HYDERABAD: In a significant development in the expulsion case of Congress MLAs Komatireddy Venkat Reddy and SA Sampath Kumar, the state Assembly and law department secretaries have filed appeals before a division bench of the High Court against the order of a single judge who had set aside the expulsion order of the Assembly and the gazette notification issued by the state government notifying vacancy for Nalgonda and Alampur (SC) constituencies.
At present, the contempt case filed by Komatireddy and Sampath against both the secretaries was pending before the single judge i.e. justice B Siva Sankara Rao and it will come up for hearing on August 10. They sought action against law secretary V Niranjan Rao and Assembly secretary V Narasimha Charyulu for deliberately not implementing the order passed by the court on April 17 this year. On an earlier occasion, the judge, prima facie, had felt that there was contempt in not implementing the court order and, at one stage, decided to issue Form-1 notices to the secretaries for their appearance in court for explanation.
The counsels representing the two secretaries sought some time to make their submissions in the contempt case, saying that consultations were going on with regard to implementation of the court order in restoring the petitioners’ (Komatireddy and Sampath) membership of Assembly. Apprehending legal problems in future, the secretaries now filed appeals before the division bench stating that they had no role to play in the implementation of the earlier order of the single judge.
As soon as the court proceedings commenced, additional advocate-general J Ramachandra Rao urged the bench comprising chief justice TBN Radhakrishnan and justice V Ramasubramanian to hear the appeals urgently, saying that the contempt case was coming up for hearing on August 10 and the single judge was expected to implead the Assembly speaker in the case and issue notices to him.