New Delhi: Uttar Pradesh governor Banwari Lal Joshi Tuesday resigned following instruction from the Narendra Modi government to quit.
According to unconfirmed reports Assam governor J.B. Patnaik and his Karnataka counterpart Hansraj Bhardwaj have also handed over their resignations to President Pranab Mukherjee.
“No one asked me for it and I won’t resign. Meeting the president was a courtesy call,” Bhardwaj said after meeting President Mukherjee.
Rajasthan governor Margaret Alva also called on President Mukherjee and Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss her future while the West Bengal governor M.K. Narayanan is also expected to follow the suit.
It is understood that federal home secretary Anil Goswami had called up seven governors suggesting them to quit on their own following the change of government at the centre.
The seven governors asked to quit include Narayanan (West Bengal), Sheila Dikshit (Kerala), Margaret Alva (Rajasthan), Kamla Beniwal (Gujarat), B.L. Joshi (Uttar Pradesh), K. Sankaranarayanan (Maharashtra) and Devendra Konwar (Tripura).
The axe was expected to fall on all Congress party leaders appointed as state governors by the previous Manmohan Singh government soon after Narendra Modi-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) swept to power in the recent general elections.
The home ministry headed by Rajnath Singh initially had planned not to ask those who are about to retire in the next few months to quit along with former bureaucrats and army/police officers serving as governors.
Among the governors scheduled to retire soon include Bhardwaj who will retire on June 29 after completing his five year tenure, Patnaik will complete his in December. Beniwal on the other hand would complete her tenure as Gujarat governor on November 27.
The change was due to increasing pressure on the Modi government to accommodate some Bharatiya Janata Party veterans who were either denied nomination to contest the recent Lok Sabha elections or stand marginalised in the new set up.
The seven governors asked to quit are among the list of 12 whom the Modi government wants to quit.
The Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) set the trend in a way when it dismissed four BJP men serving as state governors after coming to power in 2004.
The Congress party, however, is in no mood to oblige the BJP. According to reports, one of the governors told the home secretary to give the instruction in writing.
Ironically, the then federal home minister Shivraj Patil, who had justified dismissals of Babu Parmanand (Haryana), Vishnu Kant Shastri (Uttar Pradesh), Kidar Nath Sahani (Goa) and Kailashpati Mishra (Gujarat) is also on the firing list, despite just seven months remaining before he completes his tenure as the Punjab governor in January next year.
Among those in a mood to defy the Modi government include Kerala governor Sheila Dikshit who was appointed to the post in March this year after she led the Congress party to a humiliating defeat in December assembly polls after ruling Delhi as its chief minister for 15 years.
She told a TV channel that she cannot react to rumours while her son Sandeep Dikshit, who represented East Delhi constituency in the Lok Sabha for a decade before tasting defeat last month criticised home secretary Goswami for calling up state governors.
“Who is the home secretary to call a governor? Governors are constitutional posts. There is a Supreme Court ruling that governors can’t be removed on whims and caprice,” Sandeep Dikshit, one of the spokespersons of the Congress party, said.
