New Delhi: Last week, the Tamil Nadu Raj Bhavan issued a statement saying that Governor R.N. Ravi had not agreed to having Electricity and Excise Minister V. Senthil Balaji, who has been arrested on money laundering charges, continue in the cabinet.
“The Hon’ble Governor has not agreed to V. Senthil Balaji continuing any longer as a Minister of the Council of Ministers, as he is facing criminal proceedings for moral turpitude and is currently in judicial custody,” the Raj Bhavan said in a statement.
The statement came after the Tamil Nadu government under Chief Minister M.K. Stalin reassigned Senthil’s portfolio citing his “ill-health”. Last week, soon after his arrest by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), Senthil was taken ill and was advised a heart bypass surgery.
In the war of words that ensued, Tamil Nadu’s Higher Education Minister K. Ponmudy accused Governor Ravi of “acting like a BJP agent”.
But this isn’t the first impasse between the state’s Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government and Ravi, a former IPS officer who has served as the special director of the Intelligence Bureau and had formerly been the governor of Nagaland before being appointed as Tamil Nadu’s governor in September 2021.
In the nearly two years since his appointment, there have been several such standoffs over a variety of issues, including the delay in approving bills passed by the assembly, the governor’s various controversial remarks, and even Stalin’s official visit to Singapore in May.
ThePrint takes a look at Ravi’s various run-ins with the DMK government.
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Senthil’s arrest, anti-NEET bill
In the early hours of 14 June, Karur strongman Senthil was arrested in a cash-for-jobs scam after 18 hours of questioning and was eventually sent to judicial custody until 28 June.
According to the ED, Senthil allegedly “misused” his office and “engineered” a job racket scam in the state transport undertakings in 2014-15. The case allegedly goes back to his tenure as the state’s transport minister in the then All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) government.
Soon after his arrest, however, he was admitted to a hospital after complaining of chest pain and was advised coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery for triple vessel disease.
And although Governor Ravi rejected the state government’s reason for reallocating Senthil’s portfolios, he accepted its recommendation to reassign electricity and non-conventional energy development to finance and human resource management minister Thangam Thennarasu and the department of prohibition and excise to housing and urban development minister S. Muthusamy.
Ravi’s tussles with the DMK government, though, date back to 2021 — mere months after he was first appointed to the state.
While CM Stalin, whose government had swept into power only four months before, had welcomed his appointment, allies such as the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee (TNCC) and the Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK) saw an “ulterior motive” behind it.
But soon, tensions began to rise, with the Tamil Nadu government’s anti-National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) Bill becoming the first flash point. Called the Tamil Nadu Admission to Undergraduate Medical Degree Courses Bill, 2021, the legislation seeks to exempt Tamil Nadu’s students from the NEET, an all-India pre-medical entrance test that Tamil Nadu has long seen as a thorn in its side.
First passed in the Tamil Nadu Assembly on 13 September, 2021, the bill was sent to the governor for his assent the same month. As accusations that the governor was stalling grew, Ravi returned the bill in 2022. It was readopted by the assembly in February 2022.
Amid this row, however, Ravi praised the NEET at the Republic Day function on 26 January that year.
“Before the introduction of NEET, the share of students from government schools to the seats in government medical colleges was hardly 1 per cent. Thanks to the affirmative action of 7.5 per cent reservation for government school students, that number has improved significantly,” he had said then.
That speech did not go well with the DMK — in its mouthpiece Murasoli on 29 January, the party denounced the governor’s words saying, “If Ravi thought of doing politics by clinging on to a big brother attitude, it would do him good to realise that it will not succeed and Tamil Nadu is not Nagaland.”
The issue began to heat up once again in April that year, when CM Stalin and his ministers boycotted Ravi’s ‘At Home’ tea party held to mark Tamil New Year citing the governor’s reluctance to sign several bills passed by the state assembly, including the anti-NEET bill.
The issue of the pending bills cropped up yet again this year — on 4 May Tamil Nadu Industries Minister Thangam Thennarasu said the governor was yet to sign off on as many as 17 bills — seven from previous sessions and 10 from the assembly session concluded in April.
But pending bills weren’t the only cause of friction between the governor and the DMK government. The car explosion in Coimbatore in October 2022 that killed one person also led to a war-of-words between the governor and the DMK.
