Keeping the suspense on the eligibility of nine disqualified rebel Congress MlAs to vote in confidence motion on Tuesday, the Uttarakhand High Court on Saturday reserved its judgment till Monday.
"The hearing has been concluded. I will pronounce the judgment at 10.15 am on May 9," Justice UC Dhyani said in brief remarks at the conclusion of nearly three hours of arguments. The MlAs will finalise course of action only the HC judgment on Monday.
MlAs' counsel C Ariyama Sundaram argued that the Assembly Speaker's action against them was "biased" and it went against the tenets of natural justice. He pleaded with the court to enable the nine MlAs to participate in the floor test on Mondy. The counsel contested the three grounds on which the Speaker disqualified the MlAs, and asked what was wrong in the Congress MlAs writing a joint memo to the Governor with their BJP counterparts seeking a division of votes on the Appropriation Bill. Sundaram said writing a joint memo was an act of dissent which was healthy in democracy and not defection within the meaning of the 10th schedule of the Constitution.
However, the Speaker's action was defended by Amit Sibal, who said the fact that rebel MlAs went with the BJP MlAs in the same bus to the Governor and later in the same chartered aircraft outside Uttarakhand in the company of BJP general secretary Vijay Vargiya showed their ideological compatibility.
Countering the argument presented by Sibal, Sundaram said the MlAs had gone to Delhi to apprise the party high command of what had happened that day in the Assembly. Vijay Bahuguna, Kunwar Pranav Singh Champion, Subodh Uniyal, Shailendra Mohan Singhal, Shaila Rani Rawat, Harak Singh Rawat, Pradeep Batra, and Umesh Sharma Kau had challenged the Speaker's decision in the High Court by filing two separate petitions.