The posts of state governors periodically assume great significance, which otherwise is a wastage of country’s meagre financial resources. With citizens and elected representatives knocking on the courts even for non-issues, the judiciary could itself have done what governors mostly do. Governors, as the appointees of the President and the monitors of constitutional propriety in the states, however, are mostly political appointees, that does not preclude them always to act neutrally.
The fractured mandate in Karnataka has no single party, nor any other pre-poll alliance partners attaining the numbers required to form the government. Parties who have stitched up a post-poll understanding is the other option for the governor to consider. BJP though the largest party with 104 seats have staked claim to form the government, with a confident Yeddyurappa stating that he would be able to prove his majority on the floor of the house within seven days. What could be happening in the period is anybody’s guess.
The governor is cloaked with discretionary powers, regardless of varying precedents set recently in Meghalaya, Manipur and Goa, where the largest parties missed being called to form the government, while on the contrary in Rajasthan and Maharashtra, though not having a simple majority, the largest parties were invited first.
A party that forms the government select their preferred speaker, never apolitical, as a matter of routine, who ensures passage of the confidence motion, either by barring a few opposition members on one other pretext or bulldozing the motion through. The courts are concerned with the law and rarely have interfered with the procedures or with the power of the speaker or the conduct of the assembly.
The governor, an ex-RSS member and an appointee of PM Modi may not disappoint BJP at this crucial hour and may invite BJP first to prove their majority. In the unlikely event of BJP losing out after the requested seven days, the governor could urge JDS and Congress, by which time the ruling clique could engineer defections and crossovers.
The next days would be interesting in the perspective of Karnataka politics!
Sampath Kumar
Intrépide voix
