Without even ensuring a firm grip on power, Chief Minister Jayalalithaa has invited the Central government into battle and thus strayed onto a terrain that she will find tough to negotiate.
IN the days when the federal balance of political authority lay heavily skewed towards the Centre, there was often a degree of concern expresssed over the tendency of State Governors to function at the behest of those who appointed them, rather than those they served. "Gubernatorial activism" was the frequent subject of muttered imprecations by those who worried about the growing encroachment on the powers of the State.
There have been numerous occasions when the Governor's acts of commission have led to calls for his or her recall. Few precedents, however, exist for this final exercise of the doctrine of presidential "pleasure" in the constitutional scheme. When M. Fathima Beevi was hustled into resigning as Governor of Tamil Nadu by the Union Cabinet's advice to the President that he withdraw his pleasure for her continuance in office, it marked a rare case of a high constitutional functionary being removed from office for acts of omission. Activism and political partisanship were not so much the issue as political passivity and a temperamental aversion - curious for a retired Judge of the Supreme Court - to arrive at complex determinations of fact and law.
Article 154 of the Constitution stipulates that the executive power of the State government shall be vested in the Governor. Article 163 further provides for a Council of Ministers in the State which will aid and advise the Governor in the exercise of her functions. There is, however, an area of discretionary authority mentioned by the same Article, though never defined with any clarity, where the Governor will not be bound by the advice of her Council of Ministers. There have been complaints that this area has often tended to be defined in an expansive manner. Fathima Beevi's recall marks the first time that action has been initiated on a complaint that the discretionary authority of a Governor has been interpreted in an inordinately modest manner.
The charge against Fathima Beevi, to paraphrase Union Law Minister Arun Jaitley, is that she went too closely by the advice rendered by her Council of Ministers. Her report was, in his characterisation, little more than a reiteration of the account rendered by the Tamil Nadu Chief Secretary, who ostensibly acted on behalf of the State government. In uncritically accepting a partisan account, she failed to safeguard the interests of the Central government and defaulted on her obligation to uphold the constitutional order.
In listing out the Governor's catalogue of failures, Jaitley drew pointed attention to the scant attention she had paid to the propriety of the State police picking up an ailing Central Minister from his home when there was no case against him. To the Central government's concerns about any possible injuries that Union Commerce Minister Murasoli Maran may have suffered, Fathima Beevi allegedly responded with a disavowal that merely echoed the Chief Secretary's finding. On the arrests of DMK cadres, the Governor had only the rather trite observation that the party had a large membership which necessitated the detention of sufficient numbers to ensure that there was no breach of public peace. And on the crackdown on the media - not merely in the aftermath of the Karunanidhi arrest but even earlier - the Governor had little of substance to say.
Yet, partisanship is clearly not a charge that will hold against Fathima Beevi. In 1998, when Jayalalithaa was in Opposition in the State and won an unexpected harvest of seats in the parliamentary elections, the Governor proved indifferent to her demand for the invocation of Article 356 to dismiss the incumbent State government under M. Karunanidhi. Even as Jayalalithaa was raising the pitch of her demand, not hesitating to threaten Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee with a withdrawal of support that would reduce him to a minority, Fathima Beevi held a rare press conference to pronounce herself completely satisfied with the performance of the Karunanidhi government on the law and order front.
The steadfast refusal to get entangled in complex issues of political contestation may be a virtue in governors in less turbulent times. But since the May general elections to the Tamil Nadu Assembly, this is a proclivity that has tended to draw Fathima Beevi deep into controversy. Most constitutional experts were appalled by the haste with which she swore in Jayalalithaa as Chief Minister, despite the magnitude of the popular mandate her party had received. When the gubernatorial functions of advice and counsel seemed eminently in place, Fathima Beevi chose not to enter into any complex issues of constitutional and legal interpretation. A similar effort to avoid being drawn into the political thicket has now led to her removal from office.
