It is obvious enough that under the existing circumstances President Venkataraman had no choice but to dissolve the Lok Sabha and order fresh elections. But that does not settle the basic issue of the President’s powers in this matter. And it does not even touch the question of his duty as the country’s First Citizen in similar situations.
Even in purely legal terms, all eminent jurists are not agreed that the President is bound to dissolve the Lok Sabha on receipt of advice to that effect by the Prime Minister provided that the recommendation has been endorsed by the Council of Ministers and the Prime Minister has not been defeated on the floor of the House. Soli Sorabjee, former Attorney-General and a legal luminary in his own right has, for instance, taken the view that the President is not so bound. Apparently the broad consensus does not favour his interpretation of the President’s powers. But that cannot dispose of the issue, at least so long as the Supreme Court has not pronounced on it.
I find it extraordinary that even the worst critics of Indira Gandhi, who deliberately sought to reduce the Head of State to a rubber stamp and pushed the 42nd Amendment through Parliament, and that too during the Emergency, specifically with that end in view, should now argue, in effect, that she did the right thing. I would, however, have let that pass if the situation we face, and are likely to face even after the forthcoming poll, was not so different from the one Indira Gandhi provided for.
Indira Gandhi, it need hardly be recalled, sought to perpetuate her dominance over the Congress to the point that she could virtually nominate first one son and then the other as her successor and the party’s dominance over the country. She would not, therefore, brook any challenge either from within the Congress or from outside. She went so far as to split the party in 1969 because she feared that Sanjiva Reddy in Rashtrapati Bhavan could prove inconvenient to her.
But Indira Gandhi’s imperial style of leadership and dynastic ambitions are not my principal concern. That story is over, though it is not inconceivable that Rajiv Gandhi too nurses similar ambitions. My concern is that if we persist in our present approach to the office of President, we may not have any agency capable of mediating and containing the ambitions and conflicts of feuding leaders and parties and thereby managing political confusion at critical moments in the nation’s life. Indira Gandhi was hostile to a potential rival centre of authority. The problem today is that we may not have any centre of authority at all.
There has been widespread sympathy for Chandra Shekhar in view of the manner in which Rajiv Gandhi has tried to humiliate and even blackmail him on so petty an issue as the presence of two Haryana policemen outside his residence (or was it outside the AICC office?) and consequently antipathy towards Rajiv Gandhi. But surely it does not behove responsible citizens interested in the long-term well-being of the nation to think in terms of personalities alone.
Chandra Shekhar, it is self-evident, had, as a respected and self-respecting public figure, no choice but to resign. I said so in this column on February 24, that is, full 10 days before he finally made up his mind on March 6. I also happen to be one of those who have been impressed by Chandra Shekhar’s performance as Prime Minister, especially in view of the weakness of his team and the awesome problems confronting him. Even so, I cannot bring myself to concede that he was morally within his rights to recommend dissolution of the Lok Sabha.
Chandra Shekhar could not have his cake and eat it as well. He could not resign on the plea that the arrangement with the Congress had broken down and yet use the existence of the same arrangement to argue that he was entitled to advise the President to dissolve the Lower House of Parliament. Such disingenuousness does not behove a Chandra Shekhar, or for that matter, any Prime Minister.
V.P. Singh, of course, did not recommend dissolution. In fact, he did not resign when the withdrawal of support by the Bharatiya Janata Party deprived him of the necessary majority in the Lok Sabha. He preferred to be defeated on the floor of the House. But if he was not the kind of man he is, he could well have anticipated the BJP’s decision and the fall of his government once L.K. Advani had begun his rath yatra. Would Chandra Shekhar then have accepted that the Raja was entitled to recommend dissolution of the Lok Sabha to the President?
I most certainly would not have, and not just because of my adverse view of V.P. Singh as a public figure. No sensible and well-meaning person will argue that the country could have afforded to go to the hustings last October if V.P. Singh had anticipated the BJP’s move, resigned and recommended dissolution.
The government that replaced his setup was the product of Rajiv Gandhi’s strenuous efforts to split the Janata Dal, Devi Lal’s frustrations, idealism of some individuals such as Harmohan Dhavan and Chandra Shekhar’s conviction that he could make a good Prime Minister. No one expected, or could expect, it to last more than a few months, Rajiv Gandhi’s “assurance” to the President that he would support it for one year notwithstanding. Yet it is indisputable that it has, at the very least, provided us a “cooling period” and thus made it possible for us to believe that the proposed elections can now be held in a reasonably peaceful atmosphere.
I do not intend to use this fact in support of my case for recognition of wider presidential powers in the matter of dissolution of the Lok Sabha. My case is that the Head of State should be seen to be competent to disregard the recommendation to dissolve the Lok Sabha by V.P. Singh and a Chandra Shekhar, that is, Prime Ministers who are not leaders of parties, or of coherent coalitions, clearly in possession of majority support in the House. I cannot accept that a Prime Minister on the run is better placed or inclined to think of the larger national interest than the President.
