Central teams instead of Article 356

The Opposition then mobilised protests and forced Indira Gandhi to appoint the Sarkaria Commission on Centre-state relations. Its recommendations, however, have not changed the pace of the Centre’s intervention for they have not yet been accepted fully by any government.

Two other chief ministers, M. Karunanidhi (TN) and Rabri Devi (Bihar), were not as forthright as Basu. They met the Central teams and were at pains to explain that law and order intheir states was okay.

But Basu knew the BJP’s compulsions. He also knew that he had no moral and Constitutional obligation to be a party to that. For the BJP, it was a well-calculated policy of “appeasement of minorities” in a different form.The selective despatch of teams to non-BJP-ruled states will have two immediate impacts: it will instil a fear of dismissal in the state government. At the same time, it might make the BJP’s allies, Mamata Banerjee in Bengal, Jayalalitha in Tamil Nadu and Nitish Kumar in Bihar, happy. All these minority groups giving life-support to the BJP-led government at the Centre have their own political compulsions.

If you have failed to secure the mandate to rule in the state, then do not worry about the sanctity of the mandate. Try, and keep trying to topple the elected governments in the name of law and order because there is not a single state where the governments are above criticism by the Opposition on this ground. And the Centre can choose to decide which way toturn.

All these years, Centre-state relations have been defined more in terms of political interference by the Centre in the states. Imposition of President’s Rule in states more than 110 times, sparingly during the first three Parliaments and then brazenly till October 1997 have “theoretically” come to a near halt.

The power vested in the Centre to dismiss an elected government is an extreme step. But it was certainly not meant to be a political weapon against the people’s mandate. B.R. Ambedkar favoured such a provision for its use sparingly but made it known during the debate in the Constituent Assembly that he would be happy if “Article 356 becomes a dead statute” for all practical purposes.

Not dismissing a government, however, doesn’t mean that the Centre should be complimented. For, sending Central teams without having been requested by the states has a more wider potential to vitiate Centre-state relations. An elected government will always remain vulnerable to blackmail by the Centre whichwill use petty bureaucrats as its tools.

In fact, in the ’80s, there were only two issues on which the non-Congress opposition, including regional parties, agreed to invite the BJP to their platform. First was to oppose a law — which all of them said was draconian — called the Essential Services Maintenance Act (ESMA). And, second, was for redefining Centre-state relations in the context of dismissal of the state governments. Ironically, ESMA is a favourite weapon of most BJP governments today to tackle striking employees.

The Central teams have a clear motive. The first one to visit Tamil Nadu under pressure from Jayalalitha ended in a fiasco. Its leader, Arun Kumar, a joint secretary in the Home Ministry, was shunted out to a nondescript assignment after he made public his findings that the law and order situation was under control. If his report did not make Amma happy, it certainly didn’t make Home Minister L K Advani happy.

In Bihar and Bengal, Advani justified his decision to send the team onthe ground that Opposition parties had demanded it. Is there any state in the country where the Opposition parties have not made such demands? The BJP has actually been preparing grounds for Central intervention in certain states.Advani quietly ignored to send a team to Uttar Pradesh with about one and a half dozen history sheeters in the council of ministers, and with Chief Minister Kalyan Singh himself admitting in the Assembly that the law and order situation in the state was bad. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s threat to build the temple and the possibility of it provoking communal sentiments is worth ignoring too, because it is a BJP-ruled state.

Days after the BJP came to power, Rajasthan’s Kota district witnessed communal violence. State PCC Chief Ashok Gehlot, a six-time MP, put the blame entirely on the RSS. But no team was sent.

And even when the Central team was visiting Bihar, Governor S.S. Bhandari, an RSS leader and BJP vice-president till he took up the new assignment, made a public statementthat the law and order situation in Bihar was grim. Arun Kumar was shifted from the Ministry for publicly saying that the law and order situation in Tamil Nadu was not grim. But Bhandari stays because he has said what his erstwhile party and its government want to hear.This rewrites and distorts the Constitutional provision defining who an elected government should be accountable to.