: Jagdeep Dhankhars roller-coaster journey to Veep nomination (IANS Backgrounder) #IndiaNEWS #National,IANS Special Series,Politics By Sumanta Ray Chaudhuri and Archana SharmaKolkata/Jaipur, July 16

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Jagdeep Dhankhars roller-coaster journey to Veep nomination (IANS Backgrounder) #IndiaNEWS #National ,IANS Special Series,Politics
By Sumanta Ray Chaudhuri and Archana SharmaKolkata/Jaipur, July 16 (IANS) When West Bengal Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar was announced as the surprise choice of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) for the office of the Vice President, political observers in Kolkata, where he has spent the last three years engaged in an almost daily sparring match with Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, started reading the signals being sent out by the BJP top brass.
By naming Dhankhar, who was little known outside Jaipur and the citys legal fraternity till July 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has in a way sounded the poll bugle for Rajasthan, where Assembly elections will be held next year, and Jats form a substantial vote bank.
Analysts in Kolkata also see in the move a message being sent out to Banerjee that despite her evident displeasure at the governors outbursts against her government, and the many representations made by Trinamool Congress MPs to Home Minister Amit Shah to have him removed from Raj Bhawan, Dhankar was being rewarded with a higher office.
On previous occasions, there had been tiffs between the governor and the West Bengal government, like when Gopalkrishna Gandhi and the then Left Front chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, differed over the police firing at Nandigram in East Midnapore district of West Bengal on March 14, 2007, which resulted in the death of 14 persons.
But never has the government-governor spat in West Bengal been a daily affair, as it happened during the tenure of Dhankhar. He was the first governor of the state in whose tenure the Raj Bhawan press conference became an almost daily affair, giving Dhankhar a platform to target the Trinamool dispensation.
The chief minister, in an unprecedented move, responded by blocking Dhankhar from her Twitter handle.
Dhankar is also the first governor to have expressed his displeasure with the state government via regular Twitter posts. What really irked the Trinamool Congress leadership was that Dhankhar had started firing similar salvos at official functions held in the West Bengal Assembly premises.
The Assembly Speaker, Biman Banerjee, once even said that if this continued, he would have to contemplate restricting the governors presence on the premises of the House, something that has never been heard of in a parliamentary democracy.
A seasoned lawyer, Dhankhar has maintained that he has just been using his power and rights as a governor given by the Constitution, which no other governor had cared to do before him.
In March this year, Dhankhar marked his presence in Jaipur as chief guest at a seminar on the Role of Governors and MLAs in Furtherance of Democracy, organised by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Associations Rajasthan chapter in the Assembly building.

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