Paper-Tiger on Raisina Hill
9 May 2012 4:11 AM GMT
Is it Pranab Mukherjee, the Congress 'troubleshooter'? Or Hamid Ansari, the closet Leftist? Or a mystery name, a card held so close to the chest by his sponsors that the media hasn’t yet got a whiff of his presence in the race?
Who is moving into the big house up the hill? Mamata Banerjee says, much in the style of Sholay’s Gabbar, spinning the chambers of his revolver, that the election is still 'two months away'. But excitement is soaring. One hopes that the enterprising gentlemen who usually hang out near cricketers' dressing rooms have so far kept away from laying wagers on the names doing the rounds for the Presidential election.
But much of the excitement is just synthetic, somewhat like the sub-national patriotism which is conjured up in naming of the Indian Premier League teams (Pune Warriors, Mumbai Indians, etc.). And that is enigmatic. The election of President is both fair and complex. It involves MPs and MLAs, with the valuation of the votes reflecting the population size and the ratio in which it is represented in each state assembly. The proportional representation leaves no room for the candidate discarded by the majority to win because he is first past the post. But the real job for the person elected so laboriously to occupy the Rashtrapati Bhavan is to potter about its 355 decorated rooms, across 2,00,000 square feet of marble flooring, for full five years. Who stole his power?
The answer is: Indira Gandhi. The constituent assembly had a strong current of opinion, led by B N Rau and K M Munshi, in favour of the US type presidential system but it got buried under the majority outcry for the Cabinet system of today in which the President is nothing but a rubber stamp. Nevertheless, the framers of the Constitution had enough long vision of desisting from defining the boundaries of President’s power. It was understood where these were laid, yet Art 74(1) only said 'there shall be a Council of Ministers with the Prime Minister at the head to aid and advise the President'. It did not go further.
But things got different during the 1975-77 Emergency when Indira Gandhi, after having pulled out a President from his bath tub late at night to sign on the Emergency proclamation, still found it necessary to make the 42nd amendment to the Constitution in 1976. After this, Art 74 (1) read: '…to aid and advise the President who shall, in the exercise of his functions, act in accordance with such advice.' It is of course the job of future historians to discover the reason behind the amendment. But it is not unlikely that the then Prime Minister was anxious to prevent her despotic younger son Sanjay Gandhi from using this unstated opportunity in the Constitution to grab Parliament’s power. After her electoral rout in 1977, the Janata Government too tinkered with the Article. However, instead of restoring it to its pre-1976 concision, the 44th amendment of 1978 gave President the limited liberty of sending back to the Council of Minister an advice 'for it reconsideration', if he so wished.
Times change, and so do ideas of threat. Lawmakers of the past wanted their government, or the executive, and the President in whom the executive power of the state vests, to prove their loyalty every day and not just once in five years. But now the wages of this daily test are proving unsustainably high. Since single parties have long since ceased to run governments, it is now the aggregate number of parties big and small that must remain intact. And the constituents are regional parties to whom the state – with its panchayats and municipalities – come first and the nation remains someone else’s concern. It has made governance a bizarre exercise. The union government may be deep-sixed by a band of 10 or 15 dissenting MPs.
The current economic downturn is a direct outcome of having too many local leaders running the Center. The local politician interest usually shuns reform because it has a price. Instead local leaders want populist measures like giving water or electricity free to the people, regardless of who would foot the bill. He will not allow Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in organised retail as that would clean out the middlemen who is usually his party worker but who contributes nothing to the value of his ware. He doesn’t like land to be acquired for industry as it displaces voters even though they are mostly usurpers of the land. He would rather get the energy regulator under his thumb to maintain a cap on energy price than let him set the price a tad higher, as price rise means vote loss.
United Progressive Alliance 2 and its uncontrollable anarchy, lauded as ‘federalism’, has already got India into a pretty pickle. It has slipped, from the 9 per cent growth rate band till recently, into the 5-6 per cent level, where it must indefinitely postpone the idea of catching up with China. In two years flat, the US dollar has become 20 per cent costlier in rupee terms. The capital market is in deep coma. People keep their savings in gold now; they do not trust their currency. And declining faith in India’s future growth is evident from the rising number of empty seats in capitation-fee engineering colleges and business schools.
It is a situation that should make Indians revisit their national goals. The President of India is best suited to be the man of the hour, being elected truly by legislators across the nation. His leadership is stable as he cannot be impeached at the drop of a hat; it requires not less than two-thirds members of a House. If the damage caused by the 42nd amendment can be undone, a re-energised President not only can veto the bad laws. He can even trade-off his assent to some of the laws in which politicians are 'interested' with a couple of bold laws that can carry the nation forward. Without giving the President any power, does it matter who fills the chair?
Who is moving into the big house up the hill? Mamata Banerjee says, much in the style of Sholay’s Gabbar, spinning the chambers of his revolver, that the election is still 'two months away'. But excitement is soaring. One hopes that the enterprising gentlemen who usually hang out near cricketers' dressing rooms have so far kept away from laying wagers on the names doing the rounds for the Presidential election.
But much of the excitement is just synthetic, somewhat like the sub-national patriotism which is conjured up in naming of the Indian Premier League teams (Pune Warriors, Mumbai Indians, etc.). And that is enigmatic. The election of President is both fair and complex. It involves MPs and MLAs, with the valuation of the votes reflecting the population size and the ratio in which it is represented in each state assembly. The proportional representation leaves no room for the candidate discarded by the majority to win because he is first past the post. But the real job for the person elected so laboriously to occupy the Rashtrapati Bhavan is to potter about its 355 decorated rooms, across 2,00,000 square feet of marble flooring, for full five years. Who stole his power?
The answer is: Indira Gandhi. The constituent assembly had a strong current of opinion, led by B N Rau and K M Munshi, in favour of the US type presidential system but it got buried under the majority outcry for the Cabinet system of today in which the President is nothing but a rubber stamp. Nevertheless, the framers of the Constitution had enough long vision of desisting from defining the boundaries of President’s power. It was understood where these were laid, yet Art 74(1) only said 'there shall be a Council of Ministers with the Prime Minister at the head to aid and advise the President'. It did not go further.
But things got different during the 1975-77 Emergency when Indira Gandhi, after having pulled out a President from his bath tub late at night to sign on the Emergency proclamation, still found it necessary to make the 42nd amendment to the Constitution in 1976. After this, Art 