In Hyderabad, the Telangana High Court’s single bench of Justice Bollam Vijaysen Reddy directed the Advocate-General Sudershan Reddy to get information from the State Legislative Assembly Speaker’s office about the status of pending disqualification petitions for BRS legislators Danam Nagender, Venkata Rao Tellam, and Kadiam Srihari. The court was handling a writ petition filed by Padi Kaushik Reddy, a BRS MLA seeking Nagender’s disqualification, and another petition by Kuna Pandu Vivekananda, a BRS legislator seeking disqualification of Venkata Rao and Srihari for defecting to the Congress after the 2023 Assembly elections.
The three MLAs in question had switched from BRS to the Congress Party after the elections, and their disqualification petitions are currently with the Speaker. In a previous hearing, the court had instructed the petitions to be sent to the Speaker’s office through the General Administration. Notices were also issued on April 15, 2024, to the MLAs, State government, ECI, and Chief Electoral Officer of Telangana to respond to the petitioners’ arguments regarding the MLAs defecting without resigning.
The High Court division bench, led by Chief Justice Alok Aradhe and Justice T. Vinod Kumar, discussed a suo motu writ petition on Wednesday that was initiated based on directions from the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court had instructed all High Courts to expedite the disposal of criminal cases against elected representatives like MPs and MLAs. The HC Registry reported an increase in cases against MPs and MLAs in Telangana, with 258 cases pending and only two cases where accused were present due to police action.
In response to these orders, the CJ court directed the registry to share these directions with designated courts in the State to speed up the trial and disposal of cases involving MPs and MLAs.
