State of the symbol
By M
J Akbar | India Today
Two
women almost became president of India, one in 1977 and the other in 1982. One
will be familiar only to dedicated political pedants. The second remains a
household name, even 28 years after her martyrdom. By 1982, Mrs Gandhi felt
exhausted: The punishing drama of power had been compounded by the despair of
personal tragedy. A "syndicate" of party heavyweights made her prime
minister in 1966 after Lal Bahadur Shastri's sudden death, on the assumption
that she would be a palliative for an increasingly disillusioned electorate and
compliant to their commands. The steel that kept her nerve steady was visible
only in 1969, when Mrs Gandhi used an election for President of India to split
the Congress and propel her rebel, V.V. Giri, to Rashtrapati Bhavan. In 1971,
she lifted her Congress to a magic pinnacle with a stunning victory; four years
later, she drove it into unprecedented depths by declaring an unwarranted
Emergency. Congress was erased from the electoral map of north, west and
east India
in 1977.
That
turned out to be only the middle of the story. She was back in office in
January 1980. The euphoria of this political miracle vanished when in 1980 her
young heir Sanjay Gandhi died in an air crash over Delhi. No burden is heavier
for a mother than a son's bier. It sapped her once indomitable spirit to the
point where she began to consider a form of semi-retirement. In 1982, as
another election for president neared, she turned to her young finance minister
and close confidant Pranab Mukherjee with a strange thought.
She
wanted to become president. Mukherjee was stunned. Why would a woman with
unchallenged power seek the damp ceremonies of Rashtrapati Bhavan? Mukherjee's
genius, however, lies not in asking questions, but in finding answers. As
instructed he checked with two seniors, R. Venkataraman and P.V. Narasimha Rao.
They squashed the suggestion. Their motives were not totally altruistic. They
were apprehensive that Mrs Gandhi would nominate Mukherjee as her replacement.
Mrs Gandhi stayed on. The multi-lingual intellectual Rao became frontrunner,
but Mrs Gandhi had other ideas. Much to the nation's surprise, and the horror
of his peers, she made home minister Giani Zail Singh president.
In
public perception, Zail Singh's principal claim to fame lay in his offer to
sweep Mrs Gandhi's room with a broom if asked. Since subservience is not the
best argument for upward mobility, a political camouflage was trotted out.
"First" is always a handy category. His nomination was rationalised
as a gesture towards Punjab, since Sikhs were already in ferment. Zail Singh's
real USP was a promise to be an obedient, trouble-free occupant of the palace.
Loyalty
can be a fragile asset. Zail Singh was president on the morning Mrs Gandhi was
assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984; by nightfall, Rajiv Gandhi had
become prime minister. Before dawn, Delhi, the capital of rumour, was
whispering that Zail Singh had been less than cooperative. In a more concrete
demonstration of suspicion, Rajiv Gandhi dropped his mother's favourite
minister, Pranab Mukherjee, from his Cabinet after the general elections of
December.
The
conflict between Rajiv Gandhi and Zail Singh strained their relationship beyond
constitutional elasticity. Zail Singh was soon telling anyone who would listen,
and many who would not, that he had the legal authority to dismiss Rajiv
Gandhi. He would take selected guests on a walk in the Mughal Gardens because
he was afraid his drawing room conversations were being taped by the
Intelligence Bureau. Rajiv Gandhi's aides responded with threats of
impeachment. The rhetoric on both sides possibly exceeded practical capability,
but the tension was palpable and dangerous. Zail Singh slid into the larger
script of confrontation over pay-offs in the Bofors gun deal.
Mrs
Sonia Gandhi, as wife of the young prime minister, took away a lesson from that
searing experience which she has not forgotten: That trust is a scaleable
commodity in politics. In theory a president is above politics; in practice, he
is what he chooses to be.
There
shall be a President of India. Seven simple words define the highest office in
the Republic of India. Nothing more; the Constitution is silent on the
executive penumbra of the position. The next Article, 53, of the Constitution,
shifts to the executive power of the Union. As symbol of the state, the
president is vested with supreme command of the armed forces, but with the
qualification that "the exercise thereof shall be regulated by law".
