Team Goemkarponn
PANAJI: The Supreme Court of India refused to entertain the special leave petition filed by the former Goa Congress president Girish Chodankar against the Speaker’s order on eight MLAs, who defected to the (BJP) in September 2022.
The petitioner was instructed by a bench consisting of Chief Justice Sanjeev Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar to seek remedy under Article 226 of the Constitution at the High Court of Bombay in Goa.
The petitioner’s senior counsel, Adv. Abhishek Manu Singhvi, contended that the Goa Assembly Speaker’s unreasonable and inexplicable 700-day delay in deciding Chodankar’s disqualification petition against eight rebel Congress MLAs was the reason for going straight to the Supreme Court.
After 10 Congress MLAs defected during the previous session of the Assembly, it took the Speaker 622 days to decide on a similar plea.
According to the senior lawyer, the Speaker’s delayed decisions make such appeals for disqualification futile as the assembly’s term draws to a close.
“How is it possible that you have defied the Speaker’s order under Article 136? The CJI Khanna stated, “You must submit a writ (petition) to the High Court.”
We are unable to consider a plea under Article 136. The bench declared, “We will not become the court of first appeal.”
Later, Singhvi retracted the plea. The Congress party leader could request an early resolution of the case before the High Court, the bench stated.
Speaker of the Goa Assembly Ramesh Tawadkar denied the Congress’s disqualification plea against eight of its MLAs who switched to the BJP on November 1st of this year.
Speaker Tawadkar dismissed Chodankar’s petition, ruling that “the elected member will not be disqualified in either contingency, i.e. whether he chooses to go with the merger or disagrees with the same,” when the elected member’s original political party merges with another political party.
Tawadkar had decided that defection-based disqualification would not be applicable in the event of a merger.
