Speaker Must Decide on Disqualification Plea Within Reasonable Time, Rules HC

Hyderabad:A division bench of the Telangana High Court, comprising Chief Justice Alok Aradhe and Justice J. Sreenivas Rao, on Friday ruled that the Legislative Assembly Speaker must decide on the petitions seeking disqualification of turncoat legislators “within a reasonable time”.

Though the bench did not specify what constituted ‘reasonable time’, it observed, “Already four and a half months have lapsed since the time the disqualification petitions were filed. Action on the petitions has to be taken in consonance with the rules.”

The political outcome of Friday's legal verdict could provide breathing space for Speaker G. Prasad Kumar and the legislators as well.

BRS leaders have been stating that the legislators, Danam Nagender, Kadiam Srihari and Tellam Venkat Rao, would be disqualified anytime, leading to bypolls in their constituencies.

In an elaborate order, the CJ said: “Needless to state that the Speaker while dealing with the disqualification petitions shall bear in mind the concept of reasonable time, by taking into account the period of pendency of disqualification petitions, the object of inclusion of X Schedule to the Constitution as well as the tenure of the Assembly.”

The bench set aside an earlier order by a single judge that had insisted on fixing a schedule by the Speaker for hearing the disqualification petitions within four weeks from its order. The three MLAs had switched over to the Congress after getting elected on BRS tickets last year. The single judge had also refrained from fixing the timeframe to the Speaker to decide on the disqualification after completion of hearings.

The single judge had made it clear that the case filed by BRS leaders K.P. Vivekanand and Padi Kaushik Reddy, and Aleti Maheshwar Reddy of the BJP, would be re-opened suo motu if the schedule for hearing was not fixed within the stipulated time. Interestingly, with the bench setting aside the single judge order, the threat of suo motu reopening of the case is gone.

Chief Justice Aradhe referred to different rulings by the Supreme Court on similar matters on earlier occasions. While in one case the apex court defended the courts directly ordering disqualification of legislators, in another case it was not inclined to interfere before the speaker decided on disqualification. In ‘S.A. Sampath Kumar vs Kale Yadaiah’, however, the apex court referred the matter to a five-member bench, the final order of which is awaited.

“At this stage, we may take note of another well settled legal principle that this court is required to decide the matter on the basis of law as it stands today,” the Chief Justice pointed out.

He went by the latest decision of the constitutional bench of the Supreme Court in ‘Subhash Desai vs Principal Secretary, Government of Maharashtra’, that the Speaker was bound to decide the disqualification petition within a reasonable time.

The High Court expressed its views while deciding the three appeals filed by the secretary of the Legislative Assembly challenging the single judge orders in the writ petitions filed by Kaushik Reddy and Vivekanand of the BRS and Maheswar Reddy of the BJP seeking directions to the Speaker to decide their applications to disqualify the three MLAs.

Their grievance was that the Speaker had refused to take the disqualification petitions and he did not take any steps on their applications, which were sent through post.