Parrikar helped Digambar to stabilise: Narvekar
Sandesh
Prabhudesai
6 August 2007
Opposition leader Manohar
Parrikar has helped the Digambar Kamat government to stabilise through his own
deeds, claims finance minister Dayanand Narvekar.
According to Narvekar,
Kamat won the confidence vote since the opposition did not ask for a division
vote. We won the motion by voice vote, which means that all support the motion,
he added.
Though Parrikar had claimed that the Kamat government had reduced
to minority, Narvekar counters it stating that Parrikar did not have majority
with him. Otherwise, who will not ask for a division vote, he asks.
He also
fully agrees with the viewpoint of legal experts that saving the government with
the support vote cast by the speaker invites President's rule and keeping the
Assembly under suspended animation.
However, according to Narvekar, the
question does not arise in the recent case of trust vote since the motion was
passed by voice vote and no division of votes took place to prove the point that
the government was shaky.
On the contrary, Narvekar points out that the
opposition had ample opportunities to ask for division vote even later on the
same day while passing the budgetary demands. But they simply walked out of the
House, he added.
Pointing out at the S R Bommai case, Narvekar said that
the order in this case has made it mandatory to go for a head count on the floor
of the House and nowhere else. What is the use of parading them elsewhere, he
asks.
A lawyer by profession, Narvekar also dismisses the possibility of
the case filed by Dhavalikar brothers in the Supreme Court deciding fate of the
Kamat government.
I personally feel, he says, is that the court would in
all probability refer the case to the constitutional bench to decide the powers
of the speaker.
To justify his argument, the finance minister recalled the
case filed by Parrikar in 2005, challenging the powers of the governor, who had
dismissed his government after then speaker Vishwas Satarkar had lifted Philip
Neri Rodrigues out of the House and won the confidence vote.
In order to
decide the powers of the speaker and the governor in such cases, the case was
then referred to the constitutional bench. The order is still pending.
Since
the nature of the case filed by Dhavalikar brothers is similar, Narvekar feels
that it cannot be singled out but becomes an additional input for the constitutional
bench to decide the powers of the speaker and the governor.
He however expressed
surprise over the dubious stance of Parrikar, who claimed that the speaker is
supreme when his government was dismissed and questions the speaker's supremacy
now, when he wants to form the government.
The finance minister also justified
the ex-parte ad-interim order passed by speaker Pratapsing Rane, restraining Dhavalikar
brothers from voting.
According to him, the Mumbai high court has already
upheld the ex-parte decision of the Maharashtra speaker, when few Nationalist
Congress MLAs had revolted against the Congress-NCP alliance government led by
Vilasrao Deshmukh and was subsequently disqualified by the speaker, without even
listening to them.
Dhavalikar brothers have acted against the party's decision
in a similar manner and would naturally invite similar kind of action from the
speaker, he argues.
"I personally hope that the supreme court would
decide powers of the speaker as well as the governor in such cases once and for
all", he quipped.
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