Now that the Governor of Tamil Nadu Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar has run out of delaying tactics and finally sworn Vijay in as Chief Minister, it may be time to list the takeaways from this election season.
The first one is obvious. There is a long and disgraceful history of Governors trampling on the Constitution to serve the interests of the people at the Centre who appointed them. When we (with some justification) look at the examples from the last decade with shame and anger, we forget that this practice dates back decades. In the 1980s, NT Rama Rao was unseated in Andhra Pradesh by a pliant Governor acting under Indira Gandhi’s instructions. A similar fate befell Farooq Abdullah in Jammu and Kashmir because of Mrs Gandhi and Arun Nehru.
The only difference between then and now is that the bias has become far more blatant. Mamata Banerjee had a running battle with Governor Jagdeep Dhankar in West Bengal, who took the unprecedented step of travelling around the country to badmouth the Chief Minister. For his pains, Dhankar was rewarded with the post of Vice President. (That didn’t last for reasons nobody can convincingly explain.)
Before this Assembly election, the Centre shifted RN Ravi—a former policeman with no claim to fame except for loyalty to his masters—from Tamil Nadu to Bengal so it would have its hatchet man in place in case the election threw up a complex verdict.
As it turned out, the Centre should have kept Ravi in Tamil Nadu (where he had constantly fought with the elected government) because the election resulted in a hung assembly and it needed Ravi’s hatchet man skills. Instead, it sent Rajendra Arlekar, a lifelong RSS man, who struggled clumsily to delay Vijay’s swearing in. This delay led to attempts at horse trading because politicians believed that the Governor had been instructed to swear in anyone but Vijay.
Vijay’s accession became inevitable only when the Governor had run out of other options. But at least, Arlekar managed to delay the Tamil Nadu swearing-in until the grand government formation in Bengal—attended by Prime Minister Narendra Modi—was over so that his bosses did not have to compete with the spectacle of Vijay and Rahul Gandhi sitting side by side.
All this seems shocking, but it is not unprecedented. Even in Indira Gandhi’s time, there was so much disgust with the behaviour of Governors that there was talk of abolishing the post or of at least changing the method of appointing Governors. Nothing came of it because every government always wants its own stooges in Raj Bhavans.
Now the subject has come up again. Though the BJP does not want the discussion to proceed any further, there is no longer any doubt that a national debate is required. India cannot afford to hand the people’s verdict after each election to henchmen of the Centre who can then twist and mangle it for political purposes.
Credibility crisis at Election Commission
The second takeaway from the election season, also about a Constitutional post, is the need to restrain the Election Commission. The current Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, functions in the same way as Governors do: as the central government’s man. He is not the first Election Commissioner to be accused of impropriety but it is fair to say that never before in the history of modern India have we had a man who is less respected handling one of the most important jobs in our democracy.
Respect may be a matter of perspective but it is becoming increasingly clear that the SIR exercise was directed at disenfranchising Muslim voters. This exercise and others like it will eventually lead to deep resentments and alienation. Indian democracy works because all of us have a stake in it. Suggest to Muslims that they count for less than Hindus when it comes to choosing governments and you betray everything that India is supposed to be about.
The BJP is fortunate that, according to many calculations, it would have won Bengal even without the SIR deletions. But it is probable that it would not have won this kind of majority without SIR and that several of its victorious candidates (including its new Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari) would have lost.
My concern is less about the election in Bengal than about the precedent it sets. If the Election Commission can get away with this kind of match-tampering this time (and let’s face it, the EC has escaped any kind of censure), then what happens when it starts fixing matches so completely that there is no doubt about the outcome?
And yet no obvious solutions present themselves. There is no way, in the present system, of preventing the government from choosing loyalists to run Indian elections. And the Supreme Court seems unwilling to get involved in such crucial issues as the SIR deletions.
We are not quite there yet, but if these trends continue, we are heading for a situation where elections are not conducted fairly and the Governors, the men charged with implementing the electoral verdict, are totally in hock to one party or the other.
Also read: Bengal was the undisputed industry leader in India. Why did it lose its way? asked Vajpayee
Nobody is invincible
Indian democracy has many imperfections but at least it gives voters two opportunities every five years (at Assembly and Lok Sabha elections) to elect politicians of their choice. Given the calibre of many of India’s politicians, the only thing that keeps them in some sort of check is the fear of being thrown out. Rig the electoral system and you risk turning India into a banana republic.
All governments know this but they always believe that they don’t need to worry about subverting the Constitution because they will always be in power. That’s what Indira Gandhi believed. And that’s what this government believes.
But nothing lasts forever. Everyone loses eventually. At some stage, all the institutional and constitutional damage each government does with the intention of benefiting itself will benefit the next lot of people who come to power. All of the democratic institutions that Indira Gandhi subverted ended up helping future governments bypass constitutional safeguards. It will happen again.
Politicians never even entertain the possibility of losing. Look at the recently concluded Assembly elections. On the day the results were coming out, the DMK was planning its victory celebrations, not realising what lay ahead. Till the very end, Mamata Banerjee believed the TMC was headed for a landslide victory.
But the reality is that they do lose. And sadly, the damage they have done to India’s democratic institutions lives on, long after they have been forgotten.
Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)
Mr Sanghvi,
Can you elaborate with statistical data and analysis how the SIR exercise has disenfranchised only Muslim voters?
Please, we don’t want generic and useless statements lkke “By all accounts” and “increasingly clear” and other such bs terms. Get the data of how many Muslim voters and Hindu voters were struck off per constituency, and the result, vote percentage and margin of victory in that constituency.
Get this data, publish it and make your point with sufficient data points and analytics.
Till then your reputation as a pimp for the congress will supercede any fancy language you use and makes your article irrelevant.