In the absence of reliable and detailed information, it is not possible to say how far and how often President Venkataraman asserted himself during the last phase of Chandra Shekhar’s tenure in office as Prime Minister. It is, however, reasonably clear that he played a significant role in the Chief Election Commission’s decision to postpone elections in Punjab.
I have been opposed to elections in Punjab in the prevailing condition. The decision to hold them was, in my view, an insult to common sense, regardless of any agreement Chandra Shekhar and General (retired) OP Malhotra might have reached with a section of the militants. For it did not require much perspicacity to anticipate that opponents of the poll among the militants would step up their murderous activities and make any kind of canvassing impossible. One did not need to be either an experienced politician or a former Chief of Army Staff to know that it would be easy for the disruptors to kill candidates and aggravate the atmosphere of fear in the state.
It is, therefore, only natural that I am favourably inclined towards the President for his role in the postponement of what I believe was an invitation to disaster in Punjab. But having declared my interest, as the saying goes, I can now examine the issue of the role of the President.
The Constitution obviously provides the framework within which such a discussion should generally proceed. But one must be an innocent abroad either to believe that the relevant constitutional provisions admit of only one interpretation, or that the. Constitution can override all other considerations.
To begin with, I would make the point that India must have a centre of authority if it is not to drift into chaos under the remorseless pressure of tensions and conflicts already threatening to tear the country apart, and that if the Prime Minister cannot, for whatever reason, be that centre of authority, it has to be the Head of State.
In terms of the Constitution, as it was conceived by our founding fathers on the Westminster model and as it stands, the Prime Minister should doubtless be that centre. But surely it cannot be anyone’s case that the framers of the Constitution envisaged either a Prime Minister whose own party would command the support of barely one-tenth of the total strength of the Lok Sabha, or a Prime Minister who would take so contentious and vital a decision as the holding of elections in a terrorist-ridden state after he had resigned and elections had been ordered in the rest of the country.
It is, of course, argued that the Constitution does not provide for a caretaker Prime Minister. By this logic, a Prime Minister remains entitled to take whatever decision he feels like taking even after he has resigned. If that is indeed the case, we should not talk of the Westminster model any longer and amend the Constitution to provide for a caretaker Prime Minister and define his role.
It is a travesty of the very concept of parliamentary democracy that a Prime Minister who has had to resign precisely because he anticipated loss of majority support in the Lok Sabha should be able to exercise the full powers of that office. It is inconceivable that any Prime Minister in Britain would ever act after his resignation the way Chandra Shekhar did on the question of elections in Punjab.
Chandra Shekhar’s Ministers too behaved in that last phase of his government as if they owned the state of India and freely distributed gas licences and telephone connections out of turn. Secretaries to the Union government are known to have withheld implementation of those “orders” and the new government to have cancelled them.
By the above logic applied by the President’s critics to Chandra Shekhar’s Punjab decision, those secretaries should be suitably punished and the present government forced to restore the previous legal sanctions. It is rather odd that the same individuals, who commend the secretaries for their discretion, should criticize the President for a similar discretion in a matter at once more urgent and vital.
Chandra Shekhar has said that he avoided a confrontation with the President because he did not wish to aggravate the atmosphere of crisis already prevailing in the country. We should be grateful to him for this consideration. But his statement underscores the need to sort out the issue in a forthright and unambiguous manner. A caretaker Prime Minister cannot be allowed to act as if he is a regular Prime Minister in command of majority support in the Lok Sabha.
The President first exercised the “constitutional” option open to him when Chandra Shekhar, for reasons which still remain obscure, decided to order elections in Punjab. He returned the recommendation to the Cabinet, consisting of individuals most of whom were duly defeated at the hustings a few weeks later as observers of the political scene knew they would be, which reaffirmed the decision; two options were available to him.
He could either use his influence with the Chief Election Commission to get the poll in Punjab finally postponed, or he could acquiesce in the “cabinet’s” decisions. He exercised the first choice and he is accused of having exceeded his constitutional authority. If he had taken the second option, he would have exposed the country to a risk which he regarded as unacceptable. Surely, the country can cope far more easily with the “excess” than it could have with the risk. For, while the excess can be taken care of by the new government, if it is so disposed, the cost of coping with the risk, in case it had turned out to be as grave as the President and many others had feared, would have been enormous. It might have become necessary to replace Governor Malhotra with Martial Law administrator Chagotra.
The President is, of course, obliged to preserve the constitution. But one would assume that he is also obliged to protect the integrity of the country and to act in fulfillment of that patently larger duty if he is convinced that the nation’s unity is threatened by the actions of an outgoing government.
It would be impermissible, indeed intolerable, if the Head of State was to dream up the threat. But in this specific case no one can prefer such a charge against the President. A government representative of the majority in Parliament can also expose the nation’s integrity to risk. In that eventuality, the President should resign in fulfilment of his oath of office.
In passing, I might add that whatever my reservations about TN Seshan’s conduct as the Chief Election Commissioner in some matters, such as his decision to entertain a frivolous petition to disallow the use of the lotus symbol to the Bharatiya Janata Party, he acted in the country’s best interest in postponing the poll in Punjab. Chandra Shekhar has complained that Seshan did not inform him, though he was still holding the office of Prime Minister. Apparently, like Chandra Shekhar vis-à-vis the President, Seshan too chose to avoid a confrontation with the outgoing Prime Minister. If one deserves to be commended for being discreet, so should the other.
President Rajendra Prasad’s letter to Prime Minister Nehru has been recalled in the current discussion on the President’s proper role. Far more pertinent would be to recall President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed’s endorsement of the proclamation of the Emergency in 1975 before it had been approved by the Council of Ministers and in all probability, without inquiring from Prime Minister Indira Gandhi whether she had secured the consent of her Cabinet, and President Zail Singh’s claim to the right to dismiss Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi still in command of an overwhelming majority in the Lok Sabha.
Much of the intelligentsia reacted with horror over President Ahmed’s action because it was opposed to the Emergency, though the same intelligentsia was glad that issues raised by Rajendra Prasad regarding the President’s powers had been sidestepped to Nehru’s advantage. The intelligentsia’s response to Zail Singh’s extraordinary claim was generally not adverse because by that time Rajiv Gandhi’s popularity had ebbed.
All this is recalled not so much to underscore the fickleness of even educated opinion in our country as to argue that we cannot afford either a rubber-stamp Head of State or an intransigent one. The President has to be a man of dignity and conviction, on the one hand, and of great restraint and discretion, on the other. These qualities are not easy to combine. As such, a certain amount of tension between the Head of State and head of government is built into our constitutional arrangement even if we disregard the increasingly harsh reality regarding our public life and assume that we shall never be landed with a buccaneer as a Prime Minister. We have come fairly close to having one twice.
The present incumbent of Rashtrapati Bhavan describes himself as a copybook President. Apparently the implication is that he goes by the book known as the Constitution of India. But who is to interpret the Constitution of India? Does it provide that the President ask VP Singh and Chandra Shekhar for proof of majority support in the Lok Sabha in advance of agreeing to swear them in as Prime Ministers and not PV Narasimha Rao? Does it say one kind of minority is different from another kind of minority?
The suggestion is not that the President has acted wrongly in any one of these cases but that he has not gone by the book and, in fact, that he could not have done so and still performed his duty for the country. God alone knows what would have happened if he had insisted on evidence of majority support from Narasimha Rao. Real life is far more complicated than any Constitution can provide for.
Sunday Mail, 1 September 1991