The Supreme Court on Friday set aside the one-year suspension of 12 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLAs from Maharashtra from the state Legislative Assembly terming it "unconstitutional and arbitrary".
A Bench headed by Justice AM Khanwilkar held that suspension of MLAs could not have been suspended beyond that ongoing Monsoon session in July 2021.
Twelve MLAs were suspended for one year for allegedly misbehaving with the presiding officer.
These resolutions passed, apart from being illegal and unconstitutional, were also "beyond the powers of the assembly" in question, the Bench said.
Earlier, the apex court had said that the suspension from Legislative Assembly for one year should be linked with some purpose and there has to be an "overpowering" reason that the member should not be allowed to even attend the next session.
The Bench had also observed that the resolution passed by the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly suspending 12 BJP MLAs, is prima facie "unconstitutional" as such a suspension cannot operate beyond six months owing to a constitutional bar.
It had said that the explicit outer limit as per the Constitution for an MLA to be absent from his seat is 60 days, after which the seat is deemed to be vacated.
"How long can seat remain vacant? At the most six months, the outer limit can be there. Here we are talking about a constituency being represented in a parliamentary form of democracy? Is this not hitting the basic structure of the constitution when the 12 constituencies are unrepresented?" the Bench had asked.
"We can say that the decision to suspension can only operate till 6 months and later than that it will be hit by the constitutional bar," it had added.
The Bench had also taken exception to the arguments of senior advocate Aryama Sundaram appearing for Maharashtra Assembly that the House has absolute powers to frame its own rules including on period of suspension of its members.
To this the Bench then said that even if the Assembly rules are read in consonance with the Constitution, the maximum bar could be for six months only.
It had further opined that the decision of suspension is even worse than expelling them since no one can then represent the constituents of the suspended representatives in the Assembly.
Twelve BJP MLAs were suspended on July 5, 2021, from the Assembly for one year after the State government had accused them of "misbehaving" with presiding officer Bhaskar Jadhav in the Speaker's chamber. The motion to suspend these MLAs was moved by state Parliamentary Affairs Minister Anil Parab and passed by a voice vote.
On July 22 last year they had filed a plea in the top court challenging the resolution passed by the Assembly to suspend them for one year.
The 12 suspended members are - Sanjay Kute, Ashish Shelar, Abhimanyu Pawar, Girish Mahajan, Atul Bhatkhalkar, Parag Alavani, Harish Pimpale, Yogesh Sagar, Jay Kumar Rawat, Narayan Kuche, Ram Satpute and Bunty Bhangdia.
( With inputs from ANI )
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