A War Of Attrition

Partisan governors and their increasingly fraught relationship with the chief ministers are now a regular feature in opposition-ruled states. It is time the gubernatorial role and the criteria of selection are clearly defined

- Amarnath K. Menon

He has been called a ‘cipher’, ‘a purely functional euphemism’, but that is how the office of the governor was envisaged in the Indian Constitution: a titular role with discretionary (and not real) powers. Among the elected representatives of the state, he was to be a nominee of the Union government, the only qualification being that he be a citizen of India and over 35 years of age. What the Constitution-makers hoped for was a nonpolitical, non-partisan incumbent in the role.

The ‘non-partisan’ part was always suspect, but in the past few years, governors have overtly come out as agents of the party in power at the Centre, using their discretionary powers to aid and abet the fall or formation of favourable governments, or locking horns with chief ministers from the opposition parties and hampering the functioning of the state. A litany of brazen battles across the states, openly factional positions on matters of national importance and controversies involving the excesses of governors are ever more frequent now.