The roots of the controversy in West Bengal, Kerala and other states over governors allegedly exceeding their roles can be traced back to a scene at Government House in what was then Calcutta in December 1943. Sir John Herbert, Bengal’s third last British governor, had just died, and Sir Thomas Rutherford been sworn in as acting governor.
An Indian journalist who covered the event told me many years later how perplexed he was when the dead governor's black-clad widow, Lady Mary Herbert, mounted the Durbar Hall steps to curtsy deeply to Rutherford. My friend did not know that in bending the knee to the acting governor, she was doing homage to her King-Emperor in distant Buckingham Palace. The daughter of an earl, granddaughter of a marquess, Lady Mary had already been appointed a Woman of the Bedchamber to Princess (now Queen) Elizabeth, which was a high honour. She knew that in British thinking, the divine right of kings percolated down through the Viceroy in New Delhi to the governors in the provincial capitals.
Some sense of that gubernatorial grandeur persists in India even 75 years after the British left. The governor — the Lat Sahib — has to be the fount of honour and authority since he lords it from the city’s most splendid palace. In the slightly different circumstances of princely Mysore, chief minister K. Hanumanthaiya built a massively ornate Vidhan Soudha to impress upon people that power had shifted from the maharaja's palace. Such pointers also bolster the incumbent's self-esteem. Kolkata's colonial mansion, whose marble plaque proclaims “Chief Justice's House”, and the sprawling bungalow where the “chief adviser to the chief minister” resides, are new innovations. B.R. Ambedkar was being exceptionally naïve (or deliberately ingenuous) when he told the Constituent Assembly in 1949 that the authors of the Constitution “felt that the powers of the governor were so limited, so nominal, his position so ornamental that probably very few would come forward to stand for election”. Governors may not enjoy specific authority — although that is in doubt given the record of many governors — but their exalted position surrounding by ceremonial vests them with the tremendous power of patronage.
India under the Maurya rulers, the Guptas and the Mughals also had governors. But they were autonomous and often hereditary satraps. It was only under the British, as E.M.S. Namboodiripad pointed out, that the governors “became not merely the appointees but the subordinates of the Central government”. Soli Sorabjee, the eminent jurist, claimed that before Independence a governor was “a constitutional dictator, ‘an autocrat presiding over provincial despotism’. Since 1950, he or she is often the Centre’s hidden hand.
We have seen these governors drive coach and horses through constitutional propriety and democratic norms in Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim, West Bengal and elsewhere. Inevitably, the question arises: Do we need governors? American states merge the offices of the political and ceremonial head in one person. Why can’t India do the same? The enormous cost of so many gubernatorial establishments is one reason. What’s far more dangerous is that a governor who is a Shikhandi for Central rule not only facilitates the death of democracy but also invites scorn for all national institutions.
Such concerns were expressed over the amended Government of the National Capital Territory of Delhi (Amendment) Act 2021 and, again, when the present lieutenant-governor raised questions about the Aam Aadmi Party administration’s alleged `500-crore spree on school construction. Kerala wants the Assembly, and not the governor, to act on the Lokayukta reports against the chief minister. West Bengal’s running feud between chief minister Mamata Banerjee and governor Jagdeep Dhankhar (now India's vice-president) resulted in the University Laws (Amendment) Bill replacing the governor with the chief minister as chancellor of state-run universities.
Actually, the Punchhi Commission on Centre-State relations set up in 2007 to cover roughly the same ground as the Sarkaria Commission, and which made 312 recommendations in 11 volumes, also recommended distancing governors from university chancellorships — advice that Gujarat, Maharashtra, Kerala and Tamil Nadu had acted on before West Bengal.
The formal justification is that universities lie outside the orbit of gubernatorial functions and that governors, whose role should be confined to constitutional provisions, should not be burdened with extraneous responsibilities.
The unspoken fear is that the more authority a governor enjoys, the greater his scope for meddling in state affairs.
The Constituent Assembly members had anticipated all this. Some feared rivalry between governors and chief ministers, especially if the former were also elected. Others were suspicious of discretionary powers. “I know to my cost and to the cost of my province what 'acting by the governor in the exercise of his discretion' means”, declared Rohini Kumar Chaudhuri, a legislator from Assam. “It was in the year 1942 that a governor acting in his discretion selected his ministry from a minority party and that minority was ultimately converted into a majority. I know also, and the House will remember too, that the exercise of his discretion by the governor of the province of Sindh led to the dismissal of one of the popular ministers — Mr Allah Bux.”
Chaudhuri touched on a raw nerve when he went on to say that if in spite of his experience, governors were armed with discretionary powers, it would mean that the government was “still living in the past, which we all wanted to forget” — he meant the Government of India Act 1935, when governors were the Central government's not-so-hidden weapon against democratic federalism.
It is not surprising, therefore, that T.T. Krishnamachari's pious assurance in the Constituent Assembly that “we do not want … to make the governor of a province an agent of the Centre at all” has not really been borne out by subsequent events. After all, the controversial TTK was an astute practitioner of realpolitik.
Constitutional reform alone cannot, however, save the situation. Even if 51 per cent of Indians do hanker for dictatorial rule, as a survey claimed, institutional change will only challenge the ingenuity of political operators who long ago suborned the lofty hopes that inspired the founding fathers. A governor who functions primarily as the Centre’s watchdog negates the very concept of state autonomy in a federal setup. But whether today’s political climate will tolerate any other arrangement is a moot point.
