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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Election Commission just got away with match-fixing. This isn’t what India is about

Even in Indira Gandhi’s time there was so much disgust with the behaviour of Governors. Nothing came of it because every government always wants its own stooges in Raj Bhavans.

Now that the Governor of Tamil Nadu Rajendra Vishwanath Arlekar has run out of delaying tactics and finally sworn Vijay in as Chief Minister, it may be time to list the takeaways from this election season. 

The first one is obvious. There is a long and disgraceful history of Governors trampling on the Constitution to serve the interests of the people at the Centre who appointed them. When we (with some justification) look at the examples from the last decade with shame and anger, we forget that this practice dates back decades. In the 1980s, NT Rama Rao was unseated in Andhra Pradesh by a pliant Governor acting under Indira Gandhi’s instructions. A similar fate befell Farooq Abdullah in Jammu and Kashmir because of Mrs Gandhi and Arun Nehru.

The only difference between then and now is that the bias has become far more blatant. Mamata Banerjee had a running battle with Governor Jagdeep Dhankar in West Bengal, who took the unprecedented step of travelling around the country to badmouth the Chief Minister. For his pains, Dhankar was rewarded with the post of Vice President. (That didn’t last for reasons nobody can convincingly explain.)

Before this Assembly election, the Centre shifted RN Ravi—a former policeman with no claim to fame except for loyalty to his masters—from Tamil Nadu to Bengal so it would have its hatchet man in place in case the election threw up a complex verdict.

As it turned out, the Centre should have kept Ravi in Tamil Nadu (where he had constantly fought with the elected government) because the election resulted in a........

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