The eminent constitutional expert, Ram Jethmalani, pins the anomaly that was
redressed: "If the relevant Article (53) did not have important
catchwords, the president of India would have been more powerful than any
hereditary and absolute King. Both parts of the Article however employ words
which render the vesting of these enormous powers nothing more than formal and
ceremonial. Article 56(b) reaffirms the supremacy of Parliament, as "the
President may, for violation of the Constitution, be removed from office by
impeachment (by Parliament) in the manner provided in Article 61."
Jawaharlal
Nehru held, in essence, that the president was akin to the British monarch,
whose limits were defined by convention rather than statute. It was not merely
a matter of blindly imitating the British template; the written clause,
particularly in the grant of rights, can be more amenable to exploitation than
an unwritten one. India's presidents, so far, have respected the division of
responsibility; even Zail Singh did not dare go beyond the private innuendo. In
any case, Article 74 binds the president to act only on the advice of the
Council of Ministers, the directly elected heart of government.
Conflict
arose even when India was governed by giants nurtured in the freedom movement.
Dr Rajendra Prasad, Gandhiji's host at Patna en route to Champaran in 1916,
became India's first president after we shook off our Dominion status and
became a Republic in 1950. Prasad was an enthusiastic supporter of a
controversial public-private project to rebuild the Somnath temple, famously
destroyed by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1026 ad. Prime Minister Nehru took a classic
view of the secular state, and wrote to chief ministers on May 2, 1951:
"Government of India as such has nothing to do with it. While it is easy
to understand a certain measure of public support to this venture we have to
remember that we must not do anything which comes in the way of our State being
secular. That is the basis of our Constitution..."
Prasad,
and stalwarts like Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, thought that the best way to lance
emotive issues, residuals of a complicated history, was to address majority
demands early, when reactions could be either absorbed or brushed aside, or
they would inflate into huge communal crises later, as indeed the dispute over
Babri mosque did. Prasad presided over the opening ceremony of Somnath in 1951,
and Nehru did nothing. The difference was not worth a confrontation.
Their
second dispute arose over what Nehru described, in an interview to Taya Zinkin,
correspondent of the Manchester Guardian in 1962, as the greatest achievement
of his life, the Hindu Code Bill, passed in 1956, which amended and codified
Hindu law to ensure gender equality. Polygamy, for instance, was permissible
for Hindus till then. Prasad resisted reform, but he could do nothing against
Nehru and the will of Parliament. But these were differences over parallel
visions of India, not petty and acrimonious tussles for control.
Ironically,
collusion between prime minister and president can be as dangerous as conflict.
A president's power lies in moral authority, which demands the independence of
a judge and sagacity of a wide-awake nationalist. He is guardian of the most
precious asset in a democracy, the people's rights, as inscribed in the
Constitution. Any lapse is never forgiven by the voter or by history. A
perfectly decent president like Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed (August 1974 to February
1977), therefore, is not remembered for civility, but for the crass
subservience he displayed when, in June 1975, he signed without question Mrs
Gandhi's authoritarian proclamation that condemned India to 19 months of
Emergency. The brilliant satirist Abu Abraham, who had been nominated to the
Rajya Sabha by Mrs Gandhi, stepped out of his grace-and-favour persona and drew
a withering cartoon of the president selling away the Constitution from his
bathtub. This memory is indelible in the national consciousness, and explains
the hostile reaction to the prospect of a dummy or a dwarf in Rashtrapati
Bhavan. Indians want a president, not a puppet.
There
were two models for president for the first 19 years, personified in Rajendra
Prasad and Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who became president in 1960:
Statesman-politician and public intellectual, with high talent and integrity in
common. The three names being tossed about so far for this year's polls meet
such standards: Pranab Mukherjee is admired across party lines, as was evident
in the current session of Parliament, and in the country; Abdul Kalam and Hamid
Ansari are widely respected intellectual-professionals.
