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No ifs, no buts, no Buta
Abu Abraham?s famous cartoon showing former President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed leaning out of his bathtub to sign the ordinance that would usher Indira Gandhi?s Emergency just got an update.
Abu Abraham’s famous cartoon showing former President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed leaning out of his bathtub to sign the ordinance that would usher Indira Gandhi’s Emergency just got an update. This time it’s the Supreme Court that has confirmed another instance of a statutory authority bending over backwards to please his political masters. The apex court read out the details as to why it had stated in its interim order of October 7, 2005, that the dissolution of the Bihar assembly was “unconstitutional”. As was evident when the assembly was dissolved in May 2005, it was the case of an old party hand delivering the goods he believed was demanded. The apex court has stated that Bihar Governor Buta Singh had acted in “undue haste” to prevent the Janata Dal(U) from staking claim. Mr Singh had “misled the Centre” and had made “fanciful assumptions which could be destructive for democracy”, and the court could not be “a silent spectator to such subversion of the Constitution”. And even if Nitish Kumar had found it hard to cobble a government after the ‘initial’ polls, the electorate, reacting to Mr Singh’s action, gave the present CM the push that he needed to settle the matter of strength in the assembly without any shred of doubt. The UPA at the Centre, too, doesn’t come out unscathed. The Union Council of Ministers, the court noted, should have verified the ‘facts’ before accepting Mr Singh’s report “as Gospel truth”. So, the UPA does have an omelette on its face.
Mr Singh would do well to come down from his very rickety high horse and tender his resignation. But the problem of governors playing partymen is hardly a Buta Singh invention. The Sarkaria Commission looking into Centre-state relations was set up in 1983 at a time when it had become par for the course for central governments to dismiss state governments using Article 356 on the basis of reports sent by pliant governors. The latest Supreme Court observations reiterated the commission’s view regarding the need of a national policy with common norms for gubernatorial appointments acceptable to all parties.
While there have been examples of governors ‘doing the right thing’ — as Karnataka Governor T.N. Chaturvedi seems to have done in the JD(S) fracas in Bangalore — the temptations of playing ‘our man in the state’ have proved to be too enticing — and too common. It’s time that all political parties sit down and settle the matter of the role of governors once and for all. And if there is any morality at stake at all, Buta Singh should go. A firm signal from the Centre should make him do the needful.
