T N Ninan: Not autonomy

WEEKEND RUMINATIONS

The government has struck a wrong note by sacking governors with RSS loyalties. First, there is very little damage that governors can do in their largely ceremonial posts, even if they are RSS loyalists.

The days when Article 356 was wilfully misused to get rid of inconvenient state governments are fortunately over, and no one can easily remember the last time this was done. Perhaps it was when the Kalyan Singh and other BJP-led state governments were dismissed in the wake of the demolition of the Babri masjid; in short, over a decade ago.

It is of course true that governors play a pivotal role in deciding who should form the government, especially when elections turn in unclear results, and in interpreting the law on defections.

This explains why the governors handpicked for the sack on Friday are those where state elections are due. But even here, the danger is overblown. The new law on defections is stricter than the old one, and gives less room for convenient interpretations by the governor.

As for deciding who should be sworn in, there is room for discretion in a hung House, but precedents and court rulings have minimised the scope for mischief. In short, little is lost in retaining even those governors whose background, colour and smell you find offensive.

If nervousness about what these governors might get up to in the wake of the assembly elections is so great that it over-rides all these considerations, even then there was the lesser evil available of shuffling the governors around, moving the unwanted ones to less prestigious and less prominent states where no elections are due.

This would have given the governors concerned the strong signal that they were expected to quit, and yet have left the government with clean hands.

In any case, the BJP is not alone in using gubernatorial postings as a way of kicking upstairs senior politicians who refuse to retire or disappear. The practice was started by the Congress, so that a largely ceremonial post became an instrument in party politics. The Congress therefore is in no position to complain that the BJP ignored propriety; the BJP merely copied the Congress.

The point goes beyond governors. What the government, any government, must know is that the democratic spirit strikes root when the area for partisan conduct is restricted.

It should not be that when Murli Manohar Joshi is in office, the textbooks have a certain colour, when the Marxists are in office (as they are in West Bengal), the books say something else altogether, and when the Congress is in control, the textbooks say a third thing.

Nor should it be that the whole superstructure of governance at the institutes of management bends one way when Dr Joshi huffs and puffs, and then bends in exactly the opposite direction when he is replaced by Arjun Singh. This is neither autonomy nor a pretty sight.

The correct urge must be to strengthen the autonomous pursuit of historical and other knowledge, untainted by the wishes of the government of the day, and to insulate textbooks from possibly fickle or transient electoral swings.

This can be done either by respecting the autonomy of bodies like the National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) and the Indian Council for Historical Research (ICHR), or by simply de-nationalising the whole textbook business and leaving it to schools and school boards to decide what books they want to use.

This is not as strange as it may sound, because textbooks were nationalised only in the late 1960s, which was a period when everything was getting politicised. The winds now blow differently.

The bottom line is that if we don't want fee structures and textbooks and governors and our understanding of history and much else to change every time a government changes, then we must restrict the scope of politicising the system.

Beyond a point, it is futile arguing about who committed the original sin, whether the Marxists started the rot and whether the parivar was "correcting" the bias, only for the Congress to now seek de-toxification.

All parties are guilty of needless politicisation, and it is a pity that a government headed by Manmohan Singh, who must understand this simple point quite easily, should fall prey to the same disease.