On Monday the Supreme Court did not tell the Speaker of the WB Assembly to do anything special. It made him think of another commitment he is already under and it said that it believes he would fulfill it. That modest reminder comes at a time when the ruling-party schism has dominated political news since May's election results in the state, and it can prove to be the biggest legal shot of the season.

A petition by a legislator in the faction of Mamata Banerjee, Sovandeb Chattopadhyay, was disposed of by a bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi, V Mohana. He had requested the court to examine the pleas of disqualification of 10 MLAs, which were filed on July 8, without delay and allow Speaker Rathindra Bose to make a decision. The judges denied a new mandamus.

They believed that the Speaker was entirely aware of the verdict of the court and would make an effort to determine the matter within the prescribed time. There are different reports on the last date, either October 8 or October 10, both based on the filing date of July. The most conservative interpretation of the Speaker's tenure is that it will last for about 10 days.

The yardstick is that a Speaker sitting on a defection case is a court of law and should settle the defection case in a period of three months generally. The court did so because of a problem that is not new and is well documented. A Speaker sits on a petition until near the end of the House's term and the member of the House whose seat is up for grabs votes all the way through. The Supreme Court has previously commented on the increasing ability of Speakers to stray from the neutrality required of their office.

They are Ritabrata Banerjee, Arup Roy, Firhad Hakim, Sandipan Saha, Akhruzzaman Ansari, Shiuli Saha, Sabina Yasmin, Biplab Mitra, Javed Khan and Rathin Ghosh. Banerjee, who switched party allegiance in 2020, was expelled by the CPI(M) and elected as Leader of the Opposition in early June, with the rebels alleging they had the support of 58 or 59 members of the Rajya Sabha. According to the information his camp received, the cause of the conflict was a disagreement over the signatures presented for the installation of the opposition leaders, which were allegedly fake. That is the general grievance over the increasing influence of Abhishek Banerjee in the functioning of the organisation.

The arithmetic is the reason it's a close race. In a House of 294 members, a group must have 54 members to qualify for protection under the Tenth Schedule, if they wish to secure a merger.The Trinamool has 80 legislators in the 294-member House, so a group must have at least 54 members if they want to qualify for the protection of the Tenth Schedule and secure a merger. The rebels say they have crossed it. Mamata Banerjee's government says expulsion does not take anyone out of the party whip and that the rebels are attempting to camouflage desertion as a split. The Speaker is the one who will determine which account is true, and his response will determine the control of the party's name and symbol, another battle that's raging.

The Bengal drama is not the only one. The party had requested to disqualify 20 rebel Lok Sabha MPs who withdrew from the party in June, while the court had made a fresh appeal to Speaker Om Birla to expedite the hearing of the pleas. Now both the two presiding officers one in Kolkata and another in Delhi are on the same test: whether someone in the ruling or aligned party can be a neutral judge of a dispute between his own political family.

Bengal is no stranger to this. The Supreme Court had in 2021 asked the then Speaker to rule on disqualification of Mukul Roy within a span of two weeks, and the counsel to the Speaker had requested that it would be difficult to keep the deadline as such. In 2019, Karnataka has the more telling example. The court upheld the disqualification of 17 rebel MLAs but said that the bar on contestation until the end of the term "as a rule" could not be applied to any Speaker, though it could be applied to a rebel MLA. That limit will be there, waiting to be obeyed by Rathindra Bose at his convenience.

In countries outside India, the concept of defection law is completely different. Britain crosses the floor to conscience, and the ballot box. New Zealand had a "waka-jumping" law which expelled MPs who left their party, and then repealed it. India has gone the hard way and its institutional lacuna is the Speaker's chair. That is why the judiciary continues to intervene on timing and without touching any of the merits.

It is a game that does not stop at the party. The first place investors and industry bodies consider for investment is in Bengal. One government who has to deal with a divided opposition and a divided legislature for many months is one thing; another government who gets a clear answer early. I was unable to find any recent state-level economic data for this piece, but it's a simple story to follow: uncertainty is not a friend of a state looking for private investment.

If the Speaker decides to side with the loyalists, 10 seats will become vacant and, by-polls will be held and the rebels will return to court. If he continues to be a leader of the rebels, the Trinamool's base is losing its strength both in law and in the Parliament.If he continues to be a rebel leader, the Trinamool's base is becoming weaker both in the Parliament and in the law. If he fails to do so by that time, the Supreme Court will be called on to do what it refused to do on Monday.