With the departure of Lt. Gen. SK Sinha (retd) as Governor of Assam following his transfer to J&K, the Guwahati Raj Bhawan is likely to lose its pre-eminence as a parallel power center. Whoever is named as Gen. Sinha's successor will find it difficult to follow the interventionist,and often meddlesome, style of functioning preferred by Sinha during his five year plus tenure as Assam's Governor.
Unlike several of his counterparts, Sinha was not content to live in the silent shadows of the stately Raj Bhawan. From the moment he joined as Governor in September 1997, Sinha had been in the thick of one controversy or the other, be it the denial of sanction to prosecute the then chief minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta in an alleged corruption case or the debatable report on influx from Bangladesh. Throughout his stay in Guwahati, Sinha, a former vice chief of Army Staff, gave enough indications that he loved to be in-charge, often riding rough-shod over the elected government in the state.
Not a man to follow conventions, Sinha gave frequent interviews and made public speeches like a politician. He often attended meetings of the Unified Command and tried to dictate strategies in dealing with insurgency. Sinha's appointment in September 1997 also came as a big boost to the Army which regards him as its own. Army officials had easier access to the Governor and frequently Sinha took inputs from them directly. Although under the Unified command structure, the 4 Corps Commander is supposed to act under the overall guidance of the chief secretary, very often Sinha directly interacted with topofficials.
Sinha's assertive style and penchant for direct intervention had led to charges of "President's rule by proxy,"during the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) rule under Prafulla Kumar Mahanta. With the current incumbent Tarun Gogoi,as well, Sinha had several run-ins. His views on the infiltration of Bangladeshis into Assam and the contentious Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunals) act, 1983 are in complete variance with the Congress stand leading to a well-publicised public spat between him and chief minister Gogoi.Sinha, who authrored a controversial report on the influx of illegal Bangladeshi migrants into Assam in November 1998, is a strong advocate of repealing the IM(DT) Act, a stand that the Congress is strongly opposed to.