State after state in India is falling for governor-chief minister tussles like a row of dominoes. The latest instance is Punjab, where Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann had criticised the governor after the latter sought details of the legislative business to be taken up in the Assembly session last month. “In 75 years, no president/governor ever asked for a list of legislative business before calling a session,” the CM wrote in a tweet. In Jharkhand, Governor Ramesh Bais keeps Chief Minister Hemant Soren on tenterhooks over the Election Commission’s purported opinion on his disqualification as a legislator in connection with a mining lease contract. The fate of the state government still hangs in the balance.
Likewise, Kerala Governor Arif Mohammad Khan is on a collision course with the state government. Khan recently red-flagged the appointment of a university teacher. The state government introduced a bill in the Legislative Assembly to have absolute powers to appoint vice-chancellors to the 13 state-run universities.
The tussle has become an open brawl as the chief minister termed the governor’s ‘outbursts’ against the government ‘ridiculous’ and not befitting the latter’s noble office. The governor hit back, stating that he was not inclined to approve the University Laws (Amendment) Bill, on the grounds that it is designed to legalise the illegalities in university appointments. Khan’s response is a straw in the wind—a much more intense political stalemate is in the offing in the state.
When the coalition government of Uddhav Thackeray was toppled by a combination of Shiv Sena rebels and the BJP in Maharashtra, the role of Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari came into question. The Thackeray faction alleged he was partisan and aided the rebels in crucial ways on critical occasions. The governor summoned the Assembly while the petitions were still pending before the Supreme Court, and his decision changed the situation in favour of the BJP and the Shiv Sena rebels.
In West Bengal, erstwhile Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar had several disagreements with Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
The Assembly passed a bill relieving the governor from the post of Chancellor of state universities and appointing the chief minister to the mantle. In Telangana, too, there is a tug of war between Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao and Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan. The governor recently told the media, “We are Governors, not rubber stamps to approve every decision made at Cabinet meetings attended by CM’s family members.”
India’s Constitution is the nation’s ‘founding deed’ and its ‘paramount parchment’. Parliamentary democracy, with its nucleus, the cabinet system, is the warp and weft of the constitutional fabric. The Supreme Court of India, in Shamsher Singh v. State of Punjab (1974), unambiguously clarified that our Constitution has adopted the British Westminster system, and the status of governors—and the President—corresponds to that of the monarch in the United Kingdom.
When King George V of England was asked how he was getting on with his first Labour government, he famously replied: “Very well. My grandmother would have hated it; my father would have tolerated it, but I move with the times.”
Very often, objections raised by King George V were silenced by the simple statement, “Well, your Majesty, that is the Cabinet decision”. Governors and the president of India have to move with the time, as the British monarch does, irrespective of the party in power and his political views and hues.
King Edward VIII’s abdication underscores the monarch’s role in the British system. In connection with his proposed marriage to Wallis Simpson, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin told the monarch that he must obey his advice or take the government’s resignation. The cabinet refused the king’s idea of broadcasting his case to the people and insisted on a rapid decision. The monarch decided to abdicate. This demonstrates how practically important the prime minister and chief ministers are and how splendidly impotent the president and the governors are.
Justice V R Krishna Iyer observed in his A Constitutional Miscellany four decades ago—“The office of Governor is a British Indian transplant with a federalist flavour. Even so, it is not an altogether otiose office or redundancy. But, thanks to frequent abuses, some political jurists question even the need to keep the Raj Bhavan and its tenant in expensive pomp and panoply and the potential for puppetry directed from Delhi or the Moghul tendency misled by artificial diction.
The basic challenge has acquired militancy because Governors are no longer innocent idlers with ceremonial relevance and statesmanly detachment but nocent torpedoes of the State autonomy or artists of superannuated sadistry with gubernatorial ego…No party in Central power has been guiltless, and appointments of Governors and their behavioural patterns are an open ‘trade secret’ in extra-constitutionalism. We now need a genetic change in the DNA of the office and its functions so that representative government at the State level may not become the political plaything of outsiders.” Krishna Iyer’s comments on gubernatorial interference appear prophetic in current times.
In his Working a Democratic Constitution: A History of the Indian Experience (2003), Granville Austin says: “Unless governors conduct themselves strictly as constitutional monarchs (whether by personal self-discipline or as the result of constitutional requirements), the office is likely to prejudice cooperative centre-state relations and effective administration, and risks the viability of the democratic Constitution.” The vigilance of We the People is a surer guarantee of the democratic order than the pontificating clauses of the Constitution. Public opinion should ensure that governors are the pious priests of the ‘paramount parchment’.
Faisal C K
Under Secretary (Law) to the Government of Kerala
(Views are personal)