Karnataka Speaker KR Ramesh Kumar’s order disqualifying 17 dissident Congress and JD(S) MLAs until the end of the current Assembly’s term is legally vulnerable and could be struck down by a constitutional court, an analysis has argued.

The Goa precedent

The main difficulty, according to the analysis, is that barring the MLAs until 2023 conflicts with a 2017 Bombay High Court judgment in a Goa Assembly case. That ruling held clearly that disqualification under the Tenth Schedule does not prevent a legislator from going back to the voters and being re-elected while the same Assembly is in office. “The disqualification in question is not for five years,” the court said.

The petition was filed by the Congress against Vishwajeet Rane, who won on a Congress ticket but defied the whip and quit both the party and the Assembly on the day the BJP-led coalition in Goa faced its floor test, later joining Manohar Parrikar’s cabinet as health minister. The Congress contended that Rane’s resignation ought not to have been accepted by the Speaker and that he should be disqualified for the whole term, until 2022.

The High Court dismissed the plea. It distinguished between disqualification for reasons such as holding an office of profit, unsoundness of mind or insolvency, which bars a person even from standing for election for the House’s five-year term under Article 172, and disqualification under Article 191(2) for defection or anti-party activity. The latter ends membership but adds no ban on seeking re-election, the court said. Both lead to the seat being vacated at once under Article 190(3), but their consequences are set out in separate clauses, and the court declined to assume the legislature meant something it had not written.

That judgment still holds; the Supreme Court, where an appeal is pending, has neither overturned nor stayed it.

Other grounds of challenge

The MLAs are also expected to argue that the Speaker violated natural justice, acted with mala fides and ignored Assembly rules requiring at least seven days’ notice for a reply. In a line of rulings beginning with the Kihoto case in 1992, the Supreme Court has held that the Speaker acts as a tribunal when deciding Tenth Schedule matters, so his decisions are subject to judicial review on grounds such as constitutional violations, mala fides, breaches of natural justice and perversity.

Fifteen of the 17 MLAs have already gone to the Supreme Court, where their petitions over their resignations are pending. The court had said in an interim order that they could not be forced to attend Assembly proceedings, so they may argue that disqualifying them despite that protection amounts to contempt, and seek an immediate stay.

The Supreme Court will once again have to interpret the relevant constitutional provisions and clarify the Speaker’s powers and the duties of legislators.

See also: State assembly members | Election news

Originally published on 29 July 2019. Rewritten on 9 October 2026.

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