By Our Reporter
SHILLONG: The State Assembly Speaker Charles Pyngrope is yet to receive the letter written by the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) general secretary DP Tripathi demanding action against 12 party legislators who recently defected to Purno Sangma-led National People’s Party (NPP).
A source from the Assembly Secretariat on Thursday, however, said the secretariat has received the letter which was sent from Delhi.
The NCP Central Observer, Robert Kharshiing had earlier said Tripathi had written the letter questioning the validity of defection of 12 NCP MLAs to NPP, which took place on August 24.
According to NCP, any merger of split should take place at the national level and not at state level since NCP is a national party.
However, the contention of NPP is that Para 4 of the Anti-Defection Law suggests that two-thirds of the legislators can merge with any other party.
According to the source from the Assembly Secretariat, though the Speaker will reply to the letter, he is unlikely to accept the stand of the NCP leader.
As far as the Speaker is concerned, he may give nod to the merger of the Legislature wing of NCP in Meghalaya provided the NPP leaders submit the documents related to the merger.
Since the Speaker is yet to receive any paper related to the merger from NPP, the letter of Tripathi may become irrelevant as the NCP leader has to substantiate his stand with relevant documents, sources added.
However, the NCP is banking on the newspaper clippings of the merger meeting of the State unit of NCP with NPP. The Speaker may reject the claim of Tripathy on the ground that a member of the House and not any party leader should lodge complaint against the NCP legislators who had changed their allegiance to NPP.
The NPP leaders in Shillong are consulting legal experts before submitting the merger documents to the Speaker. Pending the official nod from the Speaker, all the 12 defected NCP legislators will remain as party legislators.
