Something that Babasaheb Ambedkar once said resonates in the two current controversies regarding the role of governors and attitudes towards Dalits. "Good men can make even bad laws work to the common benefit," wrote the author of India's finely-drawn Constitution, "but bad men will abuse even the best constitution."
The controversy over J P Rajkhowa in Itanagar takes me back to a stormy November morning in 1967 when the West Bengal Assembly was in an uproar. No sooner had the governor, Dharma Vira, a retired ICS officer, taken his seat than the speaker, Bijoy Banerjee, stood up and wagging his finger like a village schoolmaster admonishing errant children, intoned that by summoning the Assembly, the governor had dealt the greatest blow to democracy since 1642, when King Charles I entered the House of Commons. The MPs he had gone to arrest had disappeared; asked about their whereabouts, the speaker, William Lenthall, famously replied in words Banerjee would have loved to utter, "I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here."
While Banerjee was making history, the 76-year-old Prafulla Chandra Ghosh, appointed chief minister by Dharma Vira, gazed bewildered about him like a rustic on his first visit to town. Seeing Siddhartha Shankar Ray clutching Erskine May's Parliamentary Practice, it occurred to me the bulky volume might be more effective as a missile in that tumultuous gathering than a text anyone would read, comprehend or follow. Legislators booed and barracked the diminutive governor whose spectacles were knocked off as he was escorted - dragged is more appropriate - out of the building.
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Having served in British India for 17 years, and received an OBE in 1946, Dharma Vira would have known of the hallowed antecedents of his job. It was said during the Raj that the divine right of kings filtered down from Buckingham Palace to New Delhi's viceregal lodge to provincial government houses and thence to divisional commissioners, district magistrates and even sub-divisional officers. Some were treated to royal honours. Vicereines curtsied to their husbands, as did the wives of lesser excellencies. An old All India Radio hand told me that when Sir John Herbert, governor of Bengal, died in 1943 and the Bihar governor was sworn in to act in his place, the widowed Lady Mary Herbert was the first person to go up the throne in the durbar hall of what is now Raj Bhavan and curtsy.
Herbert may have set a precedent for Rajkhowa and his masters in New Delhi. Shortly before his death he eased out Bengal's popular chief minister, A K Fazlul Huq, and appointed Sir Khawaja Nazimuddin instead. The ousted Sher-e-Bangla wrote, "Of all the faults of which a governor can be guilty the fault of partisanship is most reprehensible... a partisan governor is no more fit for his high office than a partisan judge."
Some aspects of partisanship were explored in the anthology The Governor, Sage or Saboteur that Soli Sorabjee edited in 1985. Invited to contribute a chapter on gubernatorial misdeeds in Sikkim, I described the conduct of the first governor, B B Lal. Also an ICS man like Dharma Vira, he was infinitely more overbearing and dictatorial than the hereditary monarch (Chogyal Palden Thondup Namgyal) he had replaced, supposedly in the interests of democracy. The conquered Sikkimese suffered him because he represented the conquering power and they were terrified of Indira Gandhi.
They also thought - mistakenly - that the law was on Lal's side. Just as Article 356 of the Constitution, which enables New Delhi's appointees to play ducks and drakes with democratic rights, is believed to be descended from Section 93 of the Government of India Act 1935, the simple Sikkimese thought Article 371F(g) of Part XXI (Temporary, Transitional and Special Provisions) of the Constitution legitimised gubernatorial high-handedness. Actually, it merely gives the governor "special responsibility for peace and for an equitable arrangement for ensuring the social and economic advancement of different sections of the population of Sikkim". He can "act in his discretion" to uphold ethnic harmony and ensure that the majority ethnic Nepalese don't overwhelm Sikkim's indigenous Bhutias and Lepchas.
In practice in Lal's time, "special responsibility" became the justification for every gubernatorial excess. He could do no wrong for he was the Centre's man. Today, the Centre's henchmen (and henchwomen) might also condemn any assertion of Dalit rights as "anti-national". To paraphrase Ambedkar, good laws are of little use in the hands of bad men (and women).
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