President Sanjiva Reddy has been quoted as having said that he has not acted “under pressure from anybody” and that whatever he has done is “based on the dictates of his conscience”. The reference is clearly to his recent decisions to deny Mr. Jagjivan Ram an opportunity to form a government, to dissolve the Lok Sabha and to ask the Charan Singh Cabinet to stay on in office till the poll next December. It is possible that the ugly rumour of the President having allowed himself to be blackmailed has reached him and that he has thought it necessary to repudiate it. But whatever the provocation, Mr. Reddy has enunciated a doctrine which is highly dangerous. He like his predecessors holds the august office of President under the Constitution and he is pledged to uphold it. He has to be guided by the Constitution and not by his conscience. It can reasonably be argued that the Constitution does not provide for the kind of situation that the President had to cope with following Mr. Charan Singh’s refusal to face the Lok Sabha on August 20 and advice to Mr. Reddy to dissolve it. As such it is further possible to argue that Mr. Reddy was within his rights to open discussions with political leaders and to conclude on the basis of his talks with them that despite his claim to the contrary, Mr. Jagjivan Ram was not in a position to give the country a stable government. We have not shared such an assessment. On the contrary we have held that the President should have invited Mr. Ram to try and form a government because we have been convinced that the latter was in a position to do so. But we are prepared to concede that in the face of what most political leaders had told him it was open to the President to reach the opposite conclusion and act on it. He has, however, not explained his actions in these terms. He has brought in “conscience” which at best is the product of his personal concept of public morality and duty and therefore unreliable as a guide to major decisions in his capacity as the Head of State.
It appears from Mr. Reddy’s reference to Lord Venkateswara that he abhorred the prospect of Mr. Jagjivan Ram forming a government with the help of “defectors” from other parties. We do not share this abhorrence. Instead we have, rightly or wrongly, taken the view that our society is in flux, that political parties cannot be immune to the consequences of rapid change and that neither Mr. Charan Singh and his associates nor the Congress (S) dissidents could justly be described as defectors. But the more pertinent point right now is that if the President was firmly opposed to a government formed with the help of “defectors,” he should not have invited the leader of a party consisting wholly of “defectors” to head one. We would have objected to such a decision on his part on the ground that it was not open to the President to allow his private views to influence his decision in such matters. But he would at least have been consistent. We regard it necessary to say all this because we fear that the talk of a sharp decline in moral standards among politicians is not only unjustified but is also threatening to discredit democracy itself. Perhaps we are unduly influenced by developments in Pakistan since Mr. Ghulam Mohammed, the then Governor-General, dismissed the Nazimuddin ministry in 1953. But the ease with which Mrs. Gandhi imposed the emergency in June 1975 and kept it going for the next 18 months shows that Indian democracy is not all that secure.
The Times of India, 5 September 1979