SOURCE :- SIASAT NEWS
Hyderabad: The Telangana High Court has cleared the way for elections to the Jubilee Hills Cooperative House Building Society Ltd (JHCHBS), one of Asia’s largest residential cooperative societies, setting aside an interim order that had stalled the process.
A bench of Chief Justice Aparesh Kumar Singh and Justice GM Mohiuddin allowed a batch of appeals filed by the society against a single judge’s order passed in April this year and directed the state cooperative election authority and the election officers concerned to resume the election from the stage at which it was halted.
It ordered that the process be completed at the earliest, preferably within eight weeks of receiving the judgment.
The 270-member question
The bench issued specific directions concerning 270 members whose names appear on the voter slip. Their votes are to be cast separately and deposited in distinct ballot boxes, while votes of the remaining members on the final voters’ list will be kept as a separate set.
This group traces back to a 2024 High Court order that had granted them membership and voting rights in the society, a decision that drew objections from existing members over the removal of some older members from the rolls and which became one of the central flashpoints in the dispute that followed.
The bench directed that the election result be declared in accordance with law, while ensuring both categories of ballots are preserved separately. It also made clear that anyone aggrieved by the outcome would be free to file an election petition, including on the ground that the separately polled votes had a material bearing on the result.
The High Court further clarified that any such petition or other statutory proceeding arising from the dispute must be decided independently on its own merits, without being influenced by observations made in either the single judge’s interim order or the division bench’s own judgment.
Why the elections were stalled
The society’s election notification was issued on March 3, with nominations opening on March 9 and polling originally scheduled for March 21. That process was halted in April, when a single judge stayed the election notification while hearing a petition filed by a society member alleging it had been issued in violation of the society’s own rules.
The petitioner’s counsel had argued that despite the 2024 order on the 270 members, the registrar of cooperative societies had failed to act on objections raised by existing members, and that this and related contempt pleas over the voters’ list were already pending before the same court.
These grounds were on which the judge held that intervention after the notification was permissible and stayed the process, notwithstanding the state’s argument that courts should not step in once a notification is issued.
Separately, in February 2026, another single judge had directed the registrar-cum-commissioner of cooperative societies to consider representations from members who said they had been wrongly excluded from the voter list.
Those petitioners said 887 members had been struck off the rolls solely for failing to submit KYC (know-your-customer) documents and the court had asked the registrar to decide on their inclusion in line with the Telangana Cooperative Societies Act, 1964, and the society’s own bylaws.
A society long mired in election disputes
Formed in 1963, JHCHBS spans roughly 1,195 acre in Hyderabad’s upscale Jubilee Hills neighbourhood and counts around 5,000 members across some 3,325 plots, making it one of the largest cooperative housing societies in the country.
Its elections have repeatedly run into legal trouble over the years, with earlier rounds of litigation centred on disputed voter lists, allegations of financial irregularities in the society’s land dealings and disqualification of large blocks of members.
These issues have kept the society’s managing committee facing court challenges throughout much of the past decade.
With the High Court’s latest order, the long-delayed poll is now set to resume, though the fresh election petition route it has left open suggests the legal wrangling over the society’s leadership may not be over yet.
SOURCE : SIASAT
