ONE Governor in India is regarded as being ‘something’ – the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India. This is as it should be. He controls money which controls everything. He holds gold for the country. And gold holds fascination for India; always has. In history, sovereigns mint. In British mints, a gold coin called ‘sovereign’ has long been minted; still is. The RBI Governor is in a sense, sovereign. Ask anyone – by which I mean anyone with any interest in India’s fiscal fortunes – who the first Indian Governor of the RBI was and you will hit ‘gold’ – C.D. Deshmukh. Ask not just a bank-kind of Indian but any educated Indian a ‘quiz’ question: ‘Did any Governor of the RBI become Prime Minister of India?’ and you will get bullion in the esteemed name of Dr Manmohan Singh. All this, despite the fact that the extraordinary powers of the Governor of the RBI flow from ‘a mere Act’ – the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934.
Coming from a much loftier text, the Constitution of India, no less, Governors of India’s states are, on the other hand, regarded as being ‘virtually nothing’. This is not how it should be. For the Governor has not been created absent-mindedly, extravagantly or redundantly. He or she is there for a reason. In fact more than one.
‘Is that so?’ one may ask in barely repressed cynicism, which is understandable for the Governor of an Indian state is, under the terms of the Constitution, a symbol, ‘a mere symbol’. Here he or she only mirrors the President of India who in turn reflects the position of the British monarch. The office of Governor, derived as it is from the Constitution of India, is a constitutional office and that very nomenclature – ‘constitutional’ is seen as an allusion to its titular, symbolic nature.
No surprise, therefore, that in the conversations of the public, Governors occasion little interest and less comment. Except when they do something outrageous, which is rare. Or when they do something remarkable, which is rarer. Ask anyone – by which I mean anyone with elementary interest in modern India’s political history – who were the first Indians to be appointed to the office of Governor and you will hit rock. Not many will remember that Sarojini Naidu, no less, was the first Governor of the United Provinces (now Uttar Pradesh). ‘The Nightingale’ flew out too soon, alas, from her gilt cage after a mere eight months as Governor, a great loss to poetry and to public life for she would have been an outstanding exemplar of what a ‘Constitutional Governor’ is meant to be and can be.
Likewise, few will know that the first Indian to be appointed Governor of Assam, which then included all the segments that are now the Northeast’s seven states, was the extraordinary ICS officer, Sir Akbar Hydari. Son of the former Prime Minister of Hyderabad State bearing the same name, Sir Akbar signed a key accord with Naga separatists that could have changed the course of that area’s history had it not been spurned by stakeholders. Sir Akbar toured his province extensively, dying of a stroke in the dak bungalow of an obscure village in Manipur’s interior.
That the first Indian Governor of Bombay, which comprised the whole of today’s Maharashtra and Gujarat states, was the scion of Kapurthala’s royal family in its Christian branch, Kanwar Maharaj Singh, too, is not known, a real loss to public awareness for Maharaj Singh was a fascinating man, captaining as Governor, at the age of 72, the Bombay Governor’s XI against a touring Commonwealth XI in a match starting in November 1950, making him the oldest cricketer to make his first-class debut.
That C. Rajagopalachari was the first and only Indian to be Governor General of India is a general knowledge factoid. Not so the fact he was, prior to that, the first Indian to be Governor of West Bengal, by Mahatma Gandhi’s side in Calcutta, on independence day, 1947.
With this history, these beginnings, it is unfortunate that Governors of the day should be widely seen as no more than a costly redundancy. This is not what they were intended to be. This is what they have, unfortunately, become. And the blame does not lie entirely with them, the incumbents. The reason for the bored irritation they generate, as I see it, is the pelf that surrounds a Governor. Gubernatorial pelf is, essentially, an optical phenomenon. They are housed in some splendour – markedly above others in high office. Located in the choicest of venues, such as the fine promontory off Malabar Hill in Mumbai where the Arabian Sea’s waves lash its rocky margins or the Guindy forest in Chennai where chital and the now thinning-out black buck graze in somnolent detachment, Raj Bhavans are by any standards, enviable locations. And they do occasion a kind of shallow envy.
Substantial acreages surround a Raj Bhavan, sequestering them and also mystifying them. They have large state rooms and suites where wooden stairways and corniced niches hold secrets beyond fiction’s imaging or fact’s storage. But then they are not quite the fairytale palaces they appear on the outside. Old grace peeling away, new accoutrement step in, most noticeably in the shape of false ceilings to support air-conditioning, ‘modern’ trappings and wires, wires everywhere to back up ‘connectivity’. That, for Governors who do not need to connect all that much or fast seems odd but then there is such a thing as keeping up with the times.
