President K. R. Narayanan's appeal to the governors to act as "watchdogs of tolerance" will be widely seen as a candid pointer to a problem that the nation needs to face. However, few will see it as spelling out a real solution. There is little mystery about the meaning of the President's sad references to the "lowering of the tolerance in the society and the emerging cult of violence" and the challenge of "upholding India's traditional heritage of a tolerant society". He was, obviously, talking of the series of incidents of violence threatening to shake the confidence of the minorities in the idea of a composite but united India. The added dimensions to the problem of aggressive communalism are disturbing enough to warrant note by all. Not many will expect the grave threat to be met with any degree of effectiveness by gubernatorial resistance. Narayanan cannot be faulted for urging the occupants of the august constitutional office, at a conference of governors, to act as "a harmonising influence" and "play acrucial role" in the combat against criminal communalism. But, it is a wider audience to which a call of the kind needs to be addressed. The Raj Bhavans cannot be expected to answer such calls with alacrity because their role has, over the years, been reduced to one that has not even helped the cause of Centre-state harmony. The President has recalled Mahatma Gandhi's idea of governors as "an all-pervasive moral influence in their provinces" and asked them to wield such an influence in the fight against "fissiparous and disharmonising forces". The representative governor, however, has only proved too ready to play a much lesser role. Eminence having become only an exceptional criterion in the choice of governors, they have been increasingly content to play a role on behalf of the political rulers in the states and at the Centre. In this conference itself, the presidential plea was only followed by the governors conducting themselves as the state governments' spokespersons, and reports mention the particularly notable performance in this regard by S. S. Bhandari giving a clean chit to the rulers of Gujarat that has witnessed horrendousincidents of anti-minority violence. When they are not the voices of the state governments, the governors echo and endorse the Centre, which too has only been striving to play down the problem of presidential concern. But, why blame the governors alone, when they are mere cogs in a giant wheel that turns unmindful of all that is being crushed under it? What the problem calls for is not so much an extraordinary role by eminencesas a reasonably efficient administration that can enforce the rule of law. The lack of the latter is writ large in the way these cases of violence have been tackled - in none of them has the law taken its course to its logical conclusion of identifying the offending individuals or groups and meting out exemplary justice. The solution does not lie in stopping with expressions of suspicions about the role of the ISI in this regard. Talk of a "foreign hand", as the country knows, can conceal much official ineptitude.
