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The President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam asked the Governors to rise above considerations of partisan politics in order to play the role the Founding Fathers had envisaged for them. Irked no doubt by the rank partisanship of the Governors of Goa, Bihar and Jharkhand, Dr Kalam, speaking at the inaugural session of the twoday conference of Governors and Lt. Governors, minced no words while berating some of the luminaries present, albeit obliquely.
"You have to decide whether you rise to be a first citizen or remain caged in the confines of your political or any other identity. If you continue to nurture certain affiliations, many will hesitate approaching you with suggestions and problems. You will be isolated from a large number of problems". The President said what needed to be said, especially in the light of recent events which had further brought into disrepute the institution of governors.
But the surprising part is that the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh deemed it fit to follow up on the same track the next day when he too asked the Governors to `rise above partisan politics while discharging constitutional obligations." The PM had some more unexceptionable homilies to deliver which he did before enjoining upon the Governors to play their constitutional role without favour or fear.
All in all, a non-controversial address which more or less endorsed the previous day's call by the President for the Governors to shed the baggage of partisan politics while discharging their duties as the exalted officers of the Constitution.
But precisely because it was the PM who said what he did he enforced the impression that the annual Governors' conference has become a mere ritual where goody-goody sentiments are expressed only for the record and when they go back to their respective capitals it is back to the routine of Rajpals as a pliant extension of the ruling party at the Centre.
Notice the irony that it is the same Manmohan Singh who was an active party to the recent conspiracies implemented by the occupants of Panjim, Ranchi and Patna Raj Bhawans. The words of Singh would not have rang untrue had he not blessed the rank partisanship displayed by the trio of Governors.
Worse, the manner of dissolution of the yet-to-be-constituted Assembly in Bihar just when there emerged a strong likelihood of a viable elected government was a most disgraceful act ever by a State Governor. The Government of Prime Minister Singh fully backed in full public view the assault on the spirit and law of the Constitution by the Governor of Bihar.
In any case, Manmohan Singh is too intelligent a man not to have known the huge gap between his words and the actions of his Government. Increasingly, he is sounding like a typical mealy-mouthed politician who does not practice what he preaches.
Otherwise, after the grave atrocity
committed against the Constitution by Buta Singh, how can this advertisement
for the decline and fall of Governors can be allowed to stay put in Patna?
The PM would have sounded far more earnest had he moved Buta Singh, with
his baggage of his two sons, oddly named Sweety and Lovely, to a lesser
Raj Bhawan where the scope of their inflicting damage on the constitutional
institution was minimal.
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