Chandigarh: After the Raj Bhavan fired off a ‘President’s Rule’ warning, Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann Saturday accused Governor Banwarilal Purohit of being “power hungry” and advised him to plunge into electoral hustings.
At a press conference in Chandigarh, Mann said that issuing threats of President’s Rule was unconstitutional and that the governor was “testing the patience” of the 3.5 crore Punjabis who voted his government to power. “I will not compromise with the self-respect of the proud Punjabis. We know how to fight back,” he asserted.
Through a four-page letter to the chief minister Friday, the governor had warned Mann that he would write to the President under Article 356 of the Constitution about the “failure of Constitutional mechanism” in the state in case the chief minister continued to ignore his demands for information regarding the working of the Mann government.
Article 356 provides for the imposition of President’s Rule in a state.
Asserting that he will respond to all the letters written by Purohit, Mann said that the one common refrain in all the governor’s letters was “hunger for power”.
“He has been losing (elections) but he still wants to give orders. When I appointed vice-chancellors, he cancelled those orders. First, he agreed to call the budget session and then he cancelled those orders. We had to approach the Supreme Court to get our budget session going,” Mann said.
Clarifying that he had never hit anyone “below the belt”, Mann said that the governor had taken unnecessary umbrage to his having referred to the governor being from Nagpur. “The fact is that he does belong to Nagpur, so what is the problem in saying that?”
Purohit had in his letter to Mann referred to multiple instances where he said the CM made graceless and personal attacks. In one such instance quoted in the letter, the governor referred to the CM questioning his antecedents at a session of the Vidhan Sabha: “Don’t know if he (read, Purohit) is from Maharashtra or from Nagaland… don’t know where he comes from….”
“The governor originally belongs to Rajasthan. From Rajasthan, his whole family had moved to Nagpur. I have a suggestion for him…though I am much younger than him and whenever I meet him I touch his feet and show him great respect. My suggestion to him is that Rajasthan is going to have elections soon and he should be the CM face of BJP in Rajasthan and contest polls. He can win and then give all the orders that he wants to…the country needs mature statesmen like him,” Mann said Saturday.
“Everyone will also come to know what people want. In Punjab, (during elections) every party had put forth their claims to power and listed their agenda. We had listed ours and people chose us.”
Mann alleged that whatever the Punjab governor was doing was part of a larger strategy of the BJP at the Centre to usurp power in the states. “Wherever the BJP does not come to power through elections, it tries to buy them (MLAs) and form government…if it is not possible to buy them, they bring in ordinances like in Delhi to curtail the powers (of the government). If that is not possible, then they try to wield power through the governor,” Mann said, citing the examples of West Bengal, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Telangana.
Punjab has been the biggest victim of the repeated imposition of Article 356 in the state, said Mann. “We all know what happens when the President’s Rule is imposed,” he said, referring to the multiple times the state was put under President’s Rule in the 1980s and 1990s during the days of militancy.
Accusing the governor of trying to “threaten” him with President’s Rule, Mann said the governor was questioning the sacrifice of millions of Punjabis.
“We are the food bowl of the nation. Our farmers work hard to feed the country. We played a stellar rule during the freedom struggle and even now we stand guard against the enemy because we are a border state. We protect the nation. Despite all this, we are being threatened with the imposition of the President’s Rule. Is this how the governor intends to protect the Constitution?”
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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