Governor

BJP in Karnataka manages to overcome the ruling of the Supreme Court regarding disqualifiction of MP’s

A couple of days back, there was a major judgment by the Supreme Court of India that could have shaken the Karnataka Chief Minister, BS Yeddyurappa. The Supreme Court held that the action taken by the Speaker of Karnataka, K.G. Bopaiah, in disqualifying 11 BJP legislators and 5 independent MLA’s was unconstitutional and devoid of logic. Further, the action taken by the Karnataka High Court which approved the actions of the speaker was also over-turned. In that sense, the Supreme Court has criticized the actions of both the Speaker and the High Court and brought back 16 MLA’s to the equation.
Given the way that the Governor HR Bhardwaj has acted in the past, he is another variable in the equation. His relation with the Chief Minister has not been cordial in any way and he has been accused of acting like an opposition in the state, with comments against the Chief Minister, his policies, and his minister. The Governor should feel gratified by this action of the Supreme Court, since it seems like the Court has done precisely what the Govldernor would have wanted; now, this should actually put the Chief Minister and the BJP under pressure, since the number game would have gone against the BJP now.
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The drama continues in Karnataka, Governor seems to lose support

The heading of this article seems to suggest that the Governor is the primary villain of the piece, but that is not entirely true. The Governor of the state of Karnataka, H R Bhardwaj, has behaved in a most inappropriate manner; over the past many months, he would comment on the internal state of the BJP, was picking a fight over ministers that he felt should be pushed out, and so on. But it is in the recent state of affairs over the dissidence in the BJP and the attempt to make the Government a minority Government, that the picture of the Governor has really got distorted. He first sent a letter to the Speaker instructing the Speaker not to make any changes in the legislature and claiming that he would have the ultimate responsibility to take a decision; and since the Speaker of any assembly would refuse any such letter, this missive was treated with contempt by the Speaker. Then, when the BJP Government managed to win the trust vote through a very controversial method (of disqualifying the dissident members of the BJP, and even more controversially, the independent members of the legislature), the Governor seemed to see red. He wound up sending a report to the Central Government that the state had seen a Constitutional breakdown and it was fit for President’s rule. However, even the Congress central Government did not see fit to consider the report of the Governor and instead decided to go in for such a notion (although the fact that the Congress Government did not have a majority in the Rajya Sabha could have something to do with this).
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