A Notice Dated the Exact Day of the Hearing

What a Notice Timed to a Hearing Date Actually Proves The Tenth

Schedule gives the Speaker sole authority to decide disqualification petitions. What it does not give is a deadline. That single omission is the entire reason a notice on a two-month-old petition could arrive exactly the day the Supreme Court sat to ask why nothing had happened - because until a court applies pressure, there is no constitutional clock running against the Speaker at all.

The

Rule as Written, the Rule as Practiced As written, Rule 6 simply requires the Speaker to seek comments and decide the petition - no window specified. As practiced, that silence has repeatedly meant petitions sit until external pressure, usually judicial, forces movement.

The Supreme Court tried to fix this gap procedurally in Keisham Meghachandra Singh (2020), suggesting three months as an outer limit and even proposing Parliament create an independent tribunal to take the decision out of the Speaker's hands entirely.

Neither suggestion is binding law - they remain judicial guidance the Speaker's office can and evidently does, treat as advisory. This case shows exactly how that plays out: two months of no action, followed by action within hours of a Solicitor General telling the Supreme Court that action had been taken.

Why the Court Declined to Notice the Speaker Tellingly, the Supreme Court in

this instance declined to issue notice to the Lok Sabha Speaker's office directly, accepting the Solicitor General's assurance that notices were already out. This is not judicial indifference - it reflects the separation-of-powers caution courts have historically exercised around Speaker's Tenth Schedule decisions, treating them as quasi-judicial functions largely insulated from direct judicial command.

But that same caution is precisely what allows the delay-then-comply pattern to repeat: courts can prod, but rarely compel on a fixed timeline, leaving the Speaker's discretion as the only real clock in the room. For an aspirant, the mistake would be reading this story as "TMC MPs got notices." The actual finding is structural: eight years after the Tenth Schedule was designed to stop political defection from destabilising legislatures, the law still has no enforceable timeline forcing action - only a Speaker's own sense of when scrutiny has become uncomfortable enough to respond to.