General S.K. Sinha is a man of strong and articulate opinion. He is also well-acquainted with the demands of life in Raj Bhavan, having held a string of governorships in his long and varied public life. Therefore, he must know the curbs on freely expressed interventions his office imposes on him. As governor in Jammu and Kashmir, the responsibilities that come with the office are especially complex. There exists in the state a particular arrangement of security and military agencies. As the Centre’s man in the state, he must keep an especially keen eye on governance and law and order. But as the governor of a state with a fully elected government, he must act upon his concerns within the bipartisanship of his office and without undermining the government’s primacy in making policy statements.This week, by heartily echoing in public Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad’s rejection of demands for troop reduction in the state, Sinha failed his duty. Troop reduction is the overt issue on which friction between Azad’s Congress and its coalition partner, Mufti Mohammed Sayeed’s PDP, is playing out in public. By calling the PDP’s demand for demilitarisation “incomprehensible” and “obnoxious”, Sinha has dived into a political issue. His intervention comes less than a week after his counterpart in West Bengal, Gopal Krishna Gandhi, appeared to criticise the state government for not only its handling of tensions in Nandigram but also for the quality of its economic policy.The governor — like the monarch in the British constitutional arrangement — is not supposed to rebuke his government in public; the PDP is still part of the governing coalition in J&K. Any rebuke is meant to be issued in strict confidence, and even that rebuke is more in the context of his constitutional obligation to advise the government on how to most prudently align its governance with the demands of a situation. To the governor is available the valuable instrument of calling the relevant persons for advice and feedback. What is not available is the option of wading into live policy/political issues.