This keeping up means really a half-way house adjustment between the old and the new, unconvincing, often unsuccessful. Some colonial-period Raj Bhavans still have, miraculously, period furniture and carpets, the value of which is not always appreciated by their occupants or their staff who seek to replace – ‘condemn’ or ‘write-off’ are the official phrases – the old pieces for having ‘outlived their utility’. Machine-made horrors then take their place to create a new optics, a new avatar in splendour. And the mystique continues.
This surrounds them like an aura, of which the biggest feature is being ‘His Excellency’, which sounds even grander in its formal Hindi form – Mahamahim and grandest in the informal Hindustani – Lat Sahib. The title is being slowly given up but is still around, in usage. ‘HE’ is escorted with clicking-heels smartness to events by uniformed officers from the armed forces or the Indian Police Service, waited on at the table by hush-soled liveried staff. Governors’ ‘movements’ are quite simply, processional. They do not ‘leave’, they ‘depart’. They do not ‘reach’, they ‘arrive’. They do not ‘meet’ visitors, they ‘grant audience’. The car they move in being escorted and backed by other vehicles, they move in ‘a convoy’.
‘And all this’, an observer might well say, ‘for someone who has virtually nothing to do, no powers, no duties, no responsibilities, no work except to appear at ceremonial events and then disappear into the sylvan hollow of his palace.’ The word ‘anachronism’ can then appear in the analysis to be tossed at Governors. With a prefix added for extra effect – ‘costly anachronism’. Another word then drifts into the narrative pairing the residence with the resident – ‘relic’. With a cruel paraphrasing – ‘relic in age and in function.’
This ‘state of affairs’ is facilely ascribed to ‘the kind of persons who are being appointed Governors’, with the corollary being ‘…the kind of political characters that are made Governors…’ A brief examination of the state of the Governor then becomes worthwhile, both as a governance matter and as one of pertinent political science and constitution-study interest.
Governors are meant to be politically unbiased. They are expected to act with impartiality. They may have had and, in fact, they have invariably had, political affiliations. Once sworn in, however, they are supposed to move above and beyond political affinities. But – and this where the rub is – one cannot get away from the fact that their very appointment is a political act. They are appointed by the President of India in but name. They are, in reality, identified and positioned in Raj Bhavans by the Prime Minister of the day. He may have been advised or assisted in the process by political advisers, colleagues, coalition partners, but the plain fact is that, from the time of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru down to present times, every Governor has been placed in a Raj Bhavan courtesy the Prime Minister.
And ironically enough the Prime Minister has done that after making a political assessment of the suitability of that person to hold the a-political office. So-and-so will be a good Governor, an impartial, judicious governor, a Constitution-protector, rising above all narrow politics, all regional politics, is a political assessment.
The first clutch of Governors, post-Independence, that Nehru picked included front-ranking Congress politicians, distinguished former Dewans, former princes. Their successors, in the 1950s and early 1960s were also distinguished though, it must be admitted, the coffee in the filter was now into its second brewing.
But what could Nehru have possibly done? The brown berry was no longer what it had been. If some of the early Indian Governors had to be persuaded to accept that office, now there were many, too many, who wanted to, even lobbied to get there. And then, by the time Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, P.V. Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh became Prime Minister, politics had become so over-populated with aspirants and so fraught with intrigue that Raj Bhavans became good ‘railway sidings’, where the politically inconvenient could be shunted and more pertinently, where a politically astute Governor – never mind that she was no Nightingale or he played no cricket – could be made to ‘keep a sharp eye’ on the state’s politics. And they also became places where those who had to be ‘rewarded’ were given five years of arboreal ease.
In other words, with time, the political appointment of Governors became a function in politics, not a function above politics as it was in Nehru’s time not that all his selections were un-flawed. Little wonder then, that the institution of Governor has suffered a trust deficit, never more starkly than when President’s Rule is recommended or when, in ‘hung result’ scene, a person is to be invited to form a government.
But fairness requires it to be said that not all post-Nehru appointments to Raj Bhavans have been ‘all politics’. True, politicians have dominated the scene but even with that being the case, one has to only see the larger picture of how Governors have functioned to realize that the constitutional purpose of Governors has managed to more than survive. T.N. Chaturvedi in Karnataka was an NDA appointee. But no one has accused him of having functioned with any bias. In fact no one saw in him any trace of politics. His term of office was quintessentially constitutional. The late Ram Kapse was an ardent member of the BJP but as Lieutenant Governor of the Andaman & Nicobar Islands during the time the 2006 tsunami hit, he was a turbine of energy – focused, calm, strong. I have mentioned these two examples because politically they belong to a ‘church’ entirely different from mine and yet I see in them exemplars of the ideal Governor.
