HC to Speaker: answer on ‘defections’
Telangana High Court has put the Assembly Speaker and seven MLAs on the clock over petitions saying they ditched BRS for the Congress. The Congress-run government’s poster boys are now respondents — and the court wants counters, not shawls.
The High Court has sought counters from the Speaker and seven MLAs in the defection petitions.
The Telangana High Court issued notices to Assembly Speaker Gaddam Prasad Kumar and seven MLAs after BRS legislators challenged the Speaker’s orders dismissing disqualification pleas under the Tenth Schedule, according to reports from the March 24–27 hearings. The division bench of Chief Justice Aparesh Kumar Singh and Justice G M Mohiuddin directed the MLAs to file counter-affidavits and tagged the batch with a related case on Danam Nagender, then listed the matters to April 16, 2026.
The seven named by the court are T Prakash Goud (Rajendranagar), Venkat Rao Tellam (Bhadrachalam), A (Arikepudi) Gandhi (Serilingampally), Bandla Krishna Mohan Reddy (Gadwal), Kale Yadaiah (Chevella), Danam Nagender (Khairatabad) and Srinivas Reddy Parige (Banswada). The petitions — filed by BRS MLAs Kalvakuntla Sanjay, K P Vivekanand, Padi Kaushik Reddy, Palla Rajeshwar Reddy, G Jagadish Reddy and Chinta Prabhakar — ask the court to set aside the Speaker’s dismissals as arbitrary and contrary to the anti-defection law, and to disqualify the respondents.
In the connected case, BJP floor leader Alleti Maheshwar Reddy challenged the Speaker’s March 11 dismissal of the plea against Nagender. The High Court on March 24 issued notices to Nagender and the Speaker and sought counters within four weeks. Petitioners’ counsel argued you cannot hold affiliation to two parties at once; the Speaker’s counsel said the office acted as a neutral tribunal. That neutrality will now have to be explained on affidavit.
A separate report says notices also issued on March 27 to M Sanjay Kumar and Kadiyam Srihari in connected proceedings. The Speaker’s dismissal orders themselves were not available in the material reviewed, and no High Court stay was reported in those March hearings. The Congress government in Telangana has not bothered to explain, in public yet, why its new friends in the Assembly should be exempt from the law it quotes on everyone else.