Examine powers of Speaker, top court tells Parliament

DISQUALIFYING LAWMAKERS The presiding officer also belongs to one political party or the other, observes SC

NEWDELHI: The wisdom of the Parliament to entrust the Speaker — of state assembly or the Parliament -- with the duty to decide disqualification petitions against lawmakers on the ground of defection needs to be revisited, the Supreme Court held on Monday.

The top court was hearing a case on defection of a Congress MLA from Manipur.

The judgment, which is likely to spark a debate on the partisan role of speakers of state assemblies in government formation in states, was rendered by a bench of justices Rohinton Nariman, Aniruddha Bose and V Ramasubramanian.

The bench urged the Parliament to rethink whether disqualification petitions ought to be entrusted to a speaker under the tenth schedule of the Constitution, considering the fact that the speaker continues to belong to a particular political party.

“It is time that Parliament have a rethink on whether disqualification petitions ought to be entrusted to a Speaker as a quasijudicial authority when such Speaker continues to belong to a particular political party either de jure or de facto”, the judgment said.

Paragraph 6 of the tenth schedule of the Constitution provides that questions relating to disqualification of member of the house

shall be referred to the speaker whose decision on the same will be final.

The court recommended amendment to the tenth schedule by substituting speaker with a permanent tribunal headed by a retired Supreme Court judge or a retired chief justice of a high court or some other independent mechanism as arbiter of such disputes.

Such a measure, the court held, will ensure that such disputes are decided both swiftly and impartially, thus giving real teeth to the provisions contained in the tenth schedule, which the