Delhi High Court reinstates seven Delhi BJP MLAs suspended by speaker

The Delhi High Court on Wednesday reinstated the seven Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Members of Legislative Assembly (MLA) who were suspended from the Delhi house for allegedly creating ruckus during Lieutenant Governor's address. .Justice Subramonium Prasad passed the order after the MLAs moved the High Court challenging the speaker's decision. .BJP has eight MLAs in the 70-member Delhi assembly. Seven of these BJP MLAs were suspended on allegations that they disrupted the address of the Lieutenant Governor (LG) Vinai Kumar Saxena.The suspended legislators were Vijender Gupta, Ajay Kumar Mahawar, Anil Kumar Bajpai, Om Prakash Sharma, Jitender Mahajan, Mohan Singh Bisht and Abhay Verma..In a detailed judgement, the High Court held that the Speaker who is an impartial arbitrator and conducts the House has not taken any decision independently and has not held that the matter is one that requires to be referred to the Committee of Privileges.“In the absence of any application of mind by the Speaker in referring the matter to the Committee of Privileges and in view of the fact that the Petitioners have not been heard while being given punishment of suspension till the Committee of Privileges decides the matter and since the punishment under Rule 77 of Chapter XI [Rules and Procedures] can be prescribed only after a Member is heard, the direction for suspending the Petitioners till the Committee of Privileges takes a decision cannot be sustained,” Justice Prasad observed.He added that the upshot of this is that the decision of the House to send the issue before the Committee of Privileges without the Speaker independently applying his mind as postulated under Rule 70 of Chapter XI and the decision of the House to suspend the Petitioners till the Committee of Privileges takes a decision both are in violation of the procedure prescribed under the Fifth Schedule and Chapter XI.“Since the petitioners have already undergone the suspension of 14 sittings, this Court is of the opinion that the petitioners should be permitted to re-join the House forthwith,” the Court held..The BJP MLAs had approached the High Court claiming that the speaker's decision to suspend them was "grossly unconstitutional" since almost the entire opposition was suspended from the assembly thereby, silencing any voice of accountability.They argued that the motion moved by AAP MLA Dilip Pandey was "maliciously engineered" to disable the opposition members to participate in the discussions on crucial businesses that were to be discussed and to also exclude them from participating in the budget session of the House..The BJP legislators also argued that the ruling Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) was turning their suspension into a political issue by comparing it to suspension of AAP MP Raghav Chadha from the parliament.They had said that they had apologised to the Lieutenant Governor and who had accepted their apology..Senior Advocates Jayant Mehta, Kirti Uppal and Sonia Mathur along with advocates Ripu Daman Bhardwaj, Satya Ranjan Swain, Vijay Kumar Joshi, Himanshu Bidhuri, Kangan Roda, Nikita Sethi, Chetanya Puri, Priyanka Garg, Nikhil Jaiswal, Kamal Digpaul, Soumava Karmakar and Rudra Paliwal appeared for MLAs Vijender Gupta, Ajay Kumar Mahawar and Anil Kumar Bajpai. Senior Advocates Malvika Trivedi and Dinesh Agnani along with advocates Himanshu Pathak, Neeraj, Amit Tiwari, Sahaj Garg, Abhishek Saket, Shrey Sherawat, Kautilya Birat, Shoumendu Mukherjee, Kushagra Kansal, Siddharth Khatana, Subhash Tanwar, Ankush Kapoor and Shrey Sherawat appeared for MLAs Om Prakash Sharma, Jitender Mahajan and Mohan Singh Bisht.Advocates Pavan Narang, Jyoti Taneja, Piyush Beriwal, Himanshu Sethi and Aiswarya Chhabra represented MLA Abhay Verma. The Delhi Assembly was represented by Senior Advocate Sudhir Nandrajog as well as Delhi government's Additional Standing Counsel Sameer Vashisht and advocates Vanshay Kaul, Aman Singh and Vedansh Vashisht. .[Read Judgement]