The commission has asked the MLAs to file their responses by November 11. The petition forwarded to EC by the President’s House about two weeks ago had sought cancellation of membership of 27 AAP legislators.
The Aam Aadmi Party’s woes increased on Wednesday after the Election Commission (EC) issued show cause notices to 27 of its MLAs on a petition seeking their disqualification for allegedly holding offices of profit.
The commission has asked the MLAs to file their responses by November 11. The petition forwarded to EC by the President’s House about two weeks ago had sought cancellation of membership of 27 AAP legislators.
The petitioner claimed that the MLAs held posts of Chairpersons of Rogi Kalyan Samitis (RKSs) of different government hospitals in Delhi without any sanctity of law.
These 27 MLAs include seven legislators from the earlier list of 21 MLAs against whom the EC is already considering a similar plea for holding the offices of profit as Parliamentary Secretaries. The two separate cases thus have put the future of 41 of the 67 AAP MLAs at stake as it can lead to their disqualification from the assembly.
The list includes Delhi Assembly Speaker Ram Niwas Goel, his deputy Rakhi Birla, former Deputy Speaker Bandana Kumari, and estranged AAP MLA and Swaraj Abhiyan leader Pankaj Pushkar.
According to the complaint, the Delhi Government through an executive order had approved constituting Rogi Kalyan Samitis in all the hospitals with a governing body under the chairmanship of local MLA that was in violation of the mandate of the scheme.
The petition contested that the order of appointing MLAs either by the present government or by the earlier government as Chairperson of the Rogi Kalyan Samiti was wholly illegal and void ab initio without any legal sanctity.
However, the AAP-led state government is not overly worried as it feels the petition will not stand legal scrutiny because the Rogi Kalyan Samitis were set up by the Sheila Dikshit cabinet on October 5, 2009.
Moreover, in July 2014, the then Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan had also stated in the Parliament that MPs/MLAs will be the chairpersons of the committees. The National Rural Health Mission website clearly states that an MP/ MLA can become a chairman/member, the state government sources said.
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