A WAR OF ATTRITION
He has been called a ‘cipher’, ‘a purely functional euphemism’, but that is how the office of the governor was envisaged in the Indian Constitution: a titular role with discretionary (and not real) powers. Among the elected representatives of the state, he was to be a nominee of the Union government, the only qualification being that he be a citizen of India and over 35 years of age. What the Constitution-makers hoped for was a nonpolitical, non-partisan incumbent in the role.
The ‘non-partisan’ part was always suspect, but in the past few years, governors have overtly come out as agents of the party in power at the Centre, using their discretionary powers to aid and abet the fall or formation of favourable governments, or locking horns with chief ministers from the opposition parties and hampering the functioning of the state. A litany of brazen battles across the states, openly factional positions on matters of national importance and controversies involving the excesses of governors are ever more frequent now.
Bengal governor Jagdeep Dhankhar has, of late, taken the lead in this. His run-ins with the chief minister, Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress, are now worthy of a tale of its own. In the latest of his comments, on September 19, Dhankhar said the state had become the “home of illegal bomb-making” and the for the Ram temple in Ayodhya, he tweeted: ‘At 6.30 PM today at Raj Bhawan ‘ will celebrate historic day—‘Ram Mandir Bhoomi Pujan’… Long wait over—thanks to historic judicial verdict.’ He did not stop at that, taking a dig at the chief minister: ‘Appeasement Silence Stance @MamataOfficial resonates’.
