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The job at hand
The details of Kalam?s ?scheme? which Vir Sanghvi cites in The accidental President (June 3) suggest that his qualification, ?it is rumoured?, is intended to protect his source, not belittle his version.
The details of President APJ Abdul Kalam’s ‘scheme’ which Vir Sanghvi cites in The accidental President (June 3), obviously on high authority, suggest that his qualification, ‘it is rumoured’, is intended to protect his source, not belittle his version. In 2004, when Prime Minister AB Vajpayee advised the President to dissolve the Lok Sabha, he was asked to resign ‘because it would be wrong for the government to continue in office while elections were being held’. It is no consolation that Abdul Kalam ‘blinked’. His only alternative was to sack Vajpayee.
A President who has such notions is a constitutional ignorant. One who persists to the point that a ‘stand-off’ ensued, despite the Law Minister’s tutorial, bares an outlook which is a menace to democracy.
Vajpayee deserves credit for not resigning. The integrity of the presidency brooks no partisanship. A Chief Election Commissioner, RK Trivedi was laughed out when he suggested, in his report of November 16, 1983, that the states ‘should be placed under President’s Rule for the duration of the elections’. He left democratic government in Delhi intact. Abdul Kalam’s ‘scheme’ destroys that; logically, in the states also; and leads to government by men he chooses outside the political sphere. One set of politicians cannot be replaced by another.
India would be exposed to ridicule. Such a ‘scheme’ is unheard of in all the centuries of the parliamentary system. It violates three rulings of the Supreme Court which rejected the plea that on the dissolution of the Lok Sabha on December 27, 1970, Indira Gandhi ought to resign as PM. It ruled that the conventions of the British parliamentary system applied. ‘The President cannot exercise executive powers without the aid and advice of the council of ministers with the Prime Minister at the head’. A similar challenge was repelled in M Karunanidhi’s case in 1971.
Justice Krishna Iyer and PN Bhagwati observed in 1973 that ‘the constitutional right of the ministry to continue in office after the dissolution of the State Assembly was highlighted’ in that case. Abdul Kalam ought to remember these judges’ admonition that the President ‘is not a rival centre of power in any sense and must abide by and act on the advice tendered by his ministers except in a narrow territory which is sometimes slippery’.
Our experience provides ample warning. Less than two months after his election, President Rajendra Prasad sent PM Jawaharlal Nehru a note of March 21, 1950, reopening issues decided by the Constituent Assembly in his own presence. As Granville Austin wrote ‘Had his first attempt to ignore conventional restrictions and to act the part of his own Prime Minister not been foiled, parliamentary government in India would have disappeared before it was two years old.’
His successor S Radhakrishnan, was tempted to usurp such a power. The US Ambassador Chester Bowles records in his memoirs that ‘on several occasions he expressed to me in a half-joking manner the wish that somehow after Nehru’s death or retirement the whole country could operate under President’s rule for a few months’. Half jokes are not told repeatedly. He was testing the US’ opinion. Nor did the appetite grow ‘in the last five months of Nehru’s life’. He acquired it weeks after his election in 1962.
Indira Gandhi rushed to Vice President Zakir Hussain, after China’s military attack in October 1962, complaining that the President was floating a ‘King’s Party’. The Vice President counselled that Nehru meet the President and address his concerns, little knowing that the concerns related to power.
Major General Niranjan Prasad had been removed from the command of 4 Division. He was summoned on November 6 by Radhakrishnan and ‘told it was not necessary to be in uniform’. The President let loose a tirade against the PM to a serving Army officer. “I shall go to Nefa as early as I can to see things for myself”. Two days later, he said at Tezpur, even while the war was on, “Our credulity and negligence have cost us some initial reverses”. Mridula Sarabhai was told, in the presence of Choudhry Mohammed Shafi MP, that her friend Nehru ‘wanted to have a gun carriage funeral’. She got up to leave.
Ever the gentleman, Zakir Hussain sought to restore balance. “They (the Opposition) want a President who would fight the PM”. In 1969, the Syndicate proved him right. Zakir saheb was aware of his ‘emergency’ power as he put it to this writer in the course of an interview for his biography. He meant the reserve powers of a constitutional head.
Zail Singh was an aberration which came close to constitutional perversion. He told me that Rajiv Gandhi gave neither ‘aid’ nor ‘advice’ and held office during the Giani’s pleasure.
I asked for a copy of the Constitution, quoted Article 310 (1) which says that every ‘member of a defence service or of a civil service of the Union… holds office during the pleasure of the President’. Pointing to North Block and South Block, in the presence of his aides, I asked the President whether it lay in his power to dissolve the entire edifice.
The upshot was a statement I drafted that day, May 3, 1987, which his secretary S. Varadan slightly altered, to say that reports ‘speculating’ that he intended to dismiss the PM ‘are utterly devoid of any basis’. He deleted a sentence I had written — enjoying majority support in the Lok Sabha. In June 1987, Haryana poll results and the Swedish Audit Bureau’s Report induced second thoughts. Fortunately, sense prevailed.
From 1992 to 2002, Shankar Dayal Sharma and KR Narayanan restored the presidency to its proper role. Sharma publicly expressed his pain on the demolition of the Babri Masjid and publicly recorded on April 20, 1996, that Prime Minster Narasimha Rao had not tendered the promised advice on the Himachal Pradesh Governor, Sheila Kaul, who was censured by the Supreme Court for improper allotment of shops as Union Development Minister.
This important State paper is on par with Narayanan’s three reasoned communiqués — on December 1, 1997 (on why he declined to invite Sitaram Kesri to form government, and instead, dissolved the Lok Sabha); on March 15, 1998 (on why Vajpayee was invited to be PM) and on April 26, 1999 (on the defeat of the NDA in the House and its dissolution).
The United Front government resented his refusal to impose President’s Rule in Uttar Pradesh on October 22, 1997, and the NDA his refusal on September 25, 1998, to do likewise in Bihar. On February 12, 1999, the advice, held unconstitutionally in ‘abeyance’, was re-affirmed. President’s Rule had to be revoked on March 8, 1999 to everyone’s embarrassment.
Both made mistakes; but they set high standards in presidential accountability. Which model will President Abdul Kalam emulate? The Radhakrishnan-Zail Singh one or the one practised by Zakir Hussain, SD Sharma and KR Narayanan?
