New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday (February 15) said that the “governor should not enter [the] political arena”. The court was hearing a case relating to the recent political crisis in Maharashtra which led to the fall of the Uddhav Thackeray government, after a faction of Shiv Sena MLAs led by Eknath Shinde withdrew their support.
Speaking on behalf of the Maharashtra governor, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta said, according to LiveLaw, “We don’t have a two party system. India is multi party democracy. Multi party democracy means we are in the era of alliances. There are two types of alliances – pre poll alliance, post poll alliance. Post poll is usually an opportunistic alliance to complete the numbers but pre poll alliance is a principled alliance. There was a pre-poll alliance between two political parties – BJP and Shiv Sena. As Kihoto explains, when you go before the voter, you don’t go as an individual candidate but as a representative representing a political ideology, a representative who will go and say, this is our shared belief, our shared agenda. The voter doesn’t vote for individuals but for the ideology or the political philosophy that the party projects. We hear the word ‘horse trading’. Here, leader of stable (Uddhav Thackeray) formed government with those against whom they contested the election (Congress and NCP) and a negative vote was given by the electorate against a particular party.”
To this, Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud said statements like this should not be coming from the governor’s office. “How can Governor be heard to say all this? On the formation of government, how can the Governor say this? When they form a government, governor is asked to give a trust vote…We are only saying Governor should not enter political arena,” he said.
The bench also included Justice M.R. Shah, Justice Krishna Murari, Justice Hima Kohli and Justice P.S. Narasimha. According to The Tribune, the judges said that this case and the constitutional questions arising from it have “very serious” ramifications for the polity.
“It’s a tough constitutional issue to answer for this reason because the consequences of both positions have serious ramifications on the polity. If you take Nabam Rebia (2016 SC judgement) position, as we have seen in Maharashtra- it allows the free flow of human capital from one political party to another,” the bench said.
“On the other end is that even if the leader of the political party has lost his flock, he can hold it down. So, adopting it would mean ensuring a political status quo though the leader has effectively lost his or her leadership over a group of legislators if we go against Nabam Rebia. Whichever way you accept, both ends of the political spectrum have very serious consequences. Both are not desirable,” it continued.
In the Nabam Rebia case, a five-judge Constitution bench held in 2016 that the assembly speaker cannot proceed with a plea for disqualification of MLAs if a prior notice seeking removal of the speaker was pending with the House. This case is relevant because a similar situation had occurred in Maharashtra – the Thackeray faction had sought the disqualification of Shinde-supporting MLAs even while a notice (from the Shinde group) for the removal of assembly deputy speaker Narhari Sitaram Zirwal was pending.