How can home secretary ask a governor to resign: Supreme Court to government

NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Wednesday expressed serious displeasure over the alleged telephonic instructions by the Union home secretary to governors, who are the constitutional heads of states, to quit after the change of regime at the Centre in 2014.

Two petitions alleged that immediately after NDA came to power at the Centre, then home secretary Anil Goswami had asked then Uttarakhand governor Aziz Qureshi to resign while the former's private secretary had called the lieutenant governor of Puducherry, Virendra Kataria, to convey a similar message.

A constitution bench of Chief Justice T S Thakur and Justices F M I Kalifulla, A K Sikri, S A Bobde and R Banumathi asked the Centre how a bureaucrat could ask a constitutional post holder to quit without instruction from the government or the President under whose pleasure they discharge their functions.

"It is not for the home secretary to ask a governor to resign. These are serious issues. Is home secretary a mouthpiece of the government? Does he represent the will of the government? If not, then the officer should not have intervened in such a way. It is not acceptable," the bench said. It added that the level of interaction slid further when the home secretary's private secretary rang up the Puducherry LG.

The court had earlier sought the Centre's response on Qureshi's petition. On Wednesday, it agreed to hear Kataria's petition along with Qureshi's and asked the Centre to file its response in four weeks.

Quereshi and Kataria were sacked by the NDA government. Many other governors, appointed during the UPA regime, resigned after the NDA government's loud message - quit or get sacked - was allegedly communicated through the home secretary.

While most governors took the hint and resigned, accepting it to be a logical fallout of regime change at the Centre, Qureshi decided take on the Narendra Modi government and moved the SC questioning the home secretary's "audacity" to ring him up and seek his resignation.

Attorney general Mukul Rohatgi told the bench that Goswami, on being asked by the President to ascertain certain controversial remarks by Quereshi on rape, had called then Uttarakhand governor to seek his explanation. Qureshi had allegedly said "even God cannot stop rapes in UP".

The home secretary never asked Qureshi to resign, the AG said, and attempted to put the controversial issue to rest. But the bench turned down his plea saying the matter needed to be adjudicated on how a governor should be treated in such situations.