S.M. Street (Sweetmeat Street) in Kozhikode gets its name from the umpteen shops on it that sell the multi-hued Kozhikode halwa, the region’s famed delicacy. On December 18, the street had a surprise pedestrian who came not to buy sweets but to score a political brownie. The governor of Kerala, Arif Mohammed Khan, walked about 200 metres through the crowded street for nearly an hour hugging shoppers, kissing babies, savouring halwa and inviting onlookers to take selfies with him. The 72-year-old governor’s impromptu saunter through Sweetmeat Street sent his security haywire and soured his relations with the Left Democratic Front government further.
Khan’s roadshow was the latest in his several encounters with the government since taking over as the governor of the state in September 2019. The stand-off has now reached a breaking point with the chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan, writing to the prime minister, Narendra Modi, and the president, Droupadi Murmu, on December 21, alleging that Khan was not fulfilling his constitutional duties and was violating protocol. The hostility between the state’s highest functionaries was publicly visible on December 29 at the swearing-in of the two new ministers at the Raj Bhavan. Despite sitting on adjacent chairs, the governor and chief minister neither greeted nor looked at each other. The chief minister and most other ministers also left without attending the customary post-ceremony tea hosted by the governor. The governor has not been invited to this year’s Christmas-New Year banquet being hosted by the chief minister on January 3.
The latest round of the clash that literally hit the streets was triggered when the Students Federation of India activists tried to block Khan’s car. This was to protest against Khan’s reconstitution of the University of Kerala’s senate as the chancellor of all state universities on December 2. Khan rejected all but two of the 17 names submitted by the university to be nominated by him to the senate and inducted persons associated with the Bharatiya Janata Party. This would ensure, for the first time, the BJP’s representation in the 11-member syndicate, which is the university’s supreme decision-making body and is elected from within the senate.
Two weeks earlier, Khan had reconstituted Calicut University’s senate, once again, bypassing the list submitted by the university. Of the 16 persons Khan nominated, nine were from the BJP and the rest from other parties. In October 2022, the Kerala High Court had issued interim orders preventing Khan from appointing new members to the UoK’s senate to replace those whom he had removed. Until now, all the nominated members used to be aligned with the ruling parties and their names were cleared by the chancellor without any change.
The UoK’s senate reconstitution came two days after Khan had a major win against the state government in the Supreme Court. On November 30, the apex court set aside the reappointment of the historian, Gopinath Ravindran, as the vice chancellor of Kannur University. Khan had informed the court that he had reappointed Ravindran under pressure from the state government and the chief minister. Khan also called Ravindran a criminal and the historian, Irfan Habib, a goonda for trying to block his speech at the Indian History Congress held at Kannur University in 2019.
The court order was some consolation for Khan, who had had a major setback in his ongoing war with the state government from the apex court on the previous day in another case. A bench headed by the Chief Justice of India, D.Y. Chandrachud, blasted Khan for sitting on eight bills passed by the state legislature for over two years.
Reconstitution of the senate led the SFI to launch an agitation against Khan’s attempts to ‘saffronise’ the university. On December 11, SFI activists tried blocking Khan’s motorcade on the streets of Thiruvananthapuram on the way to the airport. When the motorcade slowed down, the black flag-waving protestors hit the vehicle. Soon, the enraged governor asked his chauffeur to stop the car and stepped out on to the street in full glare of TV cameras. Khan shouted at the protestors, dared them to come near him and, while they dispersed, called them cowardly criminals. He then faced the news cameras and unleashed a fusillade against the chief minister, Pinarayi Vijayan. “The bloody criminals banged on my car. Will the police allow them to approach and hit CM’s car? CM is hatching this conspiracy to harm me physically. I cannot enable goons to rule the roads. When the CM is party to this conspiracy, what can the police do?”
Two days later, the Kerala High Court temporarily stayed his four nominations to the UoK senate under the quota for students with outstanding abilities. This was the result of a petition filed by two students who were on the university’s list of nominees and claimed that they had better qualifications than those nominated by the governor. The quota was reserved for students who excelled in humanities, sciences, arts, and sports.
The SFI soon intensified the stir and stated that the governor would not be allowed to enter any university in Kerala. Khan took up the challenge and decided to stay in the guest house on the Calicut University campus, changing his original plan of staying in a government guest house when he was in Kozhikode on December 17 to attend a wedding. SFI activists held a blockade in the campus on the day and hoisted banners with slogans like ‘Sanghi governor go back’. By the time Khan arrived in the evening, the protestors were removed by the police. A furious Khan admonished the police officers who were present and demanded that the police superintendent remove all the banners against him. “Will you allow these banners if they had been against the Chief Minister?” he screamed.
The next day, an unusual press release was issued by the governor’s office: “Honourable Governor Arif Mohammed Khan has taken serious note of the action of the State Police, on the direction of the Chief Minister, in placing posters defamatory to the Governor in the campus of Calicut University... Honourable Governor feels that this cannot happen without the direction of the Chief Minister and that this clearly is the beginning of the collapse of the constitutional machinery in the state.” Khan’s roadshow followed this to demonstrate that he did not need the state police’s security support and that, except for the Communist Party of India (Marxist), everyone in Kerala loved him.
Vijayan responded by accusing Khan of “deliberately trying to destroy peace” in the state by making provocative statements, calling students criminals and so on. He also said that Khan’s roaming the streets of Kozhikode in violation of protocol proved law and order in Kerala was intact. “Very few places in the country can offer such a safe and comfortable ambience to a person like Khan,” he sniped. Some CPI(M) leaders even said that Khan needed psychological treatment.
The New Year certainly looks set to get only stormier for the relations between the government and the governor.
M.G. Radhakrishnan, a senior journalist based in Thiruvananthapuram, has worked with various print and electronic media organisations
