Goa Speaker Ramesh Tawadkar pronounced his judgement on the second of three disqualification petitions filed before him by former state Congress president Girish Chodankar, on Friday. The third, filed by incumbent Congress president Amit Patkar is yet to be decided. As expected, however, the Speaker dismissed the disqualification, by adopting the same reasoning that he had applied in the first case filed by Congress worker Dominic Noronha and reproducing parts of the first order in the second.
Needless to say, no one was expecting anything different. When in 2019, ten Congress MLAs moved to the BJP their disqualification petitions were rejected by the then Speaker Rajesh Patnekar and his order was upheld by the Bombay High Court at Goa. An appeal before the Supreme Court is currently pending solely on the point of law whether a merger of 3/4th of the legislative wing of a political party without the merger of the original political party is considered within the ambit of the exception carved out in the tenth schedule of the constitution.
The Congress has argued that both the original political party and at least three-fourths of its legislative wing have to agree to merge for it to be a valid merger. However, given the current political environment, no court or Speaker has dared interpret it differently. In fact, this convenient interpretation of the law, greatly benefits the party in power, more particularly, the party to which the defection has taken place at the cost of the opposition. To that extent, since the Speaker usually also belongs to the party in power, successive speakers have either avoided ruling on the issue -- delaying until the session comes to a close or have ruled in favour of the party they belong to.
Similarly, the Court has rarely had the opportunity to rule on the issue until the Bombay High Court at Goa in 2022 gave a ruling that essentially sided with what the Congress has said is a pro-defection interpretation of the law.
The current interpretation essentially makes the anti-defection law defunct with the only hindrance being that the defecting camp needs to ensure that they have more than a 3/4th majority. Whether that is the correct interpretation is still pending before the Supreme Court, which has shown no hurry in hearing the matter, essentially allowing the status quo to continue.
To that extent, the Congress’ enthusiasm in filing disqualification petitions against the eight MLAs serves the sole purpose of giving them grounds to say that they didn’t let the ‘injustice’ pass but challenged it before the appropriate forums. There is no other practical meaning to the petitions currently being filed before the various authorities. To that extent, the current system of adjudicating the legality of defections is hopelessly broken with neither the Speaker nor the Courts willing to take a stand one way or another and especially not to the detriment of the party in power.
An analysis of various recent judgements on various disqualification petitions that it is not just speakers who decide that they will not decide and as and when courts decide the petitions have been rendered infructuous.
It is high time the anti-defection law is interpreted both in letter and in spirit and not allowed to be rendered toothless by the parties who seek to encourage defections for their own benefit.
