Congress withdraws disqualification plea against Alpesh Thakor

In a huge relief for the Thakor community leader Alpesh Thakor, the Congress leadership has withdrawn their petition from Gujarat High Court. After a three-hour-long hearing of arguments between the legal teams of the Indian National Congress party and Alpesh Thakore, the court gave an order stating that the judiciary can not direct the speaker of any assembly to speed up a process.  As per the rules, the speaker still has until November to respond to the application that was submitted to the speaker by Congress party delegation lead by Ashwin Kotwal. 

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The Congress legal team argued that Alpesh Thakor should be disqualified for 6 years since he had resigned from the posts of the party and the party had all rights to ask for his disqualification and that 'a former MLA who was up for disqualification could not be a present candidate for another party'. However the legal teams  Alpesh Thakore had argued that 'an MLA who had already resigned can not be disqualified'. 

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The court had also stated that then only a point to prove was to see whether or not Alpesh Thakore had resigned from all posts and given up his membership of the Congress party or only from the leadership positions that he had held on April 25, 2019. A major point of discussion was also to fathom Alpesh's resignation letter. While Thakor's team argued that the letter was only limited to leadership position and that the actual resignation was sent to the then Congress party president Rahul Gandhi via WhatsApp and that 'no resignation can be considered to be serious when it is sent via social media platforms'. 

These were the same arguments presented before the court by Thakores team even where there were several urgent hearings that took place right before the byelections of Rajya Sabha in July as well. That time too, the legal team of Congress had argued that an 'irreversible damage' will be caused to the party if a decision is not taken by the speaker soon and before the Rajya Sabha elections. This time too they'd argued that Alpesh Thakores candidacy should be cancelled before it can be determined whether or not he will be disqualified. 

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In the end, however, the court decided that the judiciary can't rush the speaker's decision. Also, the speaker is well within his rights to take a maximum of four months before giving a decision. Following this, the Congress delegation decided not to go ahead with the application and withdrew it. Since the court also gave them the option to file the application again after November (after the time period that the speaker has to take a decision) if the speaker still hasn't given them a decision.

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