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Order on ex-HJC MLAs
HC has overstepped its domain, says Haryana Cong
Yoginder Gupta/TNS

Chandigarh, December 22
The Haryana Congress today set the stage for a confrontation with the judiciary with three of its leaders writing a letter to the Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court pointing out perceived infirmities in the verdict of its Division Bench which declared five former Haryana Janhit Congress MLAs as unattached. The Bench had also directed the Speaker to decide the disqualification petitions against the legislators by April 30, 2012.

In their letter, Congress leaders have urged the Chief Justice to “look into the matter and issue appropriate directions to set the things in order.”

Bharat Bhushan Batra, MLA from Rohtak and Chief Whip of the Congress Legislature Party; Raghuvir Singh Kadian, MLA from Beri and former Speaker; and Karan Singh Dalal, former MLA from Palwal also distributed the copies of their letter to mediapersons.

According to these leaders, ‘infirmities’ in the verdict are of two categories - extra-legal and legal. Pointing out the extra-legal infirmity, the leaders said Speaker Kuldeep Sharma’s father, Chiranji Lal Sharma, was admitted to a Gurgaon hospital for several months and Kuldeep had to look after him. Therefore, he could not attend to his official duties. Now, the Speaker’s father has passed away and the ‘Rasam Kirya’ is to be performed on December 25, 2011. The Division Bench, they said, pronounced the December 20 judgment without taking into account the “peculiar circumstances involved”. The verdict was pronounced “in a mechanical manner making sarcastic references,” they claimed.

Regarding the ‘legal infirmities’, the leaders said besides directing the Speaker on the time-bound disposal of the disqualification petitions, the Bench exceeded its jurisdiction by issuing directions to the Speaker to treat the said MLAs as unattached, give them separate seats in the Assembly and barring them from holding any office till the petitions were decided.

They said the order had directly interfered in the working of the House and all “such actions being prerogative of the Speaker, should not have been resorted to, especially when no such appeal was raised before the Bench and no relief was sought by HJC president Kuldeep Bishnoi.” They said the subject matter (of the petition) being in the exclusive domain of the Tenth Schedule (anti-defection law) of the Constitution, it was far more necessary for the Bench to restrict the scope of intervention. Congress leaders also asserted that the High Court could interfere only after the final order had been passed by the Speaker, a Constitutional authority. “The order is, therefore, not sustainable and the reasons for issuing these directions are best known to the Bench only,” they claimed.