The Supreme Court said on Wednesday that it is making all the conscious efforts to solve the Madhya Pradesh political controversy and independently verify whether the 16 dissident MLAs are holed up in Karnataka or have been held “captive” in the South-indian state.
This whole political story has taken a lot of twists and turns in the past few days. Recently, a Bench of Justices D.Y. Chandrachud and Hemant Gupta shared that Speaker N.P. Prajapati has been looking in to the resignations of these absent MLAs. Congress party has accused the BJP of holding the MLAs in Bengaluru. This is a unique situation and in such circumstances, the court had to devise a fool-proof mechanism to satisfy itself that the legislators were not being held against their wishes.
Senior advocate Maninder Singh who is represting the MLAs offered Supreme Court to arrange one-to-one videoconferencing with the MLAs or have the Karnataka High Court Registrar General to check on them but the Apex Court declined the offer.
According to Mr. Singh, TV channels had surfaced visuals of the MLAs holding press meets to showcase that they were in Bengaluru on theor own terms. But the court made it clear that it is not possible to decide cases from what was aired on TV. After this, Mr. Singh suggested bringing the MLAs to the Supreme Court but the court declined it labelling it as inappropriate.
Senior advocate Dushyant Dave who is representing Congress informed the court that Congress’ senior party leader Digvijaya Singh was held in custody by the Karnataka police when he tried to meet the legislators.
“The duty of an MLA, as per his own oath, is not to run away when somebody promises him a chartered flight and a beautiful hotel stay. His duty is to the people,” Mr. Dave concluded.
