A Motion Does Not Lapse on Dissolution

In one line

Because the removal process is statutory and not a proceeding of the House, a motion does not lapse when the House that received it is dissolved, and the Committee already constituted continues.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: in Sub-Committee on Judicial Accountability v. Union of India, (1991) 4 SCC 699, the Supreme Court held that neither the doctrine that dissolution of a House "passes a sponge over parliamentary slate" nor any rule framed under article 118 determines the effect of dissolution on a motion for the removal of a judge, because article 124(5) and the law made under it exclude the operation of article 118 in this area; that the Judges (Inquiry) Act 1968 is a law enacted under article 124(5) which provides against the doctrine of lapse; and that a motion under section 3 of that Act does not lapse upon the dissolution of the House.

The facts, because the point is entirely practical

108 members of the Ninth Lok Sabha gave notice of a motion for an address to the President for the removal of a sitting Judge of the Supreme Court for misconduct alleged to have been committed while he was Chief Justice of a High Court.

The Speaker admitted the motion and constituted a Committee of a sitting Judge of the Supreme Court, the Chief Justice of a High Court and a distinguished jurist, exactly as section 3(2) requires, chapter 1580.

Then the Lok Sabha was dissolved and its term came to an end.

And here is the practical squeeze. The Union Government took the view that the motion and the Speaker's decision had lapsed with the dissolution, and therefore declined to act in aid of the Speaker's decision. Specifically, it did not notify that the service of the two sitting judges on the Committee would be treated as "actual service" within paragraph 11(B)(i) of Part D of the Second Schedule to the Constitution.

Read that again, because it is the most instructive fact in the chapter. The Government did not stop the inquiry. It simply did not do the administrative act without which two serving judges could not sit on the Committee. Chapter 1520 said that the power of the purse and the power of the paperwork are the same power; this is that proposition applied to a judicial inquiry.

Two writ petitions followed, by the Sub-Committee on Judicial Accountability, a body constituted by an All India Convention on Judicial Accountability, and by the Supreme Court Bar Association, praying that the Union be directed to take immediate steps to enable the Committee to discharge its functions, and that the Judge be restrained from performing judicial functions while the inquiry was pending.