Dehradun: Dislodged Uttarakhand Chief Minister Harish Rawat on Monday mounted a legal challenge to the imposition of President’s rule and demanded its revocation as Congress sparred with BJP accusing the Centre of toppling its government ahead of a floor test in the Assembly.
Describing the decision as a “brazen display of high-handedness and authoritarianism”, Rawat filed a petition in the Uttarakhand High Court seeking quashing of the Presidential proclamation.
However, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley put the blame squarely on the Congress for the “Constitutional crisis” in the state and accused the Speaker of declaring as passed a “defeated” appropriation bill and then failing to certify the “falsehood”.
“This leaves the state without any approved financial expenditure with effect from April 1, 2015,” he wrote in a Facebook blog titled A State without a Budget.
Rawat’s petition came up before the single bench of Justice U.C. Dhyani, who after hearing both sides for close to four hours, said the matter would be taken up again on Tuesday.
“Invocation of Art 356 of the Constitution in Uttarakhand is absolutely illegal, arbitrary and malafide andtherefore its invocation should be quashed and Harish Rawatgovernment restored,” SC counsel Abhishek Manu Sanghvi contended before the petition. Questioning the timing of the move, Singhvi said it was meant to sabotage the Constitutional process.
