“Tu jaanta hai mera baap kaun hai?” is a familiar dialogue one associates with Delhi’s roads and its daily dose of road rage. But to have a state governor degrade himself to that level and make a spectacle of himself on a public road in Kerala for hours is one for the history books of the hilarious.
But then Arif Mohammed Khan, the honourable Governor of Kerala, has been lowering the dignity of his office on a weekly basis for the last few years. Even by his standards, what unfolded on the Trivandrum-Kollam road on Saturday was something else.
Khan was on his way to a function when a few activists of the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) stood by the wayside and showed him black flags. The SFI agitation against Khan has been going on for a while — they are protesting his move to fill student syndicates of Kerala’s universities with people of RSS/ABVP persuasion, using his chancellorship.
In this case, Khan lost his cool, got out of his official vehicle, and decided to sit by the roadside until the police slapped anti-bailable charges on the protesting students.
The theatre that played out has provided enough fodder for Kerala’s social-media meme industry for a while to come. A furious Khan was seen talking to his staff loudly, urging them to call the Home Minister and the PMO. Khan’s “road show” for over two hours would be the first of its kind by a constitutional functionary in the country. Before this, Kerala had witnessed another “feat” under Khan when he concluded the government’s customary policy address in the Assembly in less than two minutes.
His prayers to the Delhi durbar were answered when the Centre decided to give him Z Plus CRPF security within two hours. But the question that arises is if CRPF is enough to make an insecure man feel secure. Khan faces no physical threat from the people of Kerala, from the SFI or the government. But like Don Quixote tilting at imaginary windmills, our man has been at it. In fact, many television news channels now squarely depend on him for their TRPs.
Absurdities apart, the script that his masters in New Delhi have handed over to him is the same that the British Viceroy used to give to his resident sahibs: Divide and rule. Khan says Kerala Police is the best, but its decision makers are not; people of Kerala are the best, but the representatives they elect are not; the education system in Kerala is the best, but its universities are not.
Mark Twain had famously spoken about rules of arguments, especially those with whom one shouldn’t venture into duels. This could be the reason why eminent jurists Fali S Nariman and Rohinton Nariman simply ignored the charge levied by Khan against them. At a conclave organised by a media house, Khan had alleged that Rohinton Nariman’s take on the Governor’s indefensible act of sitting on Bills was a result of his father taking a fee for rendering legal opinion to the Kerala government.
Kerala has a rich tradition of resistance, cutting across all ideological divides. Many non-Keralites don’t know that we had to fight our own war for independence even after the British were vanquished because a certain diwan of the then Travancore ruler decided he knew best. C P Ramaswamy Iyer decided Travancore (the central and south Kerala of today) would become an independent republic following the “American model”, but had to finally flee the state in the face of public resistance. Mass protests against injustice or highhandedness is a part and parcel of the Malayali political psyche and waving black flags is a ubiquitous form of protest. Khan could have spent some time studying the rich political history of modern Kerala before he boarded the flight to Thiruvananthapuram. If he had done so, he wouldn’t have seen ghosts of political conspiracy where there are none.
C N Annadurai, the legend of Dravidian politics, once remarked that a governor is as important to a state as a beard to a goat. If he could see the theatre of the absurd being enacted by Khan in Kerala, he might have had kinder words for the goat’s beard.
The writer is a Rajya Sabha member of CPIM
