Examine whether courts can prescribe time limits for Speakers deciding Tenth Schedule petitions.

The Tenth Schedule vests disqualification on the ground of defection in the Presiding Officer but prescribes no time limit for deciding a petition [1]. This silence has turned delay into a substitute for decision, forcing courts to ask whether they may supply the deadline that the Constitution omits — an issue live again in the pending proceedings against 20 rebel Trinamool MPs [4].

The case for judicial prescription

• Judicial review is settled: since Kihoto Hollohan (1992), the Speaker under the Tenth Schedule acts as a tribunal, so the process is reviewable [2].
• In Keisham Meghachandra Singh (2020), decided on 13 petitions pending in Manipur since April 2017, the Court laid down a three-month outer limit [2].
• Delay defeats the statute: pending petitions leave defectors voting, drawing salary and retaining their seats [3]. Speakers in the earlier Andhra Pradesh and Telangana assemblies let cases lapse with the assembly's term [3] — delay decides the case without a ruling.

The constitutional limits on such power

• A court fixing the Speaker's calendar edges into the internal autonomy of the legislature; the Solicitor General urged the Court not to "fix the Speaker's schedule" [4].
• The rebels argue the three-month norm and court monitoring bite only on "complete inaction" — a threshold defeated by one notice or one extension [4].
• Enforcement is the deeper gap: the Court cannot itself decide disqualification, since that power rests with the Presiding Officer [3]; a missed deadline leaves only contempt against a Speaker.

Courts may therefore lay down a normative timeline and monitor pendency, but cannot convert it into a self-executing rule — hence the Bench's choice to seek progress rather than dictate dates [4]. The durable remedy is legislative: writing an outer limit into the Schedule itself, and shifting adjudication to the President or Governor acting on Election Commission advice [3], so that the anti-defection law serves the constitutional morality of representative accountability rather than the arithmetic of survival.