Going beyond incidents and episodes, which are documented and commented upon feverishly by the two sides and also the local and national media, the continuing governor-government tussle in Tamil Nadu is mostly ideological, and not constitutional or even political. Whatever the situation that has presented itself as a matter of constitutional propriety and precedent flows only from such a construct, and the politics of it owes to the respective parties believing in and propagating such ideologies being in power respectively at the Centre and in the state.
The reasons for such a course are obvious. DMK chief minister MK Stalin is heading an elected majority government. It is unlikely that the BJP ruling the Centre could hope to effect defections across the board, to be able to install a ‘friendlier’ government in the Dravidian state, as it could do elsewhere in the country. If anything, camp-changes in the state have mostly been as parties, and not of individuals in large numbers to make it happen.
The DMK seems clear that it would stick to the Congress-led alliance at the national level as it has more ‘shareable votes’ for the party than whatever ‘transferrable votes’ that the BJP may have — which goes to the rival AIADMK and not to the DMK whenever they had been in alliance in the past. The BJP hopes to make a dent, cashing in on the unsettled faction feud in the AIADMK but such hopes were already dashed in the 2019 and 2021 elections, which followed the successive deaths of AIADMK chief minister J Jayalalithaa and arch-rival Muthuvel Karunanidhi.
Double-barrel gun
It does not mean that the BJP national leadership or the government of prime minister Narendra Modi is behind it all. But definitely, governor Ravi and state BJP president K Annamalai, a middle-aged Karnataka cadre officer who quit the IPS to enter big-ticket politics in native Tamil Nadu, are being seen as functioning like a double-barrel gun, to embarrass/harass the state’s ‘Dravidian polity’ in general and the ruling DMK in particular. If it hurts the AIADMK ally with its own Dravidian past and presence, so be it.
The difference is this. What Annamalai does is pure politics, and is acceptable. In the melee, what he gives, he keeps getting back in full measure. The latest is the controversy over his ‘Rafale’ wrist-watch, a paid-for (euro 3,500), limited edition (500 pieces) collector’s item of the French manufacturer of the fighter aircraft, which reportedly sold out in 2015, and for which Annamalai claimed he had a bill dated May 2021. Controversial DMK electricity and excise minister Senthil Balaji, against whom Annamalai had levied corruption charges in the first half of last year, was hitting back in his own way, so to say.
The same cannot be said about the governor-government row. It has constitutional implications that could cut either way if allowed to linger and rot further, and has the potential to stall the state government’s normal functions after a point. Already, the state government and the ruling party have accused the governor of sitting on 20 legislative bills, resolutions and executive decisions requiring his clearance.
Controversial, contestable
The controversial and contestable assembly legislation seeking/granting NEET exemption for the state from the central legislation, caused by a Supreme Court verdict, was only one of them. It is now lying before the President (read: the Centre) for assent, which is however not coming through.
The more recent is a bill, passed by the state assembly, to ban ‘online rummy’ and other games that have led to not-so-infrequent suicides in the state (as elsewhere?) over accumulated losses and massive debts. The governor had promulgated an ordinance, recommended by the state cabinet, but when it came to a formal bill, cleared by the state assembly almost unanimously, he delayed assent.
The governor is said to be evaluating the high court’s observations while striking down an ordinance on the subject earlier brought out by the erstwhile AIADMK government of then chief minister Edappadi K Palaniswami. The state government claims that both the new ordinance and the bill have addressed the issues flagged by the high court, but there is no response from the Raj Bhavan in Chennai.
In between, the social media reported rumours of some online game site owners meeting governor Ravi in the Raj Bhavan, reportedly at his instance, and from whom he had sought clarifications for his doubts. The Raj Bhavan acknowledged the meeting.
Yet, this is possibly the first time that a governor, or even the President, was calling in private parties that are aggrieved or targeted, seeking their opinion on what essentially was an initiative of the popular government. It was the kind of job that the Constitution had assigned to the higher judiciary in the country.
What’s in a name?
