NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Tuesday sought a response from the Telangana government and others on the pleas alleging delay by the Assembly Speaker in deciding the petitions seeking disqualification of BRS MLAs who defected to the Congress.
The court asked if this should continue till the end of term of the assembly.
Taking up the matter, a bench of Justices B R Gavai and Augustine George, asked, "What happened to the democratic principles."
The court was considering the plea against the November 2024 order of the Telangana High Court over the disqualification of three BRS MLAs who joined the ruling Congress. The other petition was related to other seven legislators who also defected.
During the hearing, the bench asked if in a democracy, should this situation go on till the end of the term of the assembly.
"A reasonable period for deciding disqualification plea should be at the end of the term," the bench asked.
Senior advocates Mukul Rohatgi and A M Singhvi represented some of the respondents in the matter.
Senior advocate C A Sundaram appeared for the petitioners.
The bench asked senior advocate A M Singhvi, appearing for one of the respondents, to tell the court the time limit for the Speaker to decide the matter, and then the court will not decide the matter.
“Every matter cannot be operation successful and patient dead. I am not referring to anything,” the bench said.
Sundaram said that Rohatgi, while appearing in the previous hearing, said that they are not going to file a reply.
“Three facts are admitted that the disqualification applications were filed in March and April 2023, so far as the other subject matter of the writ petition is concerned, it was filed in June- July 2024. More than one year has passed, and nothing has happened,” Sundaram said.
The bench said let them file a reply in the matter.
Sundaram opposed giving three weeks to the respondents to file a reply and stressed that they are just delaying the matter.
“It is another way of delaying," he said.
The bench noted that Singhvi and Rohatgi said there was no formal notice in the matter, and therefore, the respondents could not file a reply.
“No doubt the objection is hyper technical. However, we do not want any objection to be raised at a subsequent point of time that petitions were decided without following the principles of natural justice," the bench said.
The bench said in the previous hearing, it had put a query to Rohatgi as to whether the Speaker would express the timeline within which the matter will be decided so that the court could avoid passing any order.
The bench fixed the matter for hearing on March 25.
