 Summary of this article
- Early this month, Rashtrapati Bhavan made an announcement of major gubernatorial-reshuffle involving many states and union territories, including Ladakh, Delhi, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Maharashtra, Telangana, Himachal Pradesh and Nagaland.
- The framers of the Indian Constitution, keeping in mind the Westminster inheritance, laid down the framework of the parliamentary system with the addition of federalism as a core organising principle and governors were to be formally heading the states, not the government.
- The federal landscape is overshadowed by centralisation impulses and the regional parties that asserted their own identities during the 1980s and 90s are somehow being pushed back.
Come elections in the states and we see the incumbent Union government becoming super-active. The recent reshuffle, or rather reset, of both the governors and key administrative officials of the election-bound states indicate an interventionist Union impacting in the state’s electoral politics. It also smacks of the instrumentality of the Union-executives’ overreach into the electorally significant state’s governance, essentially to maintain a vigil or perhaps to elicit feedback during political mobilisations in the state elections. |
