Letters: Time to take a step back

With reference to the editorial, "Restoring a government" (July 14), during the debate that took place in the Constituent Assembly on Article 356, B R Ambedkar, the then chairman of the Drafting Committee, did not altogether deny the possibility of the Article being abused or misused for political reasons. However, he was optimistic such a draconian provision would never be implemented and remain a dead letter.

Unfortunately, soon after Independence, several states found themselves in the throes of an artificial constitutional crisis, with the Centre exercising its hegemony over democratically elected state governments.

The Supreme Court, in its landmark Bommai judgement, observed unequivocally that Article 356 could be justified only when there is a breakdown of constitutional machinery and not administrative machinery. It, thus, stripped the proclamation issued under this Article of its immunity from judicial review and subsumed to itself the power to strike down the proclamation if it was found to be mala fide or based on wholly irrelevant or extraneous grounds.

The imposition of President's rule in a sensitive border state such as Arunachal Pradesh brought a discredited political pattern to light that involved dissidence within the ruling party, the Opposition colluding with the rebels and the state governor intervening in a partisan manner. The central government should have refrained from indulging in political misadventure by attempting to install a government either run or backed by defectors. But by not waiting for a judicial imprimatur for a floor test in state the Assembly, it only reinforced the impression that governors in non-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled states are serving as active agents to implement the Sangh Parivar's Hindutva agenda.

Now that the apex court has ruled that status quo ante as on December 15, 2015, be restored in Arunachal Pradesh, it is time the BJP stopped resorting to undemocratic ways to topple popularly elected state governments to achieve its agenda of a "Congress-mukt Bharat".

Shreyans Jain, New Delhi

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