SC was in a piquant situation

The Supreme Court passed on order last week, not just moving the date of the trust motion in the Jharkhand Assembly forward, but also directing videography of the session.

It asked the pro-tem Speaker of the Assembly to conduct the proceedings of the House.

But its wishes were thwarted and the House reverted to its original date of March 15 for a floor test, comprehensively flouting the Supreme Court's ruling. With Shibu Soren's dismissal, the issue is now academic. But if Soren had still been in power, whom could the Supreme Court hold responsible for this? What could it have done under the circumstances?

Not a lot, say constitutional experts. Everything, says the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), especially in the general context of the "murder of democracy".

According to senior lawyer Shanti Bhushan, the Supreme Court's original ruling itself was an order without jurisdiction. Article 212 of the Constitution put restrictions on the court""it could neither direct the proceedings in a legislature nor interfere with its proceedings, he said.

"The order the apex court issued the other day could constitute a breach of privilege of a duly constituted Assembly and the House could start proceedings against the apex court. What will the court do then?" Bhushan said.

He said in this context, it was irrelevant whether the court's order directing the pro-tem Speaker to hold a floor test, or even whether a pro-tem Speaker or some other officer was responsible for conducting this exercise.

Bhushan cited a case in 1964 in Uttar Pradesh, where a similar problem had arisen. But the issue was the 1998 case in UP when Romesh Bhandari was governor and Jagdambika Pal was chief minister for a day.

The Supreme Court had issued an order then and the same order was repeated verbatim in the Jharkhand case. So if the order was valid in 1998, it ought to be valid today as well, said experts.

Bhushan said the two issues ""the SC order and the breakdown of law and order in the Jharkhand Assembly""had to be delinked. The court had no jurisdiction over the Assembly and the Centre should recognise that the constitutional machinery in the state had broken down and on those grounds, impose President's rule.

But the BJP, which has many senior lawyers, was rhetorical on the authority of the apex court being flouted and the Lok Sabha Speaker trying to put a gloss on the happening in Jharkhand by raising a "bogus matter" of a presidential reference.

"The NDA felt that today's developments were not only violative of the Constitution, democratic norms and the apex court order but also that it was a strange situation where a minority is ruling and the majority sits in the opposition," BJP general secretary Arun Jaitley said.

"The NDA believes that both the legislature and the judiciary are supreme in their own fields. But the ultimate supremacy is of the Constitution. Both must observe the purpose and goals enshrined in the Constitution. The role of the central government, the UPA, the governor and the Jharkhand pro-tem Speaker is extremely disturbing," a unanimous resolution passed at the NDA meeting said.

Maintaining that the Constitution envisaged governance by the majority and not the minority, it accused the UPA, the Centre, the governor and the pro-tem Speaker of "conspiring to ignore the principle of majority rule inherent in the Constitution".

"When a majority party is treated like a minority and a minority party is put into governance, it subverts the Constitution. Obviously, the Supreme Court would not be a silent spectator to this subversion," the party said.