In the partisan battlefield of Tamil Nadu politics, the Governor proved a soft target. In dismissing the conscientious, if low-profile and rather ordinary former Judge from her gubernatorial office, the National Democratic Alliance government was clearly serving a warning on the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister. It is a warning that was quickly heeded. Amidst demands from a variety of sources that Article 356 be invoked to dismiss the Tamil Nadu Ministry, Jayalalithaa sent a senior party functionary, C. Ponnaiyan, to Delhi to explain her actions. Concurrently, the two Central Ministers who had been detained by the Tamil Nadu police were ordered released. Just when it was due to take up the report of a team of three Home Ministry officials on the situation in Tamil Nadu, the Union Cabinet seemed to think the better of it. The Cabinet meeting was postponed and the threatening posture relaxed. (When the Central team, led by M.B. Kaushal, met the Tamil Nadu Governor on June 1, she reportedly gave it the State government's version of the incidents.)
As she embarked on her mission of giving thanks at a number of temples in Kerala, Jayalalithaa must have felt rather isolated. Her electoral allies had reacted with shock and dismay to her undiluted pursuit of the politics of vendetta. The failure to follow established processes of the law and the violence inflicted upon the person of an aging former Chief Minister, had decisively turned public opinion against her. And her pleas that she had an adequate explanation for the actions of her police force, as also the release of video footage that purported to give an alternative picture of the events leading up to Karunanidhi's detention, made little impact.
Karunanidhi's victory in the propaganda war is likely to have certain long-lasting implications for the situation in Tamil Nadu, as it impinges on the State's relation with the Centre. While an ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party and an integral part of the ruling coalition at the Centre, AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa strove relentlessly to secure the dismissal of the State government under Article 356 of the Constitution. She won few converts to her cause and her frequent outbursts and sulks became the subject of irreverent political jests. She once claimed, with unsurpassed effrontery, that the dismissal of the Karunanidhi government in Tamil Nadu had been an unwritten agreement with the BJP prior to the 1998 general elections. Finally, her truculence led to the collapse of the Vajpayee government in 1999, though the DMK in Tamil Nadu continued in authority and served out a full five-year term.
Within six weeks of returning to power, Jayalalithaa has managed to persuade her erstwhile allies that all their scruples about the invocation of Article 356 were misplaced. George Fernandes, convener of the National Democratic Alliance - who ran regular peace missions to Chennai in the days when Jayalalithaa was a crucial partner in the ruling coalition - has stated on record that the Central government should not merely stop with the recall of the State Governor, but initiate stronger action. Fernandes, who led an NDA team including Vijay Kumar Malhotra of the BJP and Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa of the Akali Dal, made this statement after meeting Karunanidhi at the Central Prison in Chennai, and Maran at the Apollo Hospital.
The Karunanidhi arrest has proved deeply embarrassing even for the parties that were allied with Jayalalithaa during the last Assembly elections. The Congress(I) termed it "improper and unacceptable", while the Communist Party of India(Marxist) regretted that the circumstances in which it was conducted created "an adverse impression" among the public. The CPI was forthright in condemning the arrest, while the Tamil Maanila Congress and the Pattali Makkal Katchi expressed their dissent.
Even as Sun TV captured national audiences with footage of the Karunanidhi arrest, Jayalalithaa proved impervious to all the anxious inquiries that were coming her way from the Centre. Finally, the Chief Secretary of the State was asked to provide the necessary clarifications, since the Governor also proved conspicuously unequal to the task. Late on the evening of June 30, the Centre decided that it needed to get tough. An ultimatum, itself unprecedented, was issued on the Governor to furnish her account of the day's events by 9 a.m the next day. Belatedly awakening to the damage potential of her actions, Jayalalithaa broke her silence, asserting that a quite different interpretation was possible of the day's events. Unfortunately though, the interpretation that carried the day was one that was completely adverse to her interests.
The peculiar exigencies of coalition politics today ensure that there are no permanent friends or adversaries in national and State politics. But relations between the two principal political contestants in Tamil Nadu clearly elude this generalisation. Differences in political maturity and temperament though, make the contest an unequal one. While Karunanidhi proceeded with caution, deliberation and extreme attention to detail in his effort to bring Jayalalithaa to book, the latter has proved reckless, intemperate and quite flagrantly vindictive. Her multiple legal vicissitudes and the vigilance of the media ensure that Jayalalithaa's own grasp on power is tenuous. But without quite securing this flank, she has rashly opened up another front, inviting the assembled cadres of the DMK and the Central government into battle. Despite her ample legislative majority, the impetuous Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu has perhaps now strayed onto terrain that she lacks the means to negotiate.
- with inputs from T.S. Subramanian in Chennai
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