, 2022. Public notices were printed in the Parsi Press on February 6 informing "any member of the community who desires to be heard” in person or through his attorney to appear before the Court "after filing a statement in writing…setting out his/her views and objections.”
The decision followed three days of virtual hearings in the first week of February when the Justices stymied every attempt made to delay the elections. Even for the insertion of the advertisements in English and Gujarati in the Parsi Press, BPP trustee Kersi Randeria’s request that the Gujarati requirement be done away this time as the translation proved time consuming was objected to by BPP trustee Viraf Mehta. The notice would be ready for publication late Friday or Saturday and was to appear in the Press on Sunday. The situation was salvaged by bilingual jurist Berjis Desai offering to translate the text into Gujarati within half an hour or so of receiving the matter. The publication of the weekly Parsi Times owned by Randeria was delayed from Saturday to Sunday to accommodate the election scheme notice.
Darius Khambata (l); Berjis Desai
Desai along with jurist Darius Khambata had also offered to bear the difference in cost between using paper ballots and electronic voting machines (EVMs) when Mehta said EVMs were too expensive. The BPP is going through a cash crunch which is one of the reasons why the election of all seven trustees is being clubbed together. Mehta, however, insisted on paper ballots stating they were less susceptible to tampering. Desai further offered to raise a one crore election fund corpus to help subsidize the use of EVMs in future BPP elections. "Should the trust become financially self-sufficient, the money contributed…may be used for any other charitable purpose of the trust,” noted the order of the Court dated February 4.
Among the reforms to the scheme suggested are: shortening of trustees terms from seven to five years; lowering the tenure of a trustee to 10 years in total as versus 21 at present; a candidate must deposit Rs 25,000 as versus Rs 5,000 to contest; introduction of a code of conduct with a Rs 5,00,000 ceiling on poll expenditure; two votes being allotted to donors who give Rs 10,00,000 to the BPP without any quid pro quo; introduction of closed circuit cameras at all five polling stations; the appointment of a chief election commissioner and assistant commissioners by a BHC judge in chambers; appointment of independent external advisor as and when required to proffer advice to the BPP board; a requirement that when a BPP trustee’s term expires he or she ceases to be a trustee of all trusts he or she served on through virtue of being a BPP trustee (the last clause being introduced after former BPP chairman Dinshaw Mehta claimed to continue to be a trustee of the Bhabha Sanatorium in Bandra and instructed tenants to break the terrace lock and utilize the area against the objections of some of the BPP trustees. BPP chairwoman Armaity Tirandaz, who initially agreed to locking of the terrace, did a turnabout and supported Dinshaw); a trustee’s resignation once given cannot be withdrawn; the Parsi Press must refrain from publishing any defamatory material, etc.
After the February 22 hearing, the Justices will fix a date for the election.