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Goa: Bombay HC to pronounce verdict in Congress-MGP disqualification pleas today
Among the 10 who left the Congress, three were denied tickets by the Bharatiya Janata Party in this year’s elections, while seven were retained
PANAJI: The Bombay high court will on Thursday pronounce its verdict on a plea seeking disqualification of 12 MLAs - 10 Congress and 2 Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party (MGP) - who defected to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), claiming that since they constituted two-thirds of the MLAs who were switching parties, it was a valid merger and not a defection under the 10th schedule of the Constitution.
A bench of justices Manish Pitale and RM Laddha will pronounce the verdict at 10:30 a.m .
The Congress and the MGP had initially filed disqualification pleas before the Speaker, and challenged the latter’s decision before the high court when they were dismissed.
Advocate Vivek Tankha, a Rajya Sabha MP who argued the matter on behalf of the Congress, said that the Speaker’s decision to allow the ‘merger’ when there was none, was out of tune with the mandates of the anti-defection law.
“For a valid merger under the 10th schedule, a twin test is required to be satisfied, i.e., first, there must be a decision of the original political party to be merged and secondly, two-thirds of the legislative members should agree to such a merger. A legislative party by itself cannot merge. There is no concept of merger of a legislature party in the 10th schedule of the Constitution,” Tankha argued before the court.
The Speaker dismissed the pleas and said that it was a valid merger under the 10th schedule of the Constitution.
The Congress, which emerged as the single largest party after the 2017 assembly elections, failed to form the government as smaller parties, including the Goa Forward Party and the MGP instead chose to support the BJP despite running an acerbic anti-BJP campaign in the run up to the polls.
While three Congress MLAs - Vishwajit Rane, Dayanand Sopte and Subhash Shirodkar - deserted the party after first resigning as MLAs, the bigger jolt came in 2019 when 10 of the 15 Congress MLAs switched to the BJP. In a memorandum submitted before the Speaker, they claimed they had adopted a resolution to merge the Congress Legislature Party with the BJP, and hence weren’t running afoul of the anti-defection law.
A few months back, two out of the three MGP MLAs had switched to the BJP. The high court jointly heard the pleas filed by the Congress and the MGP.
Interestingly, one of the two MGP MLAs, Deepak Pauskar, who was made PWD minister was denied a ticket by the BJP for the polls, while the other was asked to compete against leader of opposition Digambar Kamat, removing him from his favoured constituency of Pernem in North Goa.
Among the 10 who left the Congress, three were denied tickets while seven were retained.
The verdict of the high court could send ripples across the country given that issues raised could set a precedent amid cases of defection being reported in several states, most recently in Meghalaya when a group of Congress legislators, who comprised more than two-thirds of the lot, shifted allegiances to the Trinamool Congress, making it the principal opposition party without even contesting the elections.