Several other examples can be cited of Governors, contemporary to us, having served with diligence and quiet efficacy, fulfilling the constitutional purpose of their office. What is that purpose?
Here an allusion to Mahatma Gandhi would be in order. Change was in the air when Gandhi called on Bengal’s last British Governor, Burrows. The Attlee-appointee asked Gandhi on October 30, 1946, ‘What would you like me to do?’ The question was remarkable and historians would not fail to note it was coming from a direct successor-tenant in that house, of George Nathaniel Curzon who, 48 years earlier, had refused to see Gandhi. The answer Burrows received was terse: ‘Nothing, Your Excellency.’ Gandhi was indicating that, after the British declaration to quit, the governor’s position was to be that of a constitutional head.
Shriman Narayan Agarwal, a dedicated Gandhian and later a follower of Vinoba Bhave, gave Gandhi an occasion to express himself clearly on the subject. In November-December 1947, Agarwal cogitated on the office and role of governor as was being debated in the Constituent Assembly. He, of course, did not know then that he himself would, some two decades later, be Governor of Gujarat, when he wrote in an article that winter: ‘In my opinion there is no necessity for a Governor. The Chief Minister should be able to take his place and people’s money to the tune of Rs 5,500 per month for the sinecure of the Governor will be saved…’ Agarwal then went on to make some suggestions regarding the criteria and procedure for the appointment of governors – if indeed that position was to be retained under the new Constitution.
Responding to Agarwal’s comments, the Mahatma wrote in the Harijan of December 21, 1947: ‘…much as I would like to spare every pice of the public treasury, it would be bad economy to do away with provincial Governors and regard Chief Ministers as a perfect equivalent. Whilst I would resent much power of interference to be given to Governors, I do not think that they should be mere figure-heads. They should have enough power enabling them to influence ministerial policy for the better. In their detached position they would be able to see things in their proper perspective and thus prevent mistakes by their Cabinets. Theirs must be an all-pervasive moral influence in their provinces.’
So there we have Gandhi’s scarcely improvable concept of the role of a Governor in India: Governors must not interfere with the functioning of the elected ministry but must exert an ‘all-pervasive moral influence.’ Power is one thing, influence another. And that influence can be wielded, through any amount of or no pelf.
On May 8, 1949, Governor General Rajagopalachari convened a meeting of Governors which was also addressed by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Patel. The word ‘figurehead’ featured in what Rajaji said to the gathering of Governors. ‘You should not imagine that you are just figureheads and can do nothing… Our Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister do not hold that view. They want you to develop your influence for good and they expect you to find means for achieving it without friction and without prejudice to the march of democracy.’ The governors attending included industrialist Homi Mody, the veteran non-Congress political leader M.S. Aney, the free-thinking political leader and barrister Asaf Ali, the Congressman and lawyer K.N. Katju, the Maharaja of Bhavnagar, and ICS officer C.M. Trivedi. All of them took the ‘march of democracy’ forward. None of them saw their role as being bigger or less than what the Constitution had envisaged. They saw things, to borrow Gandhi’s phrase, ‘in the proper perspective.’
Speaking for myself, I can never forget an unintentional lesson on a Governor’s role that I received from an unknown correspondent in Kolkata. Meaning to give me a sense of gubernatorial grandeur, she managed to do exactly the opposite. She began her letter to me in a beautiful hand with the unforgettable words: ‘I am honoured, Sir, to be addressing a letter to the Figurehead of the State.’
Textbook right, that was.
Governors are figureheads in the sense in which the Mahatma explained to Governor Burrows. They are not to try to run the state. That way lies tragicomic failure. But they are not straw-filled scarecrows or brass escutcheons either. They wield an influence that goes beyond all optical value.
And that influence is wielded both on behalf of the Centre with the state and on behalf of the state with the Centre. And on behalf of the Constitution with the people of the state. This tripod of influence is the Governor’s sole justification and sole prerogative. In our times when there is a real danger of the Centre wanting to become supremacist and the states wanting to fight that tendency with all their federal might, it will be all too easy for Governors to become part of the ‘strong Centre’ thesis. They will, if they do that, be short-termist in the extreme for the Constitution of India has a different vision of India – an India that is held together by a democratic respect of difference and a republican regard for mutuality. That may be said to be the unsaleable, untransferable gold of the Union of India. Seventy and more years into being a Republic, the President of India and the Governors of the states of the Union are custodians of that bullion of a people’s trust, their gold standard.
