On Tuesday, two days after he described Kannur University Vice-Chancellor and historian Gopinath Ravindran as a “criminal”, Kerala Governor Arif Mohammed Khan lashed out at the doyen of the Aligarh School of History, Irfan Habib. He called the nonagenarian scholar of medieval India a “goonda”. The immediate provocation for the inelegant outburst seemed to be his disagreements with the VC over university appointments, but Khan was also raking up a three-year-old issue — he was allegedly heckled while inaugurating the Indian History Congress in 2019, in which both academics were present. As Chancellor of Kerala’s universities, the governor has had several run-ins with the state’s LDF government over university governance. The primacy of due process in the management of institutes is incontrovertible. But the Kerala governor should ask himself: Does his intemperate language behove his high office? By insulting two distinguished academics, Khan has made the Kerala Raj Bhawan a participant in the coarsening of public discourse.
Of course, Khan is far from being the first incumbent of a Raj Bhawan to court controversy. Over the decades, the constitutional office of governor has been dented and diminished, mostly by the tug and pull of politics. Red lines drawn by the Supreme Court have been repeatedly transgressed and recommendations by panels such as the Sarkaria and Punchhi Commissions seem to have gone abegging as more and more governors have become embroiled in partisan politics. At the same time, however, examples of gubernatorial high-mindedness, propriety and grace are not far to seek. President Droupadi Murmu’s tenure as Jharkhand governor, for instance, was notable for her playing by the book without being discourteous to the JMM-led state government.
Arif Mohammed Khan’s appointment as Kerala governor had led to expectations of decorum and fair play in the Raj Bhawan’s engagements with an Opposition-ruled government. In the 1980s, Khan emerged as a prominent voice of reform and reason. In later years, even though he changed political affiliation — Congress to Janata Dal to BSP, then BJP —Khan’s reputation as a thinking politician remained intact. Unfortunately, however, not only has Khan’s tenure as Kerala governor belied expectations of injecting sobriety into the Raj Bhawan, he has disappointed with his silences as well – on the remission of the sentences of the 11 convicts in the Bilki Bano case, for instance. The Kerala governor today seems a different person from the young politician who courageously spoke up for women’s rights and defied his party line in the Shah Bano case.
