Tamil Nadu chief minister M.K. Stalin took the bull by the horns on Saturday when the state’s politics was seemingly descending into a morass of ignorant, juvenile stunts, played by governor R.N. Ravi, distracting the people from the existential danger facing democracy. The special session of the state legislature readopting half a score of bills that were passed earlier by the same House but returned by the governor was the government’s bid to establish the people’s will.
As it is known, the governor’s post is not only a relic from the colonial past — it was the East India Company that first introduced governors to suppress and dominate the local people — that has become redundant.
For the job profile just entails lording over a democratically elected regime. Yet hitherto, governors, conscious of constitutional restraints, played their part with dignity and integrity by bowing to the will of the people, expressed through legislative decisions and rulers’ actions.
That equation between the democratically elected government and nominated governor went for a toss when Mr Ravi moved into the historic Raj Bhavan in Chennai. Cocking a snook at the aspirations of the local people, making unsavoury comments about Tamil literature and culture and interacting with the top brass of the state universities on the ground that he is the chancellor without taking the government into confidence, he was seeking to run a parallel fiefdom.
Apparently peeved by the mismatch between his own political orientation and the prevalent popular ideological persuasions in the state, he tried to overrun the decisions of the Assembly, which is considered the sanctum sanctorum of democracy, by sitting over files from the legislature and the government that reach his table.
The government sought remedy for the impasse from the Supreme Court, which, too, expressed concern over the trend, impelling the governor to reject the bills pending with him. The government then decided to send those bills back to him as the Constitution does not allow him to reject a bill twice. That perhaps is the constitutional way of salvaging democracy.
The curious part was that far from acting as the constitutional head of a state he is supposed to lead with a dignified presence in keeping with the highest traditions of the job in independent India, Governor Ravi saw his role as a representative of the Centre tasked with putting a spanner in the works.
Mr Ravi chose to make his role into an actively adversarial presence in the state of Dravidian rule, questioning its ideology, its beliefs and acting very much like a member of the Opposition. To make it worse, he began interpreting the Constitution in comments stating that he believed a bill was dead if the governor did not give their assent to it.
The role of governors has come under stricter scrutiny now as at least four states have gone to the top court seeking relief from the overactive presence of the Centre’s representatives who seem to view it as a political opportunity rather than a ceremonial presence even if the background of most is hardcore politics. That the problems are arising only in states not ruled by the dispensation at the Centre tells the story of how political such confrontations are between elected governments and committed governors.
