Tony Malabar Hill’s Raj Bhavan is back in the news over the pending appointment of the 12 ‘elders’ that the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government has recommended to Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari for the upper house. Hearing a Public Interest Litigation (PIL), the Bombay High Court has made the governor’s secretary a respondent and sought to know the reasons for the delay. Will the Raj Bhavan secretariat respond to the court, and if it does, what will the response be? Recently, the Raj Bhavan told an RTI activist, Anil Galgali, that the names of the government nominees were not available with the information officer. Who has it if the secretariat doesn’t have it?  Who knows the current status of the appointment process? Speaking on behalf of the MVA, some ministers said that the governor would have no choice but to appoint the nominees, but their detractors in the BJP said it wasn’t binding for the governor to act upon the government’s recommendation as far as making appointments to the upper house was concerned. In this view, the forthcoming turn of events promises to be interesting, in terms of the Raj Bhavan’s next step.

The nomination politics started since 10 posts fell vacant on June 6 and two posts on June 15, 2020. Before it, the MVA had recommended the NCP’s seasoned leaders to fill two mid-term vacancies, but Koshyari did not approve of it. The tenure of the two seats would have ended on June 6, 2020. Meantime, to continue in the CM’s office six months after taking oath, Uddhav Thackeray needed to be a member of either house before May 27, 2020. On April 10, the Cabinet held a meeting under DCM Ajit Pawar and recommended to the Governor that Uddhav should be nominated to the Upper House in one of the two vacant posts. The governor didn’t respond. The government repeated its recommendation on April 27. Finally, the Centre intervened, and elections to the nine vacancies (other than governor’s quota) were conducted in ‘locked-down’ May 2020. Thackeray was elected before the deadline, but not before going through severe turbulence. It took another six months for the MVA to recommend the governor’s quota nominees to the 78-member house. The recommendations were put into cold storage. Fuelled by the delay in appointments and several other politics-loaded issues, the friction occurred frequently between the CMO and Raj Bhavan. The MVA has been very vocal against the governor, with the BJP being equally aggressive in defending the Raj Bhavan, which has maintained a studied silence. Will the silence be broken anytime soon? We will have to wait for the court’s next hearing.