Bengaluru : The Governor, Vajubhai Vala, a close friend of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, spent most of his time consulting legal experts and at the end of the day, found two strong opinions emerging. One said that he is bound to invite the largest single party to form a government. If that party fails to muster support, he can than give a chance to the second largest party or a post poll combine.
The second opinion flows, ironically, directly from the BJP-led NDA’s courtroom victory in the Bihar President’s rule case in 2006. In this case, the constitution bench of the Supreme Court had ruled that the governor has no option before him but to invite any party or alliance, either prepoll or post-poll, to form the government once he was satisfied that it commanded majority support in the assembly.
But the operative part is that the governor must be satisfied and this is a subjective clause.
In the Bihar case, the apex court had castigated governor Buta Singh for recommending dissolution of the Bihar assembly because he feared that the pre-poll alliance of JD(U) and BJP under the banner of NDA, which had secured 92 seats in the 243-member House, may break RJD (75 MLAs) and LJP (29 MLAs) in order to muster a majority.
Fine-tuning the landmark S R Bommai case of March1994, the full bench of the Supreme Court in 2006 had said, “There is nothing wrong in post-poll adjustments and when ideological similarity weighs with any political party to support another political party though there was no pre-poll alliance, there is nothing wrong in it.”
The Congress in Karnataka is, ironically, drawing sustenance from a case that the BJP had won and they had lost way back in 2006.
The Governor chose to go by the first legal opinion by inviting the leader of the single largest party.