Opinion Express View on Tamil Nadu Governor RN Ravi dismissing a minister: Fraying the fabric

By dismissing a minister without the consent of the council of ministers – a decision he had to put on hold within hours, after the Union Home Ministry rightly advised him to seek legal opinion first — Tamil Nadu Governor RN Ravi has taken a step too far. The issue is no longer about the propriety of someone facing serious corruption charges continuing in the ministry while a probe is underway. V Senthil Balaji was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate on June 14 for an alleged job scam in 2015, and has subsequently been a minister without portfolio in the MK Stalin-led government. Certainly, propriety demands that the CM should get him to step down. But the governor’s unilateral and unprecedented move has now posed a more urgent concern about gubernatorial overreach. The Constitution’s letter and spirit, as interpreted by several Supreme Court judgments, have laid out the limits on the powers of the Raj Bhawan vis a vis the elected government that Governor Ravi has so brashly overstepped. In Shamsher Singh vs State of Punjab, 1974, a seven-judge Constitution bench of the SC said that the governor must exercise his powers “only upon and in accordance with the aid and advice of their ministers, save in a few well-known exceptional situations”. In February this year, in a case relating to the political crisis in Maharashtra, the SC cautioned the governor again against entering the political arena: “He cannot exercise a power that is not conferred on him by the Constitution or a law made under it.”

Friction between Raj Bhawan and the elected government in a state is not new. The hostilities seem to have been visibly invigorated, however, in Opposition-ruled states on the watch of the Narendra Modi-led Centre. Even so, Governor Ravi stands out in the dismal list of governors who have courted controversy for displaying a grave misunderstanding of their constitutional position and role. Even before the attempted dismissal of the minister, Governor Ravi had made news for the wrong reasons in Tamil Nadu. In January, he became the first governor in the state to skip portions of the text of his address to the assembly, which is, by convention, the government’s statement of intent. When the chief minister objected, he left the House in a huff. At a public event the same month, he suggested that Tamizhagam is a more appropriate name for Tamil Nadu — a proposal he had to hastily walk back, after it provoked outrage across the political spectrum, including in the ranks of the state BJP. In a state born of a movement of linguistic subnationalism, and in which Tamil subnationalism is now at ease with Indian nationalism and the federal compact, Governor Ravi’s tone-deafness has threatened to stoke spectres buried longago.

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Before becoming Tamil Nadu governor, Ravi, who as a police officer had a long stint in the Intelligence Bureau, served as Nagaland governor, where he played a role in negotiating a peace accord with the NSCN-IM. That CV should have given him a keen sense of the system, its constituent parts, and the lines between them — it hasn’t. This Governor, clearly, refuses to learn from his mistakes. The Centre needs to rethink his continuance in office as he further frays the Centre-state federal fabric and sets all the wrong precedents.