In 1969,
a third option entered the frame. Mrs Gandhi won a spectacular political
victory but by choosing Giri, she began a process of depreciation that
inevitably led to devaluation. When Giri departed in 1974 there was talk that
he had taken the curtains along with him. The last five years have seen the
symbol of state descend to a caricature. In 2007, Mrs Sonia Gandhi set aside
Pranab Mukherjee's name and pushed Mrs Pratibha Patil's name through perplexed
allies and a helpless nation. Ironically, these five desultory years of Mrs
Patil have sharpened the demand for a person of stature like Mukherjee as the
13th president. Congress allies Sharad Pawar and M. Karunanidhi refuse to be
hustled this time around; they are trying to pre-empt Sonia Gandhi's individual
will through collective applause. They have voiced support for Mukherjee even
before Congress has. Their upa colleague Mamata Banerjee is more wary, but she
cannot afford to vote against a fellow Bengali. Mulayam Singh Yadav is happy to
go with the flow if the flow is in this direction. Sentiment for Mukherjee has
spread to sections of the bjp as well. Curiously, the only person who could
deny Mukherjee what is widely acknowledged as his due is his own leader, Mrs
Sonia Gandhi.
There is
only one plausible reason for Mrs Gandhi's hesitation. She cannot be certain
about what Mukherjee will do during his 'overlap' moment.
The
first 'Overlap President' would have been a well-regarded Bharatanatyam dancer
called Rukmini Devi. We shall never know what prompted the Janata Prime
Minister Morarji Desai to float this 71-year-old's name in 1977; he was not
famous for patronage of the arts. Perhaps he had some personal peeve against
Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy, whose claim lay in the fact that Mrs Gandhi stopped him
from becoming president in 1969, setting off a chain of events that had come
full circle in less than a decade. Desai was overruled; Reddy became president.
But this circle had an extra twist. In 1980, Reddy had to swear in Mrs Gandhi
as prime minister. He thus became an overlap president, splitting his term
between governments that were politically hostile to each other. The last
overlap president was Abdul Kalam. In 2004, Mrs Sonia Gandhi went to him to
claim the prime ministership; there is controversy about what exactly
transpired. A day later, Sonia Gandhi chose Dr Manmohan Singh. Every Congress
MP lauded her for a unique sacrifice, all speeches broadcast to the nation by
an obliging Doordarshan.
"The
Prime Minister shall be appointed by the President and the other ministers
shall be appointed by the President on the advice of the Prime Minister."
Article 75 leaves no room for confusion. The president is within his rights to
name who he will as prime minister, for there is no Cabinet whose advice he can
seek. The prime minister must prove his majority in the Lok Sabha, but anyone
can become prime minister for that period. In 1996, Congress lost the elections
but no one won them. President Shankar Dayal Sharma set an admirable precedent
by calling upon the leader of the largest single party, BJP, to form a
government even though both he and the bjp knew that it would not win a vote in
the House. Atal Bihari Vajpayee became prime minister for 16 days. But a
precedent is not a law. As the Lok Sabha gets increasingly fractured, the
president's leeway expands. The dangers are obvious if neither major party gets
sufficient seats to command the dominant centre of an alliance, and smaller parties
feel free to offer support in return for political or financial rewards. This
has happened often enough at the state level.
The role
of the president will be critical after the next general elections. Rahul
Gandhi's future could depend on the decision the president will take. Mrs Sonia
Gandhi is clearly hesitant about both the popular favourites, Kalam and
Mukherjee; she may even wonder whether Hamid Ansari would tweak the rules just
a little at crunch time. There is therefore much talk of a last-minute surprise
candidate, who will probably pop up in the last week of May, or even in June
around the time of the notification. Since "first" is a preferred
alibi, speculation is narrowing to a tribal candidate, for three Muslims and a
Dalit have already lived in Rashtrapati Bhavan. Or the Congress might choose to
trip Mukherjee by opting for anyone else around whom a consensus can be
created.
There is
a difference though: Mrs Sonia Gandhi was in command in 2007. This year, the
allies needed to ensure victory have stopped being stenographers in the service
of a politically weakened Congress. They are not ready for dictation.
To bid
for the future, you must first insure the present. At the moment of writing the
insurance policy is in the name of
Pranab Mukherjee.
