10 BRS MLAs’ disqualification: Supreme Court gives Speaker 3 months to decide

“With the experience of over 30 years of working of the Tenth Schedule (dealing with the anti-defection law) to the Constitution, the question that we will have to ask ourselves is as to whether the trust which Parliament entrusted in the high office of the Speaker or the Chairman of avoiding delays in deciding the issue with regard to disqualification has been adhered to by the incumbents… or not?”

Recounting the various cases that have come up before it challenging the delay by the Speaker/Chairman in deciding disqualification petitions, the bench said, “We need not answer this question, since the facts of the various cases we have referred to… themselves provide the answer.”

The CJI said, “Though, we do not possess any advisory jurisdiction, it is for Parliament to consider whether the mechanism of entrusting the Speaker/Chairman the important task of deciding the issue of disqualification on the ground of defection, is serving the purpose of effectively combating political defections or not? If the very foundation of our democracy and the principles that sustain it are to be safeguarded, it will have to be examined whether the present mechanism is sufficient or not. However, at the cost of repetition, we observe that it is for the Parliament to take a call on that.”

In the Telengana matter, the court said, “The Speaker did not even find it necessary to issue notices in the petitions filed by the… petitioners for a period of more than seven months and only after the proceedings were filed before this court, did the Speaker find it necessary to issue notice.” This, it added, “cannot by any stretch be envisaged as acting in an expeditious manner”.

Given the facts of the matter, it said, “failure to issue any direction to the Speaker, in our view, would frustrate the very purpose for which the Tenth Schedule has been brought in the Constitution” and “amount to permitting the Speaker to repeat the widely criticised situation of ‘operation successful, patient died’”.

The BRS had initially moved the Telangana High Court, where a single-judge bench gave the Speaker four weeks to fix a schedule for hearing the disqualification petitions. On appeal by the Secretary of the Telangana Assembly, a division bench on November 22, 2024, set aside the single-judge order and asked the Speaker to decide the petitions in a reasonable time.

Setting aside the division bench’s order, the Supreme Court said that “the division bench… erred in interfering with the order of the… single judge…”

Directing the Speaker to decide the disqualification petitions expeditiously, within a maximum of three months, the court asked the Speaker not to permit any of the MLAs who are sought to be disqualified to protract the proceedings. “In the event, any of such MLAs attempts to protract the proceedings, the Speaker would draw an adverse inference against such of the MLAs,” the court said.

The BRS filed the disqualification pleas before the Speaker in March-April 2024. This was after Danam Nagender, Kadiyam Srihari, Tellam Venkat Rao, Pocharam Srinivas Reddy, Kale Yadaiah, M Sanjay Kumar, Krishnamohan Reddy, Mahipal Reddy, Prakash Goud, and Arekapudi Gandhi, who were elected on BRS tickets in the 2023 Assembly polls, switched to the Congress.