The Hindu : U.P. Speaker's action illegal, says Cong.

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Jan 30, 2003

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U.P. Speaker's action illegal, says Cong.

By J.P. Shukla

LUCKNOW JAN. 29. The Congress today reaffirmed its claim that the ruling of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly Speaker, Kesri Nath Tripathi, recognising a formal split in its legislature group on Tuesday had no sanction of the law or the Constitution.

The party high command representative, Motilal Vora, who rushed here to take stock of the situation, told newspersons that no split had taken place. "The number of defectors was only seven while the total number of Congress MLAs is 23.'' The party is seeking legal opinion and would challenge in court the Speaker's decision, Mr. Vora said, adding that he would also write a letter to Mr. Tripathi, registering protest against his decision.

Mr. Vora claimed there was no parallel between the G. Vaidyanathan case and the present development.

The two legislators, whose case was cited by Mr. Tripathi in his ruling with reference to the Vaidyanathan case, had voluntarily left their party, while in the present case the U.P. MLA, Akhilesh Singh, had been expelled from the Congress.

Hence, there was a clear difference in the status of Mr. Singh and that of the MLAs referred to in the earlier case.

Mr. Vora alleged that official machinery had been used to "pressure his party MLAs to defect" and they had been "coaxed for five hours" before the Speaker gave his ruling. The defection had been "engineered in an atmosphere of severe fear among the legislators".

He said the Congress would fight against the Speaker's "unconstitutional decision" with all its might.

The Congress leadership was aware that attempts were on to poach on its MLAs for quite some time.

The party president, Sonia Gandhi, had herself taken notice of the fact and tried to control the situation by talking to legislators directly.

The Congress Legislature Party leader, Pramod Tiwari's style of functioning has come under attack following the recent developments.

He had emerged as a parallel power centre in the party and never allowed it to function according to the high command's desires. And over the past several years, he has had his quarrels with every individual appointed as the president of the State party.

Of further concern for the Congress could be the open-ended nature of the Speaker's ruling in which he had mentioned that the MLAs forming the separate group had mentioned names of several other members, who, according to them, were also members of their group.

The Speaker did not give the names of those were said to owe allegiance to the new group but said that as they had failed to present themselves before him, he could not consider their cases.

Their issue could be decided only when they personally came to him to present their cases, Mr. Tripathi said.

This concluding part of the Speaker's decision leaves scope for more Congress MLAs joining the group of the Bharatiya Congress Dal in future.

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