Chandigarh Congress MP and former Union Minister Manish Tewari has rejected the UT Administration’s proposal to extend the tenure of the Mayor, Senior Deputy Mayor and Deputy Mayor from one year to two and a half years, calling it “a terrible idea” that will only perpetuate what he described as “the tyranny of the bureaucracy.”
Speaking to The Tribune over the phone from New Delhi on Wednesday, a day when this paper first reported the administration’s proposal to the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) seeking amendment in Section 38 of the Punjab Municipal Corporation Act, 1976, Tewari said the proposal was cosmetic at best and structurally flawed at its core.
“It is a terrible idea. What is being proposed is cosmetic to perpetuate the tyranny of the bureaucracy,” Tewari said. “Until and unless the Mayor of Chandigarh is directly elected by the people for five years, the Mayor will not be able to deliver.”
‘CHANDIGARH A PARKING LOT FOR BUREAUCRACY’
Tewari said the real problem was not the length of the Mayor’s term but the complete absence of meaningful powers in the hands of the elected civic body. He pointed out that Chandigarh had become “a parking lot for the bureaucracy,” with layers upon layers of officials stifling the city’s development, a reality so embarrassing. He said the government had refused to answer his parliamentary question on the sanctioned versus actual strength of officers posted in the UT, citing national security grounds.
WHAT TEWARI WANTS INSTEAD
The MP said he had already placed his comprehensive vision before Parliament through a private member’s Bill introduced in the Lok Sabha on December 5, 2025, and the administration’s proposal fell far short of it on every count.
He had proposed that the Mayor should be directly elected by all voters for five years, as is the model in Haryana. “In Panchkula, which is considered a suburb of Chandigarh, the Mayor is directly elected by the people for five years. The Haryana model is far more efficacious than the Punjab model,” he said. The Senior Deputy Mayor and Deputy Mayor, under his proposal, would be elected by the councillors, also for five years.
Governance must vest in a Mayor-in-Council comprising the Mayor and the two deputies, with all subjects except land, law and order, and police transferred from the UT Administrator to this elected body. “Given the extremely volatile security situation in Punjab, seamless coordination is imperative, that is why the Governor of Punjab was designated as the Administrator of Chandigarh in 1984. Except for those three subjects, everything else must rest with the Mayor-in-Council,” he said.
Tewari said his Bill also seeks to empower the Mayor-in-Council on critical issues, including the city’s contested heritage status, the master plan and decisions under the Punjab Capital (Development and Regulation) Act, 1952.
‘STRUCTURAL INFIRMITY, NOT INDIVIDUAL FAILURE’
Tewari was careful to draw a distinction between the individuals who had served as Mayor and the broken system they had to work within. “Some of them were not only super competent, very efficient and politically astute, but the structural infirmity did not give them a chance to deliver on whatever plans they may have had for Chandigarh,” he said. The experiment with a one-year term since the first MC elections in 1996 had, in his words, proven to be “an absolute and unmitigated disaster.”