As was only to be expected of the present incumbent of Rashtrapati Bhavan, incidentally a study in contrast with his contentious and valuable predecessor, he has not said in so many words that if in the wake of Chandra Shekhar’s resignation, any political party had staked a claim to form an alternative government and demonstrated to his satisfaction that it was in a position to command majority support in Parliament, he would have given it a chance. But my interpretation of the communiqué issued last Wednesday (March 13) is that in all probability, he would have. And I for one do not entertain the least doubt that he would have done the right thing.
I am aware that, as often in the past, I would have been in a hopeless minority among my peers. I am also not insensitive to the proposition that the Head of State would have attracted the charge of partisanship if the person invited to form the government happened to be Rajiv Gandhi. But that cannot detract from the point that it is dangerous to yield to popular clamour, especially when, by general reckoning, the chances are that no party would secure a working majority in the polls and no coalition that is stitched up for electoral purposes is likely to hold for long.
I am in no position to confirm or deny reports that money provided by interested industrialists played a significant part in defections from the Janata Dal last November, or that the Congress offered similar inducements to would-be defectors from the two Janata Dals in recent weeks. But I find it unacceptable that those who stayed on with V.P. Singh were more virtuous than those who defected and that those very defectors became impervious to the same temptation of money subsequently. Above all, I hold that the kind of political immorality that the Raja was, in my view, guilty of when he sprang Mandal on the country, is far more dangerous than payoffs, even on the Bofors scale.
So I am not unduly impressed by the argument that a lot of wheeling-dealing went on between March 6 when Chandra Shekhar resigned and March 13 when the President finally dissolved the Lok Sabha and that the latter should have prevented it by acting immediately. The President has followed what he himself has called the “safer” course in getting financial provisions in perfect of expenditure beyond March 31 approved by Parliament even if it was arguably within his competence to issue an ordinance to meet this contingency. But that is not the crux of the matter. Which is that wheeling-dealing is the stuff of which democratic politics is made and that we better begin to recognise this reality.
No one can possibly approve of the kind of corruption which has become part of our public life and administration, not even those who engage in it. It is eating into the vitals of our society. But the only way out is to reduce sharply the role and powers of government at all levels. Any other kind of search for a moral public life can only aggravate the problem.
It is not open to question that the standard of our public life did not improve one bit as a result of the Nav Nirman movement in Gujarat in 1973-74 (the despised Chimanbhai Patel is back as Chief Minister), or of the JP movement in the country in 1974-75 (Indira Gandhi clamped Emergency in 1975 and then returned to office after a brief spell of Janata rule), or of the removal of A.R. Antulay as Chief Minister of Maharashtra in 1981, or of the defeat of the Congress in 1989 at least partly on the Bofors payoff issue. In fact, in his train, V.P. Singh brought roughnecks such as Mulayam Singh Yadav and Lalloo Prasad Yadav and a number of men from the underworld where power flows truly from the barrel of the gun.
The political scene is depressing, if not frightening. It could not be otherwise on several counts. I shall mention only three main ones. The Nehruvian framework has become a prison house and yet much of the dominant elite is unwilling and unable to get out of it and look for a more relevant worldview. There is no winning coalition either at the popular or at the political level. The Raja has unleashed powerful forces of social disruption. But it is precisely because the situation is so precarious that the need for a stable and meaningful Centre, which the presidency alone can provide in the given context, is so urgent.
Indira Gandhi, it may be recalled, sought to initiate a movement in favour of a switch-over to the presidential form of government from the present parliamentary one. She did not succeed because the move was seen as part of her design to concentrate power in herself and pass it on to her son. Vasant Sathe’s efforts have met with a similar fate. Recently L.K. Advani has spoken of the desirability of such a change. I do not think he too can get anywhere.
A few points may be relevant in this regard. In my view, it is unlikely that we can make the change peacefully and constitutionally. For one thing, no one is likely to command the necessary majority in Parliament in the foreseeable future. For another, too many political actors have too big a stake in the present system in its fragmented state to allow the change. On my part, I am not sure a presidential system will not produce intolerable tensions in our society which needs to be governed rather loosely in view of its enormous diversity.
It would be absurd to suggest that we should look for a via media between the two systems. That would be a monstrosity and would not work. But an enhanced status and role for the President in critical matters and situations is both practical and desirable. Giani Zail Singh, to his credit, raised this issue. But he did it rather crudely. He allowed himself to be provoked by Rajiv Gandhi’s strange ways and behaved as if he was more interested in getting at the then Prime Minister than in serving the country’s interests. We should look at the issues he raised again in the light of our experiences since and of our assessment of the likely course of developments in the near future.
Sunday Mail, 17 March 1991