Days after the incident, Ravi questioned the “delay” in handing over the probe to the National Investigation Agency — the federal agency mandated with investigating terror cases.
“The incident that happened a few days back in the district, was an attempt to unleash a major terror attack….The quantity of explosive material that was found later and IED-making chemicals and ingredients were enough to suggest that they (the terrorists) had planned a series of attacks,” Ravi said during an address at the J.S.S. Institute of Naturopathy and Yogic Sciences & Hospitals, according to The Hindu. “The question is, when the Tamil Nadu police got the suspects within hours, why did it take more than four days to bring in the NIA?”
In its response, the DMK government claimed that the NIA had always been part of the police investigation and that the governor was doing “politics” with the issue.
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‘Sanatana Dharma’ and ‘Tamizhagam’
Ravi’s various controversial statements on Sanatana Dharma and Tamil culture have added to tensions with the ruling government.
At an event at Ramakrishna Mission Students’ Home and the Residential High School in Chennai in June last year, Ravi claimed: “The spine of Bharat is Sanatana Dharma, and this dharma has to rise for the comprehensive rise of Bharat”.
The comment drew severe backlash from several quarters of the state, including from the DMK, which saw this as an attempt to push the agenda of the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ideological mentor Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in Tamil Nadu.
In a statement he issued, DMK treasurer T.R. Baalu claimed that although the governor was entitled to his religious belief, he should refrain from supporting the “Sanatana Dharma and the varnashrama (The Varna system)” as a constitutional authority.
Ravi similarly drew the DMK’s ire in January this year, when he referred to Tamil Nadu as “Tamizhagam”.
For context, Tamil Nadu originally means Tamil ‘land’, now also read as ‘Tamil country’. ‘Tamizhagam’, on the other hand, means the ‘abode’ or ‘land’ of the Tamil people and was the name of the ancient Tamil country.
At a programme in Raj Bhavan on 4 January, Ravi claimed that a “different kind of narrative has been created” in Tamil Nadu.
“Everything applicable for the whole of the country, Tamil Nadu will say no. It has become a habit. So many theses have been written — all false and poor fiction. This must be broken. Truth must prevail. Tamizhagam is a more appropriate word to call it. The rest of the country suffered a lot of devastation at the hands of foreigners for a long time,” he had said in his speech.
This, too, kicked up a storm, not only in political circles but also on social media, where the hashtags #TamilNadu and #GetOutRavi trended.
In a strongly-worded response, DMK said the governor’s comments on “Aryan, Dravidian, Thirukural and colonial rule are blatant and dangerous”.
“His aim is to take the state back to the Varnashrama period,” the DMK said in a statement. “He has said that a false narrative has been fed to the people of Tamil Nadu in the past 50 years. What is the condition of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh after fifty years compared to Tamil Nadu? Tamil Nadu contributes 9.22 per cent to the GDP of India.”
Despite these criticisms, however, Ravi continued to refer to the state as Tamizhagam — an official invite from the Raj Bhavan for pongal celebrations referred to him as Tamizhaga Aalunar (the governor of Tamizhagam).
But even before this controversy died down, Ravi found himself in the middle of yet another one. At the start of the first assembly session of the year, Ravi skipped portions of a speech prepared for him by the state government. These omitted portions contained, among other things, references to Tamil Nadu as a “haven of peace” and the mention of some of the state’s tallest leaders such as E.V Ramasamy ‘Periyar’, and former chief ministers K. Kamaraj, C.N. Annadurai, and M. Karunanidhi.
As Stalin moved a resolution insisting that the governor read the whole of the prepared speech, sources at Raj Bhavan told ThePrint that the parts that were left out were mostly praises of the state government and not “factual details”.
Significant among these “skipped parts” was DMK’s reference to the “Dravida model” of governance.
Stalin’s foreign visit
The latest point of contention between the governor and the DMK government was M.K. Stalin’s visit to Singapore and Japan last month.
The chief minister claimed that his government had signed Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) worth Rs 3,000 crore during this visit. He also claimed that companies had expressed their willingness to take part in the Global Investors Meet that will be held in January 2024.
Ravi, however, remained unconvinced.
“Investors won’t come just because we ask them to, or we go and have a talk,” he said, adding that for this, the state needs to build an ecosystem to attract global corporate giants.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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