When Governor got anti-DMK remarks dropped from address

Tamil Nadu Assembly's Governor's address controversies and Governor P.S. Ramamohan Rao's editing of address to avoid conflict.

Over the past three years, the Tamil Nadu Assembly has witnessed unseemly developments during the customary Governor’s address that is delivered on the first day of the opening session of the year. The address is prepared by the government. Governor R.N. Ravi walked out of the House twice without reading out the text and he deviated from the text in 2023, leading to a showdown.

Against this backdrop, it would be worthwhile to examine how in the past, Governor P.S. Ramamohan Rao had ensured that adverse remarks against the Opposition DMK were removed from his address prepared by the AIADMK government headed by Jayalalithaa.

A former Director-General of Police of Andhra Pradesh, Mr. Rao recalls in his autobiography, Governorpet To Governor’s House: A Hick’s Odyssey, that even Chief Minister Jayalalithaa had agreed to his proposal to edit the controversial portion. This happened in February 2002 as soon as Jayalalithaa returned as the Chief Minister after winning in the by-election in Andipatti, an AIADMK stronghold. The seat was vacated by Thanga Tamilselvan (then in the AIADMK and now a DMK MP) to enable her to contest. She had earlier taken over the reins of the government in mid-2001 after the Assembly election, but was unseated by the Supreme Court in September 2001 on account of her conviction in the TANSI land deal cases. She contested in the byelection after the Madras High Court acquitted her. The interesting part is that the autobiography was released by Mr. Ravi at the Raj Bhavan last June.

Mr. Rao had assumed charge on January 18, 2002, when O. Panneerselvam, a Cabinet colleague of Jayalalithaa, was the Chief Minister. Mr. Rao recalls that the draft of the Governor’s address, in terms of Article 176 of the Constitution, was sent to him a day-and-a-half before the start of the session, and to his great discomfiture, the opening remarks constituted an intemperate indictment of the DMK for all its “sins of commission and omission” in the previous years. “If I had read out the address as proposed, I would have not only become at once persona non grata for the DMK but would have also invited adverse comment from every knowledgeable quarter,” he writes.

Though his secretary told him that the convention had left no choice for the Governor except to read the address, as sent by the Council of Ministers, he had initially thought of following the decision of West Bengal Governor Dharma Vira to skip the controversial portions.

“I vaguely remembered that, long ago, in the West Bengal Assembly, Dharma Vira, the then Governor, when confronted with a similar dilemma, chose to skip the controversial portions of the address. On careful reflection, it occurred to me that even if I were to exercise a similar option, it would not only displease the Government on the very first occasion, but the controversial portion of the address would still remain on record in the proceedings of the Assembly,” he writes.

Mr. Rao asked his secretary to ascertain from the Chief Minister, through her secretary, if he had any freedom to edit the draft. To his great relief, the answer came in the affirmative. “I then scored out all the controversial portions of the draft and substituted them with the simple observation: ‘After all the traumatic events of the last one year, I welcome Selvi Jayalalithaa as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu.’ She raised no objection to the amendment and thus saved me from what would have been a great personal embarrassment and a controversial start to my tenure,” he writes.