The President appears to be less than comfortable with the idea of sacking NDA-appointed Governors and this has led to a flurry of activity by the Prime Minister and some of his colleagues in the last two days.A P J Abdul Kalam forwarded to the Manmohan Singh ministry the memorandum which was handed to him by Leader of the Opposition L K Advani, three days ago, along with a note about the proposed removal of some of the governors.The President, say sources, would like to see if a way could still be found to get the governors to resign on their own. After receiving the President’s note, the Prime Minister called on the Rashtrapati on Wednesday along with Home Minister Shivraj Patil. It was after this 50-minute meeting that later in the evening, Patil called up Advani to try and persuade him to let the ‘‘BJP governors’’ put in their papers. The BJP, however, is on the warpath and is not budging and Advani is believed to have made this clear to Patil.Even though the Governors continue in office at the pleasure of the President, at the end of the day, the President is bound by the advice of the Union Cabinet. Just as the BJP is unyielding, the government appears to be determined to show the governors, who belonged to the RSS or played a partisan role, the door.To begin with, the Government is thinking of changing five governors—of UP (Vishnukant Shastri), Bihar(Rama Jois), Haryana (Bhai Parmanand), Goa (Kedar Nath Sahni), and Gujarat (Kailashpati Mishra), sources said. It seems to have zeroed in on T V Rajeshwar, a former Director of the IB in Indira Gandhi’s time, for UP; Congress leader Nawal Kishore Sharma for Gujarat; former Nagaland CM S C Jamir for Goa; and A R Kidwai, a Rajya Sabha member, for Haryana. The President may want to ease out the governors more gently, if that is possible, even though there is a precedent of the President asking the governors to put in their papers.This happened in 1990 when the then Prime Minister V P Singh had persuaded the then President R Venkataraman to write to the governors seeking their resignations. There is another view in government that the President does not even need to ask the governors to quit. He can simply appoint others in their place, which will amount to showing them the door. This line is being contested by the BJP—that governors cannot be sacked.In recent years, as the appointment of governors has been increasingly politicised, they have been nudged to put in their papers when a new government took over. The BJP too had done this with several governors, including those like Satish Chandran, a non-party person whose independence or integrity was not in doubt. The Congress too has appointed party leaders Balram Jakhar and R L Bhatia as governors of Madhya Pradesh and Kerala respectively.
