Shinde asks the Supreme Court to reject Uddhav’s request

Eknath Shinde, the chief minister of Maharashtra, rejected on Monday a Supreme Court plea from the Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray (UBT) group challenging the assembly speaker’s ruling to reject disqualification petitions against him and the lawmakers who backed him during the 2022 rebellion, claiming that the CM’s group is the “real Shiv Sena,”.

The Thackeray camp’s request was postponed by a bench headed by Chief Justice of India Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud because of time constraints, but not before the Shinde group made it plain that it would file a maintainability motion to have the suit dismissed.

Senior attorneys Harish Salve and Mukul Rohatgi, speaking on behalf of the CM’s group, questioned how the Thackeray party could go straight to the Supreme Court and challenge the speaker’s decision without first going via the Bombay High Court.

“A petition against the speaker’s judgment is now pending before the Bombay High Court. It cannot continue in two distinct courts, particularly after the high court was circumvented. The attorneys for the Shinde camp addressed the bench, which also comprised justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra, saying, “We are challenging the maintainability of their petition.”

Senior attorneys Kapil Sibal and Abhishek Manu Singhvi, representing the Thackeray camp, asked the bench to hear the case as soon as possible. Sibal said that the opposing party need to be requested to submit their counter-affidavits, given that the court served notice on their petition on January 22.

In response, Salve and Rohatgi said that they would prefer to have the plea at the threshold dismissed on the grounds of maintainability rather than to submit a counter-affidavit at this time.

The bench then said that it will attempt to set a hearing date as soon as possible.

On January 22, the bench issued notices to all 39 MLAs, including Shinde, for disobeying the party whip in the House during the speaker’s election and floor test in 2022. The Thackeray camp had filed disqualification cases against these MLAs under the anti-defection statute.

When Shinde and 38 other lawmakers left the Shiv Sena, which was then headed by Thackeray, to form the government with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the party saw a vertical split. The Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) administration of the time was overthrown by the uprising.

The UBT camp’s attorneys had pleaded with the highest court to hear the issue on that particular day, pointing out that the current assembly’s term may have ended by the time the court decided their case. The state’s polls are anticipated in late 2024.

The UBT group referred to Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar’s ruling on January 10 as a “colourable” exercise of authority based on “extraneous and irrelevant” reasons in a plea submitted via Thackeray-loyalist and lawmaker Sunil Prabhu. It further stated that by drawing a distinction between the terms “legislative party” and “political party,” the speaker was instructed by the top court’s May 2018 ruling not to base its decision solely on the group holding the majority in the House. This conclusion was deemed to be “erroneous” and violated both the anti-defection law and the ruling.

According to Prabhu’s petition, “the speaker has conflated the concepts of “legislature party” and “political party” by relying on the “legislative majority” to determine “who the political party is.” This is in direct violation of the law established by this court in the Subash Desai judgment (in May 2022), which states that “political party” and “legislature party” cannot be conflated.

It further stated that the discovery that the political party was represented by the group that had the backing of the majority of lawmakers amounted to reintroducing the idea of “split” under the previous paragraph 3 of the 10th Schedule, which had been purposefully left out of the Tenth Schedule (anti-defection law).

A Constitution bench ruled on May 11 that the Maharashtra governor had erred in asking then-CM Thackeray to take a floor test last year and that there had been a series of mistakes made during the political drama that led to the downfall of the MVA government. However, the bench declined to reinstate Thackeray because he had voluntarily resigned rather than face an assembly trust vote.

The court dismissed the Thackeray camp’s argument that the court should determine the disqualification petitions on its own due to the BJP leader’s purported prejudice at the time and instead left it up to Narwekar to decide the disqualification cases against both the Shinde and Thackeray groups. The Election Commission decided in a separate ruling on February 17, 2022, that Shinde’s group would get the Shiv Sena party’s name and bow-and-arrow emblem.

Subsequently, Prabhu went before the court once again, protesting Narwekar’s hold-up in ruling on the disqualification petitions against the 39 renegade Sena MLAs, Shinde among them.

On October 13, after hearing Prabhu’s appeal, the bench criticized Narwekar, saying that he reduced the decision-making process for the disqualification petitions to a “charade” and that the speaker could not overturn the supreme court’s directives by postponing his judgment.

The court had on October 30 ordered Narwekar to rule on the disqualification petitions by December 31 in order to uphold the sacredness of the anti-defection statute. On December 15, the Supreme Court gave this deadline an additional 10 days’ extension in response to a plea by Narwekar.