A writ petition was filed on Monday seeking to declare that Pinarayi Vijayan was not entitled to continue as Chief Minister as his Ministry had lost the collective responsibility with the conduct of a former Minister in his Cabinet and also through the abstention of four CPI Ministers from the Cabinet meeting held on November 15.
The quo warranto petition was filed by R.S. Sasikumar, former Senate and Syndicate member of the University of Kerala and Cochin University of Science and Technology(Cusat).
According to him, the High Court while dismissing a writ petition filed by former Transport Minister Thomas Chandy against the Alappuzha District Collector’s report had also gone into the fundamental basis of a Parliamentary system of governance which required members of the Cabinet to support the decision of the government even if they disagreed with a decision of a particular Minister.
At the very moment when Ministers started expressing or questioning the decision of another Minister or that of the Council of Ministers, the concept of collective responsibility would come to an end and the government would loose its Constitutional mandate to continue in office.
The petitioner pointed out that four Ministers in the Council of Ministers had abstained from participating in the meeting. The CPI Ministers had given in writing that they would not participate in the Cabinet meeting as long as Mr. Chandy continued to be a Minister in the Cabinet. The conduct of the four Ministers had “constituted an open declaration of lack of faith on the Chief Minister who is the leader of the Cabinet”.
The petitioner contended that the continuance of Mr. Vijayan as Chief Minister of the State is “nothing but as an usurper of power as he has no constitutional authority to continue in office and, therefore, a Constitutional crisis had arisen requiring the court to decide as to whether the Chief Minister was enjoying the Constitutional mandate to continue as the Chief Minister” or whether Mr. Vijayan “is presently an usurper of power”.
A separate petition was also filed by Alleppey Asharaf from Kochi seeking to issue a quo warranto calling upon on the four CPI Minsters to explain under what authority of law they were continuing in the positions in view of their admitted breach of oath by abstaining themselves from the Cabinet meeting. The petition sought a directive to the Chief Minister to take action against them as required under the Constitution.
