Country’s apex court has agreed on Tuesday to hear out the pleas submitted by disqualified legislators from Karnataka. It said that the registrar of the court will look into the urgent listing of pleas filed by 15 disqualified legislators of Karnataka.
This decision comes as a surprise as on Monday, the Supreme Court had rejected to entertain their pleas. The 15 disqualified legislators belonged to the Congress-JD(S) alliance. They were disqualified by Karnataka Assembly Speaker KR Ramesh Kumar under the Anti-defection law provided by 10th schedule.
The disqualified leaders of the coalition have approached the court to seek relief in the matter. They are demanding to scrap the orders of their disqualification by KR Ramesh Kumar dated July 28, 2019, since their resignations were “genuine and voluntary” in nature. The filed plea claims that the leaders had submitted their resignations themselves on July 6. They also appeared in person as per the court orders to submit their papers on July 11.
The petition read, “The Speakers’ insistence on them attending the proceedings before him on the date of the trust vote clearly speaks volumes of the manner in which the disqualification proceedings have been conducted against them.”
The legislators have termed Speakers’ move as illegal and arbitrary. Though the Speaker had justified his stand by saying that he has used his judicial conscience and the defected legislators committed a serious breach of rules. Kumar had disqualified 17 rebel MLAs in the related matter. It is said that they all defected from their party alliance to join the Bhartiya Janta Party. A massive shift of allegiance of this scale to the saffron party led to the collapse of HD Kumaraswamy‘s government.
Disqualified legislators include Byrati Basavraj, Anand Singh, R Roshan Baig, Muniratna, K Sudhakar, MTB Nagaraj, Pratap Gouda Patil, Shrimant Patil, Ramesh Jarkiholi, BC Patil, Shivaram Hebbar, ST Someshekhar, Mahesh Kumatahalli and R Shankar from the Congress and JD(S) legislators AH Vishwanath, Gopalaiah and Narayana Gowda.
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