A thaw in frosty relations between Kerala Governor Arif Muhammed Khan and the State government was in stark contrast to the flare-up in neighbouring Tamil Nadu when Khan’s counterpart RN Ravi reportedly carried his bitterness to the portals of the State Assembly to unroll a rare drama. 

In Kerala, the months-long verbal duel between Governor Khan and Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan appeared to subside with the former approving the return to cabinet of Saji Cherian, who was forced to resign in July for making allegedly disparaging comments on the Constitution and sparking a major controversy. 

Budget session looming

Speculations were rife that the Left Democratic Front Government may go to the extent of convening the Budget session of the Assembly without the Governor’s customary policy address. It reportedly sought to do this by merely ‘reconvening’ the seventh session which had not been ‘prorogued.’

The government intentionally delayed sending the file to the Governor that would have requested him to prorogue the session and, therefore, the House was kept in suspended animation. But it put paid to all speculations on Wednesday by deciding to request the Governor to formally prorogue the House. 

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Request to Governor

On Thursday, the cabinet made a formal request to the Governor to convene the eighth session of the 15th Legislative Assembly from January 23. Convention requires the Governor to read out the policy address handed over to him as it is, something the Tamil Nadu Governor chose to break on Monday.  

Governor Ravi has been airing political views for quite some time, to the discomfort of the DMK government. He even went to the extent of suggesting in the policy address that the state should not call itself ‘Tamil Nadu’ and that its politics ‘was regressive’ and chose to skip portions of the prepared text.

Unprecedented in TN

Chief Minister MK Stalin would have none of this and piloted a resolution in the House in the presence of the Governor to the effect that its archives would reflect only the prepared text. The resolution was adopted prompting the Governor to leave the House in an unprecedented turn of events. 

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It may have been the first time that a Governor in Tamil Nadu chose to deviate from the prepared text but definitely not the first in the country, sources aver. In 2020, in his address to the Kerala Assembly, Governor Khan himself paused to mention that he was only reading out the government’s opposition to the Citizenship Amendment Act, and that he did not agree with it. Similar instances have been reported from Tripura, West Bengal and Punjab earlier. 

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