Relations between Raj Bhavan and the government of West Bengal have come to a sorry pass and the latest developments in relation to the state’s varsities can only exacerbate the festering tension. At the mildest estimation, the powers and functions of the Governor/Chancellor have been clipped to the point of reducing the incumbent to a titular head of the universities, whose number has been increasing in recent years. Tuesday’s action happened when both the government and the Governor ought to have initiated an essay towards mending of fences in the interest of governance generally.

The rift between the two entities ~ Raj Bhavan and Nabanna ~ has progressively widened. The animus that has set in ever since Jagdeep Dhankar stepped into the rarefied portals of Raj Bhavan must end. Far from it. With a stroke of the bureaucratic pen, Mr Dhankar has been reduced to a sorry figure in the campuses across the state, in the net underlining the primacy of the higher education department. There is in fact an extreme exhibition of pique in the government’s decision to enable Senate/Court meetings in state-run universities without the concurrence of the Governor/ Chancellor, which was mandatory till Tuesday.

Nor for that matter will the Governor’s approval be necessary for selecting candidates for honorary degrees at the convocation. One could argue that this is the state’s (aka political) decision and quite totally meaningless will be the customary gubernatorial grandstanding. The CPI-M’s praxis, when in power, was not always dissimilar although it would be pertinent to recall that Governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi was not barred from visiting Singur at the peak of the movement against land acquisition. Not so, however, when Mr Dhankar wanted to visit Singur and Nandigram more than a decade after the ferment that propelled the Trinamul Congress to power. More recently, he was greeted with closed doors of the Vice-Chancellor and other worthies while on a visit to Calcutta University.

The new rules of engagement will also impact the functioning of Vice-Chancellors. Most particularly as the VCs have been directed to address “all communications” to the Secretary of the higher education department… and not the Governor- Chancellor. It will be hard not to wonder whom the VCs will report to. In terms of importance, the Secretary has been given more powers than the Chancellor as regards meetings of the Senate and the university Courts and the conferment of honorary degrees. Minister Partha Chatterjee’s statement that he had “never disrespected the chair of the Governor and would never do so in future” is neither here nor there.

The administration of varsities is only one of the symptoms of a deeper malaise ~ one where the incumbent Governor seeks to assert himself in new ways every day, while the state government appears just as determined to tell him how far it will let him do so. The strain is palpable.