Two of the latest controversies involving the governor came up in quick succession and in that the latter ended up overshadowing the former, but only after all sides had said their words. It began with governor Ravi addressing a Raj Bhavan function to facilitate state participants in the Centre’s ‘Kasi Tamil Sangamam’, inaugurated by Prime Minister Modi a month earlier.
Speaking at the function, the governor implied that the name ‘Tamil Nadu’ had a separatist intent and content to it, and should be replaced with the phrase ‘Tamizhagam’, instead. Subsequently, the Raj Bhavan’s invite for celebrating the annual harvest festival, Pongal, falling on January 15, and standing in the name of Ravi and his wife, referred to him only as the ‘governor of Tamizhagam’.
It is anybody’s guess if the Raj Bhavan flouted well-established norms and the constitutional intent, as ‘Tamil Nadu’ and not ‘Tamizhagam’ is the name given under Schedule 1. Going beyond it, the name ‘Tamil Nadu’ has a lot of sentiments for the common man, not stopping with the Dravidian polity, whose leader CN Annadurai, as chief minister, made the name-change the first order of his government after coming to power in the historic elections of 1967.
During the rule of Congress chief minister K Kamaraj, Sankaralinga Nadar or Sangaralinganar, a fellow nationalist and freedom fighter but also a Tamil Nadu statehood activist, fasted unto death in 1956, demanding the change-over from what still was the post-Independence Madras State. This was at the height of multiple protests over demarcated areas for the residual Tamil-speaking Madras State with the Linguistic Reorganisation of States that year.
The core issue had its origins in the creation of a separate Andhra Pradesh — since bifurcated, with the birth of Telangana — after ‘Poti’ Sriramulu fasted to death as far back as 1952. It is not unlikely that the current controversy could re-lit the embers over past issues, which included the Telugus’ demand for Madras city, now Chennai, and the Tamils wanting the pilgrim centres of Tirupati and Tiruttani. Of the two, they got only Tiruttani, one of the six acknowledged abodes of ‘Tamil god’ Murugan, or Subramanian or Karthikeya, much later, in 1960.
Greater assimilation
In historic terms, Tamil Nadu or ancient Tamizhagam was splintered into Chera, Chola, Pandya and Pallava kingdoms with very many principalities attached to them or independent of them. They were invariably at war with each other or one another, and not united or unified, in political terms as different from a common cultural identity.
Even the DMK, whose ‘separatist’ past the RSS-Hindutva forces continue to target, as if they are beating a dead horse, and to which governor Ravi too was alluding, found a common identity in the nation’s constitutional scheme with its electoral participation, beginning 1957 and assuming elected office ten years later. The name-change that year should thus be seen as symbolising greater assimilation or integration of the DMK in the national mainstream, and not against it, at least, not any more.
Hits and misses
On one of the multiple places where governor Ravi had skipped, or added, to the official address to the state assembly, cleared by the cabinet and also pre-corrected by him, the Raj Bhavan later explained that it owed to referring to the ‘government of India’ as the ‘union of India’. While it is a provocative practice introduced by the Stalin government since the assumption of office in May 2021 whereas Ravi took over as governor only in September, he has had no problem in the matter until now.
The Raj Bhavan statement claimed that the Tamil term ‘onriyum’, meaning ‘union’ referred to, was used mainly in the context of panchayat-level institutions, and to apply the same terminology to the sovereign was not on. Meaning ‘union’, the linguistic application is the same for panchayat union and the union of India — panchayathu onrriyam or onriya arasu — and the issue of sovereignty does not actually arise, however.
Another one of the governor’s ‘hits-and-misses’ related to the suo motu including the names of Swami Vivekananda and Tamil poet and freedom-fighter Subramania Bharati, and dropping those of Dravidian ideologue Periyar EVR, ‘father of the Constitution’, Dr BR Ambedkar, and three late chief ministers, Annadurai, Karunanidhi, both of the DMK, and K Kamaraj, the Congress leader who introduced free school education and free mid-day meals for school children.
