It was 3 pm in court 4 yesterday (20 July) and the arguments on either side on the plea to stay the disqualification of the Congress rebels in Uttarakhand seemed endless.

Senior counsel for the rebels, who have subsequently joined the BJP, C Sundaram, sought the court’s indulgence to apply the recent Arunachal Pradesh verdict of the SC, and let the disqualified rebels vote on the motion of no-confidence on the Speaker of the Uttarakhand assembly.

The rebels were disqualified by the Uttarakhand high court, and their appeal against it is pending in the Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the SC held in Arunachal Pradesh verdict that the Speaker cannot decide the disqualification of MLAs, if they had submitted a motion of no-confidence against him.

The rebels, sensing unexpected relief from the Arunachal Pradesh judgment, moved the Supreme Court, to apply the same yardstick in Nainital, as the Speaker had done the same thing to them, as his counterpart in Itanagar, did to the rebels: disqualify the movers of no-confidence motion, even before the motion is taken up.

A mythological end to the proceedings

Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Kapil Sibal and Rajeev Dhavan opposed any stay in view of the fact that the rebels have already joined the BJP, and therefore, were not entitled to any interim relief.

The bench comprising justices Dipak Misra and Rohinton Nariman patiently heard them out, but then Misra said he had a story he wanted to tell.

At that point, with the court poised in suspense on what Misra’s story would be, Dhavan said he also wanted to tell a story.

However, Misra smoothly continued to tell his own well-known tale from mythology, as planned.

When Ved Vyas dictated the Mahabharat to Lord Ganesh, Misra related, the elephant-headed god told the former, to dictate it without a pause. Vyas replied that he would, but on the condition that Lord Ganesh would take down only when he understood it.

Misra said the bench, acting like Lord Ganesh, had heard the lawyers speaking so fluently and without a break, and that the bench had understood it.

Misra then, without so much as a significant pause, began to dictate the order, declining any interim relief for the disqualified rebels to enable them to attend the assembly session tomorrow.