Supreme Court has listed for 11th September petitions of the 17 disqualified Karnataka MLAs who have claimed the Speaker’s order of July 28 disqualifying them as a move “wholly illegal, arbitrary and malafide”. It has been unanimously contended that Speaker of Karnataka Legislative Assembly, KR Ramesh Kumar, arbitrarily rejected their resignations holding those as not voluntary and genuine.
Justice NV Ramana and Justice Ajay Rastogi would take up the batch of writ petitions under the title Ramesh L Jarkiholi & anr v Speaker Karnataka Legislative Assembly praying to quash the Speaker’s orders in Court no. 3, listed as Item no. 9.
The rebel leaders had filed their resignation on 6th July, but on a misconceived petition filed by the Congress on 10th July, the Speaker disqualified them for the 15th Karnataka Assembly.
Congress leaders Pratap Gouda Patil, B C Patil, A S Hebbar, S T Somashekar, B A Basavaraja and Muniratna have also filed a joint petition.
Roshan Baig, Anand Singh, M T B Nagaraj, Dr K Sudhakar, Shrimanth B Patil and R Shankar have opted to file individual petitions.
JDS leaders AH Vishwanath, K Gopalaiah and KC Narayanagowda also figure among the disqualified MLAs challenging the Speaker’s order.
The listing comes after several attempts of counsels of the disqualified MLAs over the course of the last month.
–India Legal Bureau