The Supreme Court on Tuesday expressed dissatisfaction over the Telangana Assembly Secretariat's delay in taking a decision on the disqualification of 10 Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) MLAs who defected to the Congress last year.
A division bench headed by Justice B R Gavai, which is hearing a petition filed by BRS MLA Padi Kaushik Reddy, questioned the prolonged inaction by the Speaker’s office. The petition seeks the disqualification of the defected legislators.
The bench noted that it has been over a year since the alleged defections took place.
“When was the petition seeking disqualification filed? Why hasn’t the Speaker’s office set a deadline for deciding on these petitions? Please don’t adopt delaying tactics,” Justice Gavai remarked.
However, the bench also acknowledged that past Constitutional bench rulings on similar matters did not prescribe a specific timeline for resolving such cases.
“We cannot proceed without taking into account previous rulings. How can higher court judgments be rewritten or ignored?” Justice Gavai asked.
Senior advocate Sundaram, representing Kaushik Reddy, argued that despite filing individual complaints against three MLAs, the Speaker had not taken any action and had failed to issue notices to the defectors until recently.
He added that one of the defected MLAs had even contested the Lok Sabha elections on a Congress ticket and lost, yet continued to claim affiliation with the BRS.
Sundaram informed the court that only after the Supreme Court's earlier observations did the Speaker issue notices on February 13, giving the defected MLAs three weeks to respond. However, even after the deadline passed, there remains no clarity on the status of the disqualification process.