The state government sources indicated that they would not have had problems including new names that the governor cited, but do not know why he did not make those suggestions when the draft was sent to him. According to state BJP insiders, the governor dropping Ambedkar’s name from the assembly reference may have hurt them, as they were getting some vibes from the state’s Dalit community, though they were yet to turn as votes.
It is ‘omissions’ such as this that have convinced anti-BJP groups in the state to conclude that the governor’s was a larger RSS-centric Hindutva agenda as different from the political priorities of the ruling BJP at the Centre. According to them, this is also why they were all peeved at the governor dropping the reference to the ‘Dravidian model’ of government, again a coinage of chief minister Stalin.
Hindu revivalism
Subsequent to the assembly spat, which included chief minister Stalin moving a motion to retain only the printed version of the address for the consideration of the house and governor Ravi walking out in a huff, the latter made one more of his controversial public statements centred on Hinduism/Hindutva. Using terms often identified with the RSS and reiterating his belief in the matter, governor Ravi said at the annual Thyagaraja Aradhana in Thiruvaiyaru that “Tamizhagam contributed to the spread of Sanatana Dharma to the whole of Bharat”.
There was/is a difference. The Tamils’ contribution to the revival of Hinduism in the second half of the first millennia was mostly in Tamil, where Shaivite and Vaishnavite saint-poets took the message to every village and town across the Tamil-speaking world, including neighbouring Sri Lanka. The prefix ‘Thiru’ attached to place names, including Thiruvaiyaru, dates back to a thousand years or more, indicating the minimum age of those places, particularly the local temples and deities, in whose praise saint-poets of the yore had composed poetry.
Even last year, there were at least two instances when the inter/intra discourse of Saivism stood independent of Hinduism (at least in the Tamil country). It is another matter that unlike often believed Lord Murugan, Siva and Vishnu are possibly worshipped more in the state than Rama and Krishna, as may be the case elsewhere in the country. Though Saint Thyagaraja (1767-1847) sang in praise of Lord Rama on the banks of the Cauvery, in Thiruvaiyaru, as governor Ravi pointed out, his compositions are all in Telugu, not Tamil, and has had only an elitist/Brahminical audience. Incidentally, Thyagaraja is possibly the only music composer in the world whose death anniversary is being observed with religious rituals and celebrations befitting gods.
Fictional character…
Lord Ram was at the centre of an assembly discourse a day after governor Ravi mentioned his name, when chief minister Stalin had to clarify that his reference to the god as a “fictional character” was only to underscore a point that faith was being used to implementation of the Sethusamudram project, after 50 per cent of the work had been completed. Only after that the house unanimously passed a resolution, calling upon the Centre to revive and implement the project, with support from the BJP and the AIADMK, which had objected to the chief minister’s reference.
The hurried resolution possibly owed to the Supreme Court setting January 16 for hearing BJP leader Subramanian Swamy’s PIL, seeking to declare ‘Ram Setu’, as a ’national heritage’, thus sealing the fate of the Sethusamudram project, on January 16. For long, the court is already seized of his petition, seeking to alter the project course, claiming that the planned alignment, if carried out, would damage the ‘Ram Setu’, mentioned in the ‘Ramayana’.
In comparison, Stalin’s father Karunanidhi, as chief minister, had taken what was unmistakably a dig at Lord Ram, asking if he was an engineer to have been able to lay a bridge to Sri Lanka, then Lanka. Yet, Stalin’s soft-pedalling of controversial religious beliefs, or non-beliefs, attributed to Periyar and Karunanidhi, does not however explain why he still desists from greeting people on Hindu festivities while doing so on the occasion of Christian and Muslim celebrations.
This is so after Stalin becoming increasingly open about his wife Durga Stalin having a separate puja room in their residence, and also worshipping in Hindu temples across the state and the country, and he himself reiterating that “we are not against religion or spiritualism, but are only against those who use it for discriminating the society!”
The writer is a Chennai-based policy analyst & political commentator. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the stand of this publication.
Read all the Latest Opinions here
Comments
0 comment