Appointments with political implications

Governors are Constitutional authorities who represent the President in the states, but they often conduct themselves in the manner of political agents of the Union government.

So, the appointments and reshuffles of governors have political significance as they indicate the ruling party’s plans for the states, and for those being appointed governors. Late on Saturday, the President appointed six new governors and reshuffled three others.

The appointments did not violate the now-established rule that governors would only be picked from elderly ruling party politicians, or bureaucrats close to the ruling party. In the past, there used to be stray cases of an independent-minded person from other walks of life being made governor. That does not happen now. 

A senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader from Rajasthan, O P Mathur, has been appointed Governor of Sikkim. It could be interpreted that the party did not want him to be politically active in the state where a person much junior to him, Bhajan Lal Sharma, is chief minister.

In many cases, governorship is an equivalent of the BJP’s margdarshak mandal, serving as a retirement home. Former Union minister Santosh Gangwar, who will go to Jharkhand, is a senior politician being accommodated in a non-political role. There is another class of appointments — made as rewards for services rendered.

The appointment of former IAS officer K Kailashnathan, a close aide of Narendra Modi when he was the chief minister of Gujarat, as the Lt-Governor of Puducherry falls in that category. There are also convenience postings like the shifting of Gulab Chand Kataria from Assam to Punjab, to a state closer to his home state of Rajasthan, and promotions like the shifting of C P Radhakrishnan from Jharkhand to the bigger state of Maharashtra. It should be noted that Manipur has no full-fledged governor now, and we have new governors in Maharashtra and Jharkhand where elections are to be held soon.

While varied considerations have gone into the appointments, one demand on the governors could be that they make matters difficult for the elected governments if they ate ruled by the opposition.

Some governors do not limit themselves to the duties expected of them, but harass state governments, obstruct their work, and do the Centre’s political bidding, violating not only their Constitutional mandate but also their commitment to norms of rational and institutional conduct.

They put a severe strain on federal relations. Since the Constitution does not prescribe any eligibility criteria for the position, the government can appoint anybody as a governor.
But many of them do not care for the conduct the Constitution expects of them, and the government does not want them to either.