Goa Assembly Speaker Ramesh Tawadkar dismissed a petition on Friday that aimed to disqualify eight Congress MLAs who joined the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2022. He explained that lawmakers cannot be disqualified if their original political party merges with another party.

“In simple words, upon the merger of the original political party of the elected member with another political party, the elected member will not face disqualification in either contingency i.e whether he chooses to go with the merger or disagrees with the same,” the speaker stated in his ruling as quoted by PTI. Former Goa Congress head Girish Chodankar filed the disqualification plea against MLAs Digambar Kamat, Aleixo Sequeira, Sankalp Amonkar, Michael Lobo, Delilah Lobo, Kedar Naik, Rudolf Fernandes, and Rajesh Faldesai. The ruling party now has 28 members in the 40-member legislature after the eight MLAs joined the BJP on September 14, 2022.

The speaker mentioned that eight lawmakers decided to combine the Congress legislature party with the BJP. They clarified that the rule against disqualification for defection does not apply in this case of merger. The ruling was "on expected lines," according to attorney Abhijit Gosavi, who represented the former head of Congress during proceedings before the speaker.

“The speaker has dismissed the petition. We expected nothing more. The only silver lining is that after a lot of efforts over the last two years, finally a decision has come. Since the decision is there, now we will take steps to ensure that the correct law in regard to disqualification of defectors is laid down in the SC,” said Gosavi. The petitioner, Girish Chodankar, stated that he would seek legal guidance before choosing his next move.

“The speaker who himself welcomed the Congress MLAs into the BJP is now the judge to decide what he had done back then is correct or not. This is not in tune with the anti-defection law, which has now been reduced to a law for defections,” Chodankar said. The speaker's decision was hailed by Aleixo Sequeira, who defected from the Congress to the BJP and expressed confidence that the speaker would not fault their choice. “We had studied the law, we didn’t just jump into the fire,” Sequeira said.