It is easy to commend the UP chief minister, Mr. Vishwanath Pratap Singh’s offer to resign on account of continuing violence in Moradabad, Aligarh and some other towns in the state. But it is difficult to recommend either that as leader of the Congress (I) Mrs. Gandhi should take him at his word and let him go, or that he should press his resignation. There can be no doubt that the principle of the political boss accepting responsibility for the failures of the administration and paying for it needs to be reasserted and re-established. It has been in abeyance since Mr. Lal Bahadur Shastri resigned as railway minister in 1956 in the wake of a railway accident. Its revival can help tone up the administration. Ministers will certainly be more vigilant if they know that they will be obliged to quit if their departments continue to perform poorly. But in this specific instance, the case for Mr. Singh staying on is pretty strong. For one thing, by offering to resign he has demonstrated that he is a politician of a different breed. Unlike most others, he is not anxious to hold on to office at any price. The country should cherish such men and not send them into oblivion unless it is clearly established that they are too straightforward to cope with the complex tasks of governance. For another, the UP law enforcement agencies have not fared all that badly except on the first day of the trouble in Moradabad when the PAC may well have overreacted. In any case, the test for Mr Singh is whether he can streamline and strengthen these agencies so that they win back the confidence of the people, especially the Muslim minority, which the PAC cannot now claim to enjoy. That requires time. Only when he has had reasonable time to tackle this difficult task will it be possible to say whether or not he is up to the office he holds.
The same considerations do not apply to Mr. V. C. Shukla. He could, if he was so inclined, have resigned as Union minister for civil supplies as soon as the Madhya Pradesh high court held his election to the Lok Sabha void. That would have not upset anything and would have upheld a healthy convention. The issue involved is admittedly technical. The court has held that Mr. Shukla’s nomination papers should have been rejected because at that time he stood convicted on certain criminal charges. And just as the Supreme Court quashed the conviction, it may well turn down the high court’s judgment and uphold his election. But what if it does not? He would be obliged to resign. By resigning earlier, he could have anticipated this possibility and since he enjoys the Prime Minister’s confidence, he could have returned to the cabinet in case the Supreme Court rules in his favour. The only argument against his resignation can be that Mrs. Gandhi did not resign in similar circumstances in 1975. But that is a mechanical approach. Mrs. Gandhi’s resignation would have produced a grave political crisis. Just because the opposition led by Mr. Jayaprakash Narayan refused to recognise this reality of Indian politics and provoked her to impose the emergency, it does not follow that others, too, should be free to disregard judicial pronouncements. We cannot afford to ignore cither the reality or healthy democratic conventions.