Team Goemkarponn
PANAJI: Dominic John Noronha of Sirlim has challenged the Goa Assembly Speaker Ramesh Tawadkar’s decision to reject his disqualification petition against eight rebel Congress MLAs who switched from the Congress to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in September 2022 in a writ petition filed before the High Court of Bombay in Goa.
The eight MLAs—Digambar Kamat, Aleixo Sequeira, Sankalp Amonkar, Michael Lobo, Delilah Lobo, Kedar Naik, Rudolfo Fernandes, and Rajesh Faldessai—had been disqualified under the Tenth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, and as a result, they were no longer members of the Goa Legislative Assembly as of September 14, 2022, according to Noronha’s petition, which calls for the Speaker’s order, dated October 14, 2022, to be revoked and set aside.
Due to a thorough misreading, misconstruction, and misinterpretation of Paragraph 4 of the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution, Noronha had contended that the Speaker’s conclusion that the respondents had not been disqualified under the Tenth Schedule was arbitrary, unreasonable, illegal, and unconstitutional.
Noronha claims that the Speaker erred in dismissing his argument on the twin requirements: first, the political party must unite, and second, at least two-thirds of the legislature party members must consent to the merger.
According to Noronha, the Speaker erroneously decided that the political party merger was not necessary and neglected to acknowledge the two prerequisites that must be met for a merger under Paragraph 4 of the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution. By offering a deeming fiction, the Speaker arbitrary determined that Paragraph 4 creates an exemption, stating that the exclusion outlined in Paragraph 2 does not apply in the event of a political party merger.
Noronha claims that in determining that sub-paragraph 2 of Paragraph 4 would become unnecessary if the twin requirements of a legislative party and political party merger were required, the Speaker misunderstood and misinterpreted the provisions of Paragraph 4 of the Tenth Schedule.
Noronha further contended that the Speaker erred by citing the ruling of the High Court of Bombay at Goa in the February 2022 case of Girish Chodankar v. The Speaker and 10 Others, which held that the deeming fiction in sub-paragraph 2 of Paragraph 4 under the Tenth Schedule did not require a political party merger decision.
In the meantime, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear a special leave petition (SLP) on November 5 from former Congress president Girish Chodankar, asking that Speaker Ramesh Tawadkar be ordered to make a decision on his disqualification appeal within a certain amount of time.
