The Supreme Court will on November 17 hear a petition seeking contempt proceedings against the Telangana speaker for allegedly not complying with its direction to decide disqualification pleas against 10 BRS MLAs who defected to the ruling Congress.
On July 31, a top court bench headed by Chief Justice B R Gavai directed the assembly speaker to decide in three months the matter of the disqualification of the 10 Bharat Rashtra Samithi MLAs.
On Monday, a lawyer mentioned the contempt petition for urgent hearing, saying the speaker had not acted within the three-month deadline.
“List it next Monday,” CJI Gavai said.
Expressing concern over the delay, the counsel said the respondents were “dragging the proceedings till the end of the month for obvious reasons”, an apparent reference to CJI Gavai’s retirement on November 23.
“The Supreme Court will not close after the 24th of November,” the CJI said.
The counsel representing the petitioners also submitted that no proceedings had been conducted since the court’s July 31 order.
“The MLAs are still continuing. Your lordships had held that if any MLA was trying to protract the proceedings, an adverse inference would be drawn. Two petitions are pending. The speaker has not touched them. Others are in the evidence stage,” the counsel said.
The contempt plea stems from the apex court’s July 31 judgment, delivered by a bench of the CJI and Justice AG Masih, in a batch of writ petitions filed by BRS leaders KT Rama Rao, Padi Kaushik Reddy, and KO Vivekanand.
The top court reiterated that the speaker acts as a tribunal while deciding disqualification pleas under Tenth Schedule of the Constitution and consequently does not enjoy “constitutional immunity”.
The Tenth Schedule deals with provisions on disqualification on the grounds of defection.
“The very foundation of our democracy is shaken when elected representatives are allowed to defect and yet continue in office without timely adjudication. Parliament had trusted the high office of the Speaker to act expeditiously. That trust, in many cases, has not been honoured,” the bench had said.
