Overview

• A bench of Justices Surya Kant and N Kotiswar Singh dismissed K Purushottam Reddy’s 2022 petition to operationalize Section 26 of the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act.
• The court held that Section 26 is subject to Article 170(3) of the Constitution, which freezes any readjustment of state assembly seats until the first census after 2026.
• It rejected claims of unreasonable classification under the equality clause, finding that excluding Andhra Pradesh and Telangana from the 2020 J&K delimitation order was neither arbitrary nor discriminatory.
• The judgment emphasized that delimitation rules for Union Territories like Jammu & Kashmir differ from those governing states, preventing J&K’s delimitation framework from applying to other regions.
• Any changes to assembly constituencies in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana must await the results of Census-2027, for which the government has announced preliminary schedules.