Manas Dasgupta
NEW DELHI, Apr 1: In a morale booster to the MK Stalin-led DMK government in Tamil Nadu, the governor RN Ravi within hours of the state Assembly adopting a resolution criticising his inaction, on Monday gave his assent to a bill seeking to ban online gambling and regulate online gaming, after holding it on for over six months.
A senior official at the State Secretariat said the Raj Bhavan had confirmed the Governor‘s giving assent to the bill.
The bill was first passed by the Tamil Nadu Legislative Assembly in October 2022, and sent to the governor for his assent. However, after holding it on all these months, the governor last month returned the bill to the government. A senior official had then said the reason cited for the return was that the State legislature had “no legislative competence” to frame the Bill. Following this, the Legislative Assembly, on March 23, 2023, re-adopted the bill and once again sent it to the Governor for his assent, which has now been approved.
According to the Statement of Objects and Reasons of the Bill, online gambling and online games are addictive in nature and increase the threat to public order manifold, while posing difficulties in terms of designing appropriate regulation. A committee headed by retired High Court Justice K. Chandru, constituted to advise the government had highlighted how gambling addiction could impact human lives — at the individual, family and societal levels.
The governor signed the bill shortly after the Stalin government called him out for not clearing the bill nearly six months since it was passed in the state assembly. The Governor last month returned the bill with queries, which the ruling DMK government saw as a confrontational stance. Ravi is yet to clear nearly 20 bills passed by the Tamil Nadu assembly, including bills seeking to remove him as the Chancellor of state universities.
Chief Minister MK Stalin in the resolution against the Governor on Monday requested the centre and President Droupadi Murmu to tell the Tamil Nadu Governor to clear the bills within a timeframe. The DMK and its allies have dubbed the Governor “an agent of the RSS and BJP.” He has been accused of acting as a “stumbling block to the state’s development.”
Last week, the Governor’s comment during an interaction with civil service aspirants that withholding a bill is a “decent language to mean rejected” was condemned by Stalin and his party.
Monday’s development is being seen as a morale booster for the ruling DMK and Chief Minister MK Stalin. “The Governor indefinitely withholding bills is against the welfare of the people of Tamil Nadu. His controversial comments belittle the dignity of the house and undermine the legislature’s supremacy in parliamentary democracy,” Stalin said.
Forty-one people have died by suicide across Tamil Nadu, reportedly after losing huge sums to online gambling and chance-based online games. Although a similar law was enacted by the previous AIADMK government on regulating online gaming, a court had scrapped it. The DMK, after it came to power, framed the bill based on the recommendations by the specially constituted committee under Justice Chandru.
The DMK government’s rocky ties with the Governor reflects similar dynamics in other states where the BJP is not in power. Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and his West Bengal counterpart Mamata Banerjee, too, have had huge showdowns with the Governors of their states, with the chief minister accusing the centre of influencing Governors to sabotage state government policies. Similar complaints have also come from Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Kerala and Andhra Pradesh where the non-BJP state governments face non-cooperation from the governors appointed by the BJP government at the centre.
