Jagdeep Dhankar sets a precedent by appearing on TV debate to underscore his position.
West Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankar created history on 2 February when he made a virtual appearance in a talk show of a Bangla TV channel to defend his position in face of criticism from the state’s ruling party, Trinamool Congress. Ever since his appointment in July 2019, Dhankar’s run-ins with the Mamata Banerjee regime have been legendary. Trinamool leaders have been alleging that Dhankar has turned the Raj Bhavan into a “party office of BJP”. The Governor has been critical of the law and order situation, particularly political violence in the state. Trinamool renegades have been calling on Dhankar after joining BJP in recent weeks. The BJP symbol, lotus, is called “padma” in Bangla—Trinamool has been referring to the Rajyapal as “Padma-pal”—Governor-State government relations have indeed hit a nadir. In his TV appearance, Dhankar called for “a change of mindset” in West Bengal and was critical of state government employees and even police officers being used as extended arms of the ruling party. The chat show had representatives of all major political parties—the presence of former Tripura and Meghalaya Governor Tathagata Roy as a BJP spokesperson made this discussion rather unique.
The office of Governor in West Bengal has drawn criticism right from its inception. Chakravarty Rajagopalachari (Rajaji), who was appointed when the state was carved out during partition in 1947, was immediately criticised by Sarat Bose, as Rajaji had opposed Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose at the Tripuri session of Congress in 1938. Rajaji later became India’s first and only Indian Governor General; succeeded Sardar Patel as Union Home Minister when the Iron Man died and later fell out with Jawaharlal Nehru and went back to active politics—he went on to found the Swatantra Party, which emerged as the principal Opposition at the Centre in the late 1950s. Dhankar’s predecessors, Dharma Vira (1967), Shanti Swarup Dhawan (1970), A.P. Sharma (1983), T.V. Rajeswar (1989), Viren J. Shah (1999), Gopalkrishna Gandhi (2004) and M.K. Narayanan (2010) also had run-ins with the state Cabinet.
Kolkata’s Raj Bhavan, an 1803 vintage colonial baroque villa, had been the seat of the British Viceroy till the capital shifted to New Delhi. It has been witness to many vagaries. Rajaji was the butt of criticism because of the Bose family. Dharma Vira’s 1967 dismissal of the first non-Congress regime—led by Ajoy Mukherjee of Bangla Congress, in which Jyoti Basu of CPI(M) was deputy CM—and the installation of a Congress regime led by Prafulla Chandra Ghosh, later upheld by Calcutta High Court, stirred controversy not only in 1967 but again in 1969 when Dharma Vira decided to skip two paragraphs of the ceremonial speech at the start of the Vidhan Sabha session in which the State Cabinet (again headed by the Mukherjee-Bose duo) wanted the Governor to ridicule the judgement of the High Court, which had upheld his act of dismissing the previous regime in 1967. Many Governors in other states have followed what Dharma Vira did in 1969: the latest such incident being when Kerala Governor, P. Sathasivam (a former Chief Justice of India) followed suit in 2018. Dhankar did not challenge the Mamata regime on this score—on 7 February 2020, the only occasion when he addressed the West Bengal Assembly, he stuck to the rule book and read out a text prepared by the State Cabinet, in which the Trinamool antipathy to the CAA was reflected. A lawyer by profession, who has headed the Rajasthan High Court Bar Association, Dhankar thus followed the interpretation of the Constitution defined by India’s first Attorney General, M.C. Setalvad, during arguments in the Supreme Court in 1952 on the matter of Shamser Singh vs Union of India.
In 1952, the decision of Madras Governor Sri Prakasa to invite Rajaji of Congress to form the state government while he was not even a legislator, attracted criticism. Sri Prakasa, a Congress stalwart, did so in order to keep CPI, which had emerged as the largest party, out of the race. In 1959, Kerala Governor Burgela Ramkrishna Rao, also a Congress freedom fighter, recommended the dismissal of the CPI-led Left government of E.M.S. Namboodiripad at the prompting of the then Congress President, Indira Gandhi—this set in train the practice of Centre getting rid of inconvenient regimes in the states by using Article 356 and imposing President’s rule.
The incidents of Governor-state ruling party run-ins thereafter have been many. In 1983, Karnataka CM Ramkrishna Hegde went to the extent of calling the Governor “a glorified servant of the Centre”. In the other extreme, post retirement, Dharma Vira had reacted to the criticism that Governor is a “rubber stamp” by asking an interviewer, “Whose rubber does he stamp?”
Governor in a state and President and Vice President at the Centre are supposed to be above party politics. While Dhankar in Kolkata and his Maharashtra counterpart Bhagat Singh Koshiari, inter alia, are being accused of partisanship, it may be worthwhile to recall that D.K. Barooah had been Bihar Governor prior to becoming Congress president. Arjun Singh, Sheila Dikshit, Motilal Vora, S.M. Krishna, M. Chenna Reddy, Sushil Kumar Shinde took up active political posts, as did Rajaji in the 1950s, after serving as Governor.
The yellow line between governorship and active politics is yet to be drawn.