Monday, Mar 21, 2005
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By J. Venkatesan
NEW DELHI, MARCH 20. The Lok Sabha Speaker, Somnath Chatterjee, today asserted that the Supreme Court and the High Courts had consistently recognised the supremacy of Parliament and the Legislative Assemblies in a number of cases. While so, "I believe [that] in the March 9 interim order of the Supreme Court [relating to the Jharkhand Assembly] the contours of the area of the supremacy of the legislature have been blurred," Mr. Chatterjee said addressing the conference of Presiding Officers of Legislative Bodies. He said that in the M.S.M. Sharma case of 1960, the apex court had categorically upheld the sovereignty of the legislature in matters pertaining to the power to conduct its own business. The court had said: "No court can go into the questions which are within the special jurisdiction of the legislature itself, which has the power to conduct its own business." The Speaker said that again in 1970, in the case of Tej Kiran Jain versus N. Sanjiva Reddy, the apex court had upheld the constitutional guarantee with regard to immunity of parliamentary proceedings in respect of anything said in the House or any Committee thereof. It had clarified that "anything" was equivalent to "everything." He said this was further reinforced in the impeachment proceedings of Justice V. Ramaswami, a Supreme Court Judge, when the apex court held that Parliament was sovereign with respect to the conduct of its own business and the courts could not have any say in that. He said that as early as in 1953 the Madras High Court in the A.K. Gopalan case had held that the powers of each of the three organs had to be exercised as fundamentally subject to the provisions of the Constitution relating to that organ individually as well as to the provisions relating to the other organs. Further, in the case of Raj Narain versus Atmaram Govind Kher, the Allahabad High Court in 1954 held that the High Court had no jurisdiction to issue a writ, direction or order relating to a matter, which affected the internal affairs of the House. On the contention that the apex court in 1998, in the case of Jagdambika Pal vs Union of India, had ordered a special session of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly with the sole agenda of conducting a "composite floor test" to decide who among the two claimants to the post of Chief Minister enjoyed the majority, Mr. Chatterjee said "it was not a speaking order and no reasons were given in support of the same." Therefore, he said, such an order could not be treated as a decision on the entire gamut of the principles of separation of powers, as clearly enshrined in Article 122 and 212 (courts not to inquire into proceedings of Parliament and Legislature) of the Constitution and also of Article 361 (protection of President and Governor) thereof as a precedent. On Jharkhand, he said, "we are once again confronted with an unfortunate situation" and if it was followed in future it would upset the constitutional balance and the democratic functioning of the state as a whole.
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