Hon'ble Jagdeep Dhankhar at the Kolkata Raj Bhavan, so far, had the distinction of being the most active licentiate till his counterpart in the Mumbai Raj Bhavan decided last week to cross all limits of gubernatorial propriety. Maharashtra Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari's by-now famous letter to Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray, demanding re-opening of the places of worship to the devotees across Maharashtra, is a brilliant but thoroughly unnerving innovation in a Governor's bag of tricks of over-reach. Various Raj Bhavans, of course, have become embroiled in extremely unsavoury controversies over the decade, partly because the Constitution of India does allow a certain discretion to the Governor. And a discretion invariably does get abused. The framers of the Constitution had definitely disfavoured the idea of an elected Governor because they were unambiguously clear that political power would only be vested with the Council of Ministers, headed by a Chief Minister yet, they were not inclined to put in a formal Instrument of Instructions for the Governors and were content to believe that political decencies and correctness would be observed both by the Governor and the Chief Minister. As the distinguished constitutional expert, Nani A. Palkhivala, saw it, the Constitution intended that the Governor should be the instrument to maintain the fundamental equilibrium of the people of the State and to ensure that the mandates of the Constitution are respected in the State. The assumption, of course, was that those appointed to a Raj Bhavan would be endowed with a buddhi which sets apart a statesman from a politician. In the post-Nehruvian era, as our politics became rough and our politicians rougher, that buddhi eluded most Governors. As an appointee of the Union Government, the Governors have, predictably enough, been all too prone to do the bidding of the ruling party at the Centre. Inevitably the discretion be it choosing a Chief Minister, or requiring a Chief Minister to prove his/her majority, or dismissing a Chief Minister, dissolving the legislature, recommending President's Rule came to be tainted with partisan political considerations. More often than not, the gubernatorial discretion was abused, sometimes absurdly, even whimsically.