Daijiworld Media Network - Bengaluru (SP)

Bengaluru, Sep 26: The Supreme Court (SC) bench, which is hearing the petition filed by 17 disqualified legislators from Karnataka questioning their disqualification, on Wednesday, postponed hearing in the case to Thursday. With this, these disqualified MLAs will have to spend another day of tension and nervousness.

A three-judge bench of the SC led by Justice N V Ramana is hearing the petition. After hearing arguments, the bench posted the hearing in the case to 10 am today.

Senior advocate, Mukul Rohatgi, appearing on behalf of the disqualified MLAs, drew the attention of the bench to the fact that bypoll has been declared for the constituencies represented by the disqualified MLAs, and that September 30 happens to be the last date for filing nominations. He also said that it has been eight weeks since these legislators had resigned, and therefore requested the bench to urgently dispose of the application and stay the election notification.

Rohatgi argued that the assembly speaker had failed to follow the tenets of social justice. Instead of announcing first whether the resignations were accepted or not, the speaker all of a sudden disqualified the legislators from their assembly memberships. He said that the MLAs did not attend the assembly session as the court had exempted them from attending it and insisted therefore that the party whip does not bind them. He argued that it is wrong to accuse them of indulging in anti party activities and pointed out that in rare cases, elections had been withheld in the past, and sought stay for the bypoll as the speaker has restrained his clients from contesting elections.

During the arguments which took 90 minutes to complete, Rohatgi mentioned the case of MLA, Umesh Jadhav's resignation, duly drawing the attention of the judges to the fact that Jadhav was allowed to take part in the Lok Sabha election by accepting his resignation. When dealing with 17 other legislators, speaker, Ramesh Kumar, behaved arbitrarily, he felt. He stressed that the disqualification was resorted to by the speaker to pressurize the MLAs to withdraw their resignations.

Advocate Tushar Mehta, who argued on behalf of the speaker, said that the speaker had the power to accept the resignation and felt that accepting resignations of the legislators who had resigned together would have been the right course for the speaker.