Patil plumbs a new low

Author: Editorial
Publication; Free Press Journal
Date: November 1, 2004

What use is a gentleman Prime Minister if he cannot ensure that the Government he heads follows certain constitutional and political norms? The manner in which the Governors have been dismissed by the UPA government underlines a scant respect both for the Constitution and healthy precedents in this regard. Shivraj Patil, that Raymond-donning dimwit who occupies the chair once occupied by Sardar Patel, to whom goes the credit of having unified India, rigged up a rather silly excuse to dismiss the Tamil Nadu Governor P. S. Rammohan Rao, the other day citing that he had not hosted a tea party on the Chennai Raj Bhavan lawns this 15th August. What a fall, my countrymen! If that was the only crime of Rao for which he must forfeit his remaining term in the Raj Bhawan, Patil ought to have been packed off soon after he was thrust into that office by Sonia Gandhi for genuine crimes against the people of India, which resulted in the entire North-East, including Manipur, bleeding for weeks on end. Never before had such a lightweight, such clueless politician occupied the corner office in the North Block.

To protest that the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa had surreptitiously taped the telephonic conversation the Great Helmsman in the Home Ministry had with her is to miss the point. Which is that the centre cannot ride roughshod over the principles and spirit of federalism and then protest when a chief minister facing its onslaught tries to defend her turn with whatever means available to her in order to ensure that Raj Bhawan is not turned into the headquarters of the opposition to her regime. The taped version of the Jaya-Patil conversation exposes the depravity of the Manmohan Singh Government. Okay, DMK wants to unsettle Jayalalithaa through its own agent in the Raj Bhawan, but is a gentleman prime minister supposed to be an active party to such a diabolic game plan which militates against all that is enshrined in the Constitution on the Centre-State relations.
 

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