surely seems to have enveloped the State of Andhra Pradesh pursuant to the 2 September helicopter crash which took the life of the popular chief minister with pleas for making his son the ruler espoused by powerful sections of his party. This is no wonder in a country used to despots and dynastic succession wars and rituals but is certainly awful and unfortunate for the progress of democracy in modern days. It has also generated an illusion of a constitutional crisis. However, the majestic Constitution of India never gave its citizens the fundamental right to vote even and so to think that it would have given their representatives a basic right to choose their own leader is stupidity simple. The Governor in a State is endowed with wide powers – more so than the President of India possesses vis-à-vis his ministers, not only to use his discretion in several circumstances, but also to choose not to be bound by the advice of his ministers. And there is nothing in the Constitution except the ordaining of ‘collective responsibility’ of the council of ministers to the house of the people or the legislative assembly as the case may be, and it would require the interpretational skill of uncommon judicial minds to infer it as requiring invariably the ‘confidence of the House’. Conventions, of course, there are that the ministry has to prove such confidence in it but it is the Governor who decides the time and place and even the need for the same. Moreover, conventions old can more easily be replaced by newer ones than the provisions of the constitution. As long as the incumbent chief minister, who is a senior, experienced and talented legislator, enjoys the confidence of the Governor, and more particularly of the ‘congress high command’, which term again sounds an element of despotism no doubt, there may not be any crisis of survival for his government. The ever stinging wails and curses of their own discontented representatives cannot be avoided though, but there are more urgent problems of health, finance and floods to be confronted than this turbulent struggle for succession.
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