The governors have been dismissed or eased out of office, new ones installed and all is well with the Modi government. Or so the prime minister would have us believe.
Nearly a dozen state governors, who owed their chairs to the previous Congress government, have been removed and new ones, mostly over-the-hill BJP leaders, have been posted in a bid to make sure that they act as “eyes and ears” of the Modi government.
Balram Das Tandon, for example, is 87 years old and he is now the governor of Chattisgarh while Kalyan Singh, 83, is the man for Rajasthan. Both Keshari Nath Tripathi (West Bengal) and Ram Nayak (Uttar Pradesh) are 80 years old while Om Prakash Kohli is relatively young at 78 as he has replaced the 87-year-old Kamla Beniwal who was briefly moved to Mizoram before being sacked.
The sacking/appointment of governors has been a controversial issue for nearly two decades now - Justice (retired) P Sadasivam for Kerala being the latest one - as governance at the federal level changed hands back and forth between the Congress and the BJP. In most cases these governors are political appointees that the prime minister or the ruling dispensation at the Centre wanted to placate one way or another. (The fishes and loaves of the office are only small consolation, but a consolation still, compared to the loss of real power that all politicians are after).
In 2004 the Supreme Court ruled that governors should not be removed in an “arbitrary” manner. But the court somehow left it to the federal government to decide what is arbitrary and what is not, thus letting it off the hook, as it were. And so the saga continues.
There is no apparent harm to be a politically appointed governor. After all, though you are appointed by the President of India and you hold a constitutional post, you owe your position to the government of the day and also have a responsibility towards it. Hence the “eyes and ears” analogy.
And with the state governments from east to west and north to south increasingly getting ‘parochialised,’ it is indeed necessary for the federal government to have a close confidant in the Raj Bhawan, as the official residence of the governor is called.
Conversely, regardless of what the constitutional position is, it only stands to reason that these politician-governors offer their resignations once the federal dispensation changes hands. It is quite difficult to imagine that someone who has spent a lifetime fighting political rivals could suddenly become neutral, to say the least, and begin serving under those very same rivals.
Yes, India has had more than its share of party-hopping politicians - or ‘Aaya-Rams and Gaya-Rams,’ as they are called in these parts - but state governors are expected to stay above party politics and this is a hard task.
Hans Raj Bhardwaj is a classic example. A lifelong Congressman, he tried everything in his powers and some even outside it to make life difficult for successive BJP chief ministers of Karnataka. Indeed, he even declared that though he is the governor, he will always be a Congressman! The Karnataka High Court had to intervene when Bhardwaj’s threats to the state government began to go out of hand. The late Romesh Bhandari, who was governor of Uttar Pradesh for two years from 1996, was another who did and said what pleased him most. Only the then-president K R Narayanan - who incidentally served under Bhandari as India’s ambassador to China while Bhandari was foreign secretary -would have none of it. He shot down Bhandari’s recommendation to dismiss the Kalyan Singh ministry.
Shiela Dixit is perhaps the most glaring example of a governor who should be resigning once her parent party loses power at the centre. That she has since resigned and has declared that she was not under pressure from the Modi government to do so is a good sign, though belated.
Not that governors should be spying on their respective state governments, but how could one expect a three-time Congress chief minister to be impartial in her judgments and reports to the centre when she is in charge of a state ruled by the same Congress Party?
In a multi-cultural, multi-lingual federal set-up like India, governors are much like ambassadors, at least in terms of reporting on the state of the states. Overall foreign policy doesn’t change with change of federal governments, so ambassadors don’t have the burden of shifting goalposts in their host countries. But governors, on the other hand, have to consider that they have to work within the federal structure where inter-state relations come within the ambit of the central government. Yes, the Supreme Court is the ultimate breaker of stalemates between states, but there is much the central government can do before they get that far and the state governor has an important role when issues come to a head.
Maintaining law and order is a state’s job, but when it goes out of reasonable control, the governor has to step in and report to the centre. Political hostility one way or another should not cloud such reports. Political appointees to the gubernatorial posts will find it difficult to strike that balance.
Perhaps parliament could amend the constitution to the effect that every time the federal government changes hands, all governors would naturally cease to hold their respective offices. It should be left to the new government to either accept or reject their resignations. Much controversy can be avoided by such a law. After all, there are many who think the post of governor is a drain on scarce public resource and, therefore, should be scrapped altogether. A change in the law could, perhaps, breathe fresh life into a decrepit institution.
Irani shows her loyalty
Sir Mark Tully, veteran journalist and long-time Indophile, likens Narendra Modi to a school headmaster. Sir Mark, who for three decades was the BBC’s voice in, for and against India as the occasion demanded, says Modi treats his ministers like schoolchildren, telling them what to do and what not to do almost every step of the way.
It seems Smriti Irani, Modi’s minister for human resources development, is a very diligent pupil of this headmaster. Not only is she willing to learn all that Modi can teach, but Irani is also seeking to extend that facility to all schoolchildren in the country.
So the HRD ministry, naturally with the blessings of Irani, has decreed that come September 5, all 1.4mn government-run or government aided schools in the country will listen to the prime minister as he holds forth on what is observed as ‘Teachers’ Day.’
Irani’s original idea was to push Modi’s speech down the throats of nearly 100mn schoolchildren but that plan has now been whittled down to include only those less fortunate children whose guardians cannot afford private school education for their wards. But fearing reprisals from officialdom at a later date a number of private schools, especially in the National Capital Region which comprises Delhi and parts of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, are also falling in line to get their students imbibe whatever Modi has to say.
As Modi is due to deliver this all-important speech in the latter part of the afternoon of September 5, Irani’s ministry has ordered that schools make necessary arrangements to keep the children stay put later than usual. If that could lead to issues like timing of the mid-day meal and logistics, especially where schools work two shifts, then it is the schools’ problem.
And the TV-star-turned-minister wants enough television sets in all schools so that no student misses the pearls of the prime minister’s wisdom.
Irani and her minions think that students in states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Manipur or Meghalaya are all well-versed in Hindi to understand what Modi says. The minister’s unabashed loyalty to Modi has also apparently blinded her to the fact that more than one-third of the 70,000 or so government schools in Bihar have no electricity. So how do they telecast the prime minister’s speech?
Now, if only Irani’s ministry could bring much-needed electricity to these and thousands of other schools in remote corners of India at such short notice! Forget Teachers’ Day and what Modi would say on the occasion, the very fact they got electricity could give these hapless institutions something to celebrate.
