Panaji: After assembly speaker Ramesh Tawadkar dismissed his petition seeking the disqualification of eight MLAs who joined BJP from Congress, Dominic Noronha filed a writ petition in the high court of Bombay at Goa challenging the speaker’s order.
Noronha said that the speaker’s order misconstrued and misinterpreted paragraph 4 of the Tenth Schedule of the Constitution.
The speaker, while disposing of his disqualification petition last month, had said that the Tenth Schedule completely bars all types of defections, but para 4 carves out an exception where disqualification will not apply in the case of a merger. The intention of para 4 is not to apply disqualification in the case of merger of political parties, Tawadkar said.
Last week, the speaker had dismissed another disqualification plea filed by former state Congress president Girish Chodankar seeking the disqualification of the eight MLAs. Tawadkar held that the facts in the case were identical to the facts in Noronha’s case.
Out of the 11 MLAs elected on Congress tickets in the 2022 assembly elections, eight MLAs joined BJP on Sep 14 the same year. They claimed that they formed two-thirds of the legislature party of Congress and merged with BJP.