The Speaker called the evidence inadmissible; the High Court found it in the candidate's own affidavit
Setting aside two Speaker’s orders, a Division Bench declares a sitting MLA disqualified from April 2024 for contesting the Lok Sabha on another party’s ticket, and holds the seat vacant.
The Speaker of the Telangana Legislative Assembly held that the case against a member accused of defection rested on newspaper clippings that had not been verified as the rules require, and that unverified media reports could not prove a voluntary abandonment of party membership. On 18 September 2026 a Division Bench of the High Court for the State of Telangana — Chief Justice Aparesh Kumar Singh and Justice G.M. Mohiuddin — set that finding aside, in Alleti Maheshwar Reddy and another v. The Hon’ble Speaker-cum-Tribunal under the Tenth Schedule, Telangana Legislative Assembly.
It did not remand the matter. It declared the member disqualified from 23 April 2024 under paragraph 2(1)(a) of the Tenth Schedule read with Article 191(2) of the Constitution, and held the Assembly seat vacant.
What the member is said to have done
The respondent was elected to the Telangana Legislative Assembly on a Bharat Rashtra Samithi ticket. The case against him is a sequence of acts in the spring of 2024.
On 15 March 2024 he met the Chief Minister along with other party leaders and was garlanded with a tri-colour kanduva. On 21 March 2024 the Indian National Congress published its list of selected candidates for the Lok Sabha elections; his name was on it. On 23 April 2024 he filed an affidavit in statutory Form 26 before the Returning Officer as the INC candidate for the 08-Secunderabad Parliamentary Constituency. He campaigned as an INC candidate against the candidate set up by his own party, and made statements to that effect on Facebook and on television. The Election Commission’s result sheet recorded the outcome.
Two disqualification petitions followed. Disqualification Petition No. 4 of 2024 and Disqualification Petition No. 1 of 2024 — the latter filed on 18 March 2024 by a fellow member elected on a BRS ticket — sought a declaration that he had incurred disqualification under paragraphs 2(1)(a) and 2(1)(b) of the Tenth Schedule read with Article 191(2) and Rule 6(1) and (2) of the 1986 Rules.
Getting those petitions heard was itself a fight. Because the Speaker was not fixing any schedule for deciding them, three further writ petitions were filed, and by a judgment of 9 September 2024 a Single Judge directed the Secretary of the Telangana Legislative Assembly to place the disqualification petitions before the Speaker so that a schedule could be fixed.
Why the Speaker dismissed them
The Speaker framed a series of points and answered them against the petitioners, and the reasoning is worth setting out because it is what the High Court had to dismantle.
On the evidence, the Speaker held that the annexures produced by the petitioner consisted primarily of newspaper clippings and media extracts which were not signed or verified in the manner required by Rule 6(6) and (7) of the 1986 Rules, which mandates verification in the manner laid down in the Code of Civil Procedure. They were therefore inadmissible. Newspaper reports and media footage, he held, are only hearsay and cannot by themselves prove the facts alleged — relying on Samant N. Balkrishna v. George Fernandez and Laxmi Raj Shetty v. State of Tamil Nadu.
On maintainability, the Speaker attached weight to what the party had not done. The leader of the BRS had not communicated any deletion of the member’s name from its list, nor intimated any defection within the time the 1986 Rules contemplate. The party had taken no disciplinary action, and the member continued to sit and vote as a member. That, the Speaker held, cast serious doubt on the maintainability of the petitions.
On procedure, the defects under Rule 6(6) and (7) — the absence of verification of each annexure — were treated as fatal. Even if they were curable irregularities, the Speaker held, the substantive case failed, because unverified media reports cannot substitute for the irresistible inference required to prove voluntary abandonment of membership.
The document that was never denied
The High Court’s answer begins by removing the foundation of the Speaker’s evidentiary finding. The case did not rest on newspaper clippings.
The affidavit in Form 26, filed by the member himself on 23 April 2024 before the Returning Officer as an INC candidate for Secunderabad, was not denied by him. Alongside it stood the INC list of selected candidates dated 21 March 2024 and the result sheet issued by the Election Commission. These are documents of a different order from a press cutting: they are the candidate’s own sworn statement and the official records of the electoral process.
There was a fourth document of the same character. Form 7A dated 29 April 2024, issued by the Returning Officer for the Secunderabad constituency after scrutiny and withdrawal of nominations, lists the contesting candidates. The member’s name appears on it with his photograph, his address, his party affiliation recorded as “Indian National Congress” and the party symbol of the hand. He did not deny it either.
The judgment sets out the statutory presumptions that attach to material of that kind — that a court shall presume the genuineness of every document purporting to be an Official Gazette, or a newspaper or journal, or a document directed by law to be kept by a person, where it is kept substantially in the form the law requires and produced from proper custody, with the equivalent presumption extending to electronic and digital records.
Against that, the Bench held, the contentions advanced for the member could not stand. Emphasis on the different dates of conduct alleged in a petition filed on 18 March 2024, and on the absence of any amendment to that petition, would not save the explicit conduct of contesting the 2024 Lok Sabha elections from the INC while a member of the BRS.
Rules that are directory, not fatal
On the procedural point, the Bench held the Speaker’s findings to be in the teeth of the position declared by the Supreme Court. The 1986 Rules are directory in nature — a position established in Ravi S. Naik and reiterated in Dr Mahachandra Prasad Singh. Treating a want of verification of annexures as fatal to maintainability inverts that.
The Bench added the character of the proceeding itself. Disqualification petitions are not guided by strict rules of procedure or evidence. In a non-adversarial proceeding of this kind, the member could not draw mileage from statements made by the petitioner in cross-examination.
