PANAJI: After two years, Goa legislative speaker Rajesh Patnekar on Tuesday finally dismissed two disqualification petitions filed against 10 former Congress MLAs and two MGP MLAs. While Congress has decided to challenge the judgment, MGP will take a decision once they get the order.
The petitions were filed by state Congress president Girish Chodankar and MGP’s senior leader Ramkrishna ‘Sudin’ Dhavalikar.
In August 2019, Congress had filed a disqualification petition before the speaker against the 10 MLAs — Chandrakant ‘Babu’ Kavlekar, Isidore Fernandes, Nilkanth Halarnkar, Jennifer Monserrate, Antonio Fernandes, Francisco Silveira, Wilfred D’Sa, Clafasio Dias, Filipe Neri Rodrigues and Atanasio Monserrate — who quit the party and joined BJP a month earlier. Chodankar, who had filed the plea, had sought that the 10 MLAs be restrained from attending assembly proceedings and holding constitutional posts till the case was decided by the speaker.
MGP had also filed a disqualification petition against deputy chief minister Manohar Ajgaonkar and PWD minister Deepak Pauskar, who had quit the party to join BJP in March 2019.
“Both petitions have been dismissed,” Patnekar told reporters, while adding that reasons behind dismissal of the petitions have been mentioned in the orders.
When asked to reply to the allegation made by Chodankar, who said that the speaker has passed the orders on the instruction of “super chief minister” Satish Dhond, who is BJP’s organizing secretary, Patnekar said, “No comments.”
Dhavalikar’s counsel Carlos Ferreira said the speaker has told them that he will make a correction in the judgment. “Only when we read the order, we can a take a call on what action we have to take,” Ferreira said, while adding that “as this petition is disposed, the matter in the Supreme Court become infructuous”.
Abhijit Gosavi, Chodankar’s counsel, said, “We will wait for the proceeding before the apex court, which is on Thursday. According to us, we have crossed the first hurdle in getting these MLAs disqualified. The biggest hurdle was to get a decision from the speaker, which we finally got after a long-fought battle. We had to even move the Supreme Court to direct the speaker to pass the order. We will test the decision and succeed in that.”