New Delhi: The Governors becoming collateral damage is not new to Indian politics. In 2004, after the Congress-led UPA-I came to power, the Centre had sacked four Governors appointed by the previous NDA government.
The Governors of Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Gujarat and Goa - Vishnu Kant Shastri, Babu Parmanand, Kailashpati Mishra and Kidarnath Sahni - were summarily packed off from Raj Bhavans, ostensibly because of their BJP affiliations.
It had led to a war of words between the UPA-I and NDA. The BJP sympathiser BP Singhal had to gone the Supreme Court challenging the removal of Governors by the Centre.
In 2010, a five judge constitution bench of the Supreme Court had severely criticised the UPA-1 government for removing these four Governors.
The reason given for the removal was that they were not in sync with the policies and ideologies of the UPA government - had sounded appropriate and politically correct, but it turned out to be legally untenable. The court held that if the reasons for removal were irrelevant, malafide or whimsical, they could invite judicial intervention.
Justice Raveendran, writing the unanimous 56-page judgment, said: "The Governor cannot be removed on the ground that he is out of sync with the policies and ideologies of the Union government or the party in power at the Centre. Nor can he be removed on the ground that the Union government has lost confidence in him".
The Attorney General in the previous government GE Vahanvati had defended the decision to summarily dismiss the governors saying in a democracy, political parties were formed on shared beliefs and they contest election with a declared agenda. "If a party which comes to power with a particular social and economic agenda, finds that a governor is out of sync with its policies, then it should be able to remove such a governor," he had argued.
The Congress now can't take on the BJP government on the issue of unceremonious removal of Governors as it did the same thing in 2004.
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