NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday came out all guns blazing on the indefinite suspension of AAP's Rajya Sabha MP Raghav Chadha and said effacing opposition voices from Parliament was a "very serious concern for the constitutional court", but toned down on finding that it was a unanimous House resolution and decided to limit its scrutiny only to the period of suspension.
Attorney general R Venkataramani cautioned the SC from entering a field that involved privileges of the House and its resolution and said neither the RS or its secretariat nor the chairman could be asked to become a party before the court to respond to Chadha's petition challenging his indefinite suspension pending decision of the privileges committee. Persuaded by Chadha's counsel Rakesh Dwivedi to examine whether indefinite suspension was a just and proportionate punishment for not taking prior consent of MPs before proposing their names for a select committee, a bench of Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud and Justices J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misra said, "Is this a breach of privilege? He is a member of the opposition. Exclusion of an opposition MP from the House is a very serious matter. Because he is not only a representative of his constituency, he is representative of a viewpoint, which may not be consistent with the government. We must be very careful in not excluding those voices from Parliament."
The CJI added, "Matters like these are of very serious concern to us as a constitutional court. Parliament must have voices from across the spectrum. And that too, indefinite suspension? I can understand if the privileges committee is going to decide it in 15 days or a month. 75 days have gone (since Chadha's suspension). "We are going to propose to him if he is ready and willing to apologise to the House and to the chairman to accept the apology to obviate the need for the Supreme Court to set the law straight. We will set the law straight. Make no mistake about it. We are giving you an option." Dwivedi said Chadha had already apologised six times and was ready to do so again.
The AG said, "The threshold question is whether the court can get into this issue at all on a factual plane. I have not been able to persuade myself to say that this court can look into the matter. If the court intervenes, then we get into the area of availability of power and jurisdiction of the SC to enter into the legislative arena.
"The House unanimously passes a resolution on a motion moved by a member to suspend Chadha till the report of the privileges committee is made available. The chairman merely endorses the resolution. If the court gets into the issue, it will have to enter into the domain of House privilege, chairman's authority and whether the House rules occupy the field or not. The Rules of Business of the House cannot be looked into through the prism of administrative law."
The CJI asked whether Chadha's action was worse than physical disruption of the House, which entailed suspension for the remainder of the session. "There has to be some proportionality which is inbuilt in our jurisprudence. Can the House send an MP to prison for five years for saying something outside the House, can the court countenance it?" The CJI asked the AG whether the RS chairman would reconsider the position. "We have no difficulty in laying down the law," he said. The AG said he could not go and discuss this with the RS chairman as this was a resolution passed by the House.