What kind of proceeding this is
Much of the Speaker’s reasoning treated the disqualification petition as an adversarial contest in which a petitioner must make out a case against a defendant. The Bench held that this misreads the Tenth Schedule.
Drawing on Dr Mahachandra Prasad Singh, it held that in defection proceedings the Speaker has an independent duty to carry out the mandate of the Tenth Schedule. There is no lis between the person moving the petition and the member alleged to have incurred disqualification. Election disputes are adversarial and concern statutory infractions; defection proceedings are non-adversarial and concern constitutional grounds. Even the withdrawal of a disqualification petition would make no difference once the points have been brought to the Speaker’s notice, because the constitutional duty to decide is his.
That framing carried a second consequence on the evidence. Where acts are admitted, the question of burden of proof does not arise — and the Bench held the Speaker had acted in the teeth of that settled position.
On the purpose of the verification rules, Dr Mahachandra Prasad Singh was again decisive. The object of Rule 6 is that petitions be signed and verified in the manner the Code prescribes so that frivolous petitions making false allegations are not filed to cause harassment. It is not possible to give Rules 6 and 7 a strict interpretation, because doing so would defeat the very object of the Constitution (Fifty-second Amendment) Act by which the Tenth Schedule was added — a defaulting legislator who has incurred disqualification would escape on a pleading point.
The Bench also found the Speaker’s reliance on Udey Chand v. Surat Singh misplaced: that case concerned an election petition under the Haryana Panchayati Raj Act alleging illegality by a Returning Officer, and has no application to a disqualification petition under the Tenth Schedule read with Article 191(2). The petitioners had additionally complained that the findings on verification and burden of proof in one disqualification petition appeared to have been reproduced from the order in the other.
Behind all of it sits Kihoto Hollohan, which upheld paragraph 2 of the Tenth Schedule as valid and not violative of Articles 105 and 194, describing its provisions as salutary and intended to strengthen the fabric of Indian parliamentary democracy by curbing unprincipled and unethical political defections — and which explains why adjudicatory functions were vested in Speakers and Chairmen in the first place.
On the scope of review, Ravi S. Naik supplies the boundary. The Disqualification Rules are procedural, and a violation of them is an irregularity in procedure immune from judicial scrutiny under sub-paragraph (2) of paragraph 6. Judicial review of a Speaker’s order under sub-paragraph (1) is confined to breaches of constitutional mandates, mala fides, non-compliance with the rules of natural justice, and perversity. The Bench’s conclusion was that the Speaker’s findings fell within that last category.
Silence does not cure a defection
The Speaker had treated the party’s inaction as telling against the petitions. The High Court held the opposite: silence of the party in question, the absence of internal disciplinary action, and the subsequent conduct of the member do not efface a disqualification already incurred by openly contesting as another party’s candidate.
That follows a settled line. In Shrimanth Balasaheb Patil v. Karnataka Legislative Assembly, the Supreme Court applied the principle that disqualification relates to the date on which the act of defection takes place, so that acts or events subsequent to the prohibited conduct have no exculpatory effect — they do not cure the conduct or release the actor from its consequences. That is consistent with Rajendra Singh Rana v. Swami Prasad Maurya, where the Constitution Bench held that the Speaker has jurisdiction to determine disqualification petitions precisely because disqualification relates back to the date when the act constituting defection is alleged to have been committed — so that members who had since resigned could not escape adjudication.
Shrimanth Balasaheb Patil put it in terms the Bench adopted: the taint of disqualification does not vaporise by tendering a resignation, and the Speaker’s decision relates back to the date when the facts warranting disqualification took place. The interpretation that glorifies the spirit of the Constitution is the one to be adopted.
Applied here, the reasoning is straightforward. The disqualification was incurred when the member filed his nomination affidavit as another party’s candidate. What his original party did or failed to do afterwards, and how he conducted himself afterwards, cannot undo it.
The Bench fixed the date with precision, and the precision matters because it determines when the seat fell vacant. The member filed his nomination as an INC candidate for the Secunderabad Lok Sabha constituency on 23 April 2024 while a member of the BRS. On that date, and by that act, he voluntarily gave up the membership of his party within the meaning of paragraph 2(1)(a) of the Tenth Schedule read with Article 191(2).
Why the Court decided rather than remitted
The most consequential part of the judgment is the refusal to send the matter back.
The Bench drew on Rajendra Singh Rana, where the Constitution Bench faced petitions seeking the disqualification of thirteen members that had been allowed to drag on until the case was decided, though the members had failed to establish any defence to the charge of defection. With the Assembly’s five-year term expiring, remand to the Speaker would have meant the proceeding itself became infructuous.
The parallel was exact. These disqualification proceedings had lingered for more than a year and a half, and by the time of the judgment almost three years of the Assembly’s term had expired. Remitting the matter for a fresh decision would have risked the same futility. In those circumstances the Bench held it just and proper, in exercise of its powers of judicial review, to make the declaration itself.
That is the point on which this judgment will be cited. The Tenth Schedule makes the Speaker the tribunal, and courts have long been careful about substituting themselves for that tribunal. What the Bench has done is treat delay as the condition that justifies deciding rather than remitting — where a Speaker has taken so long that a remand would outlast the House, the constitutional court may answer the question on the material before it.
Order
The decisions of the Speaker in Disqualification Petition No. 4 of 2024 and Disqualification Petition No. 1 of 2024 were set aside and both writ petitions allowed. The Court declared that the respondent stands disqualified from 23 April 2024 as a Member of the Telangana Legislative Assembly in terms of paragraph 2(1)(a) of the Tenth Schedule read with Article 191(2) of the Constitution, having contested as a candidate set up by the INC for the Secunderabad constituency in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections despite being a member of the BRS. As a result, the seat stands vacant. Pending miscellaneous applications were closed.