PANJIM: Goa Pradesh Congress Committee (GPCC) president Girish Chodankar has filed a writ petition before the High Court of Bombay at Goa, challenging the Speaker’s verdict dismissing his disqualification petition against 10 rebel party MLAs.
The writ petition has been listed for hearing before the division bench on Monday. All 10 former Congress MLAs have been named respondents.
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Chodankar on Friday told media persons that he has appealed against Speaker Rajesh Patnerkar’s judgement dismissing his disqualification petition on April 20 this year.
In his writ petition, Chodankar has prayed that the Speaker’s order be quashed and set aside and to disqualify the 10 former Congress MLAs for attracting disqualification under Article 191(2) read with para 2 (1) (a) of the Tenth Schedule to the Constitution of India.
Chodankar said that the Speaker’s impugned order is ex-facie perverse, bad in law, biased and completely against the Constitutional mandate of prevention of political defection as contemplated under the Tenth Schedule to the Constitution.
The interpretation sought to be given to the provisions of the Tenth Schedule in the impugned order is completely against the Constitutional mandate; spirit and intent of the Tenth Schedule i.e. discouraging of the evil of political defection in as much as the impugned order appears to be for encouraging and promoting the evil of political defection, Chodankar has stated in his petition.
Chodankar has argued that that all 10 rebel MLAs have voluntarily given up membership of their original political party and joined BJP thereby incurring disqualification under the Tenth Schedule. He said that the 10 MLAs claiming that they constitute two-third majority of the Legislature Party which has merged with the BJP, can by no stretch be considered as a valid merger.
According to him, the Legislature Party of a political party by itself, has no authority or power to merge with any other political party, without the merger of the original political party. All 10 respondents failed to demonstrate that there is a merger of original political party which preceded the decision of the two-third members of Legislature Party agreeing to merger. Rather they pleaded, in their responses before the Speaker that there was merger of their “legislative party”.
On April 20, Patnekar had dismissed Chodankar’s plea, holding that there is valid merger of the Congress Legislature Party into the BJP and that there is no question of 10 former Congress MLAs giving up their membership of the party to attract disqualification.
In August 2019, Chodankar had filed the disqualification petition before the Speaker praying for disqualification of MLAs Chandrakant (Babu) Kavlekar, Isidore Fernandes, Nilkant Halarnkar, Jennifer Monserrate, Antonio (Tony) Fernandes, Francis Silveira, Wilfred D’Sa, Clafasio Dias, Filipe Neri Rodrigues and Atanasio (Babush) Monserrate, who joined the BJP in July 2019.
