The Governor-CM conflict

THE equation between a Governor and a state government is often edgy because the gubernatorial incumbent is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as a Viceroy of the ‘Delhi sovereign’, out to ‘colonise’ the state to which he is appointed by the President. The relationship is fraught in states ruled by parties/coalitions different from the one at the Centre. The tensions are invariably accentuated in such circumstances regardless of the party ruling from Delhi.

Comportment demonstrated by Governor RN Ravi towards the DMK government in Tamil Nadu has plunged the state of affairs to an inexplicable low.

During the Congress-helmed United Progressive Alliance rule, as the Jharkhand Governor, veteran Congressman Syed Sibtey Razi rejected the BJP’s claim to form a government after the 2005 Assembly elections yielded an inconclusive verdict, despite the BJP being the single-largest party and shoring up the shortfall of five with Independents. An intervention by the erstwhile President, APJ Abdul Kalam, and the court foiled the Governor’s plan to install a JMM-Congress coalition.

As the Karnataka Chief Minister, BS Yediyurappa complained that Raj Bhavan occupant Hans Raj Bhardwaj “functioned like the Centre’s agent”, while his Gujarat counterpart Kamla Beniwal sat upon the legislations passed by the Assembly when Prime Minister Narendra Modi was the CM.

The BJP, packaged as a ‘party with a difference’, has not only adopted the precedent set by the Congress, but has taken the practice to another level, suggesting thereby that it expects the Governors to engage in a perpetual duel with an Opposition CM. Kerala Governor Arif Mohammad Khan is bound to find a place in legislative history for his interminable confrontations with the Left Front government, which seems equally determined to sustain the showdowns, whether these were over the appointment of university Vice-Chancellors or Raj Bhavan’s public disapprobation of a minister’s conduct. Maharashtra Governor BS Koshyari was no less combative towards the Maha Vikas Aghadi dispensation, but he has taken a back seat after the Opposition alliance was unseated and a BJP-led government was reinstated.

Even with such a partisan background, the comportment displayed by Governor RN Ravi towards the DMK government in Tamil Nadu plunged the state of affairs to another inexplicable low. It seems that Ravi, who was engaged as an interlocutor between the Centre and National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah) and then went on to become Nagaland’s Governor, involved himself in a political endeavour as the DMK’s principal opponent who was out to dismantle the party’s edifice and uproot the Dravidian ideology, conceptualised and elaborated upon by the Justice Party founded in 1916.

Ravi began his Chennai tenure like his peers after taking over in September 2021. He refused to forward a Bill, adopted by the Assembly, seeking to exempt government seats in undergraduate medical and dental courses from the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test.

But the latest flashpoint occurred on January 9, when at the start of the Legislative Assembly session, Ravi omitted a few paragraphs from the address prepared by the state government for the Governor to deliver.

Old-timers recalled that even when relations between the then CM J Jayalalithaa and M Channa Reddy, the Governor of the day, hit the skids in 1993-95, nothing of this sort happened. The crucial portion Ravi left out encapsulated the core of the Dravidian ideology, “founded on the ideals of social justice, self-respect, inclusive growth, equality, women’s empowerment, secularism and compassion towards all”.

The DMK’s ‘social justice’ concept has empowered large sections of the intermediate and backward castes, but has no space for the Dalits. Women are targeted by its misogynists. The paragraph also upheld the formidable legacies bequeathed by Periyar EV Ramasamy, Babasaheb Ambedkar, K Kamaraj, CN Annadurai and M Karunanidhi, whose policies and schemes indisputably enhanced the quality of life of the less well-off. Ravi skipped the allusions to the ‘Dravidian model of governance to its people’.

Before making this disputatious move, on January 4, at a Raj Bhavan function, the Governor proposed that ‘Tamizhagam’ was a ‘more appropriate’ name for Tamil Nadu, inciting the DMK. It seemed Ravi took the word ‘Nadu’ that means ‘land’ circumscribed by a geographical boundary to connote a ‘country’ or a ‘nation-state’.

While it’s true that the Dravidian movement spurred debates over nationalism and sub-nationalism, the DMK had collaborated with Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and paid a huge price for its misadventure. Tamil Nadu, like Kerala and West Bengal, has so far repudiated the RSS-BJP’s hegemonic Hindu rashtra programme; it long realised the futility of chasing a secessionist demand and accepted the idea of a federal India which it zealously guarded and upheld, especially when faced with an agenda from the Centre like the imposition of Hindi.

Murasoli, the DMK’s mouthpiece, tried to get to the root of Ravi’s ‘Tamizhagam’ brainchild: “He says the name Tamil Nadu indicates a sovereign nation. Does the name Rajasthan sound like Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan or Turkmenistan to you? Is it problematic for you to find a ‘Desam’ (land) in the Telugu Desam Party?”

The timing of the Governor’s proactivism is baffling because Tamil Nadu is up there on the BJP’s radar, despite the pushback it faced for decades. Prime Minister Modi recited lines from Sangam poetry before the diaspora and at international forums and wears a veshti in local meetings and rallies. The highpoint of Modi’s concerted Tamil Nadu interface was the month-long ‘Kashi Tamil Sangamam’ last November which observers perceived as the BJP’s effort to fashion a counter-narrative, underpinned on Hinduism’s intrinsic ability to cement the north and south as against the Dravidian ‘casteist’ and ‘divisive’ outlook. Ravi’s interventions might scupper the BJP’s project.