Chennai: The Madras High Court has dismissed a petition seeking directions to the Tamil Nadu Assembly Speaker and Assembly Secretary to initiate disqualification proceedings against 25 rebel AIADMK legislators who supported the confidence motion moved by Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay May 13.
A division bench of Chief Justice Sushrut Arvind Dharmadhikari and Justice G. Arul Murugan also declined to quash Speaker J.C.D. Prabhakar’s decision to drop proceedings against 21 of the legislators after AIADMK General Secretary Edappadi K. Palaniswami condoned their conduct.
Dismissing a public interest litigation filed by advocate P.V. Selvakumar of Tiruvallur district on the issue, the bench accepted Advocate General Vijay Narayan’s contention that the petitioner was a third party with no legal standing to interfere in the AIADMK’s internal affairs.
Selvakumar claimed that Palaniswami had submitted a representation to the Speaker May 13 seeking the disqualification of all 25 MLAs under Paragraphs 2(1)(a) and 2(1)(b) of the Tenth Schedule to the Constitution.
Paragraph 2(1)(a) deals with legislators who voluntarily give up the membership of their political party. Paragraph 2(1)(b) applies when legislators vote or abstain from voting contrary to their party’s directions. It also allows the party to condone such conduct within 15 days.
The petitioner’s counsel, K. Sakthivel, argued that the AIADMK leader had specifically sought action under both provisions. Therefore, the Speaker should not have accepted Palaniswami’s subsequent request, dated May 27, to withdraw proceedings against 21 legislators.
The court, however, rejected the contention. Writing the verdict for the bench, Justice Murugan observed that the allegation under Paragraph 2(1)(a) was also based on the MLAs’ decision to vote in defiance of the party whip. Since the party had condoned the voting within the prescribed period, no independent ground for disqualification survived under that provision.
The judges ruled that once the AIADMK General Secretary formally condoned the conduct of the 21 MLAs, they could not face disqualification under either Paragraph 2(1)(a) or Paragraph 2(1)(b). Holding that the Speaker had acted correctly in dropping the proceedings against the legislators, the Bench found the petitioner’s arguments “baseless and misplaced” and dismissed the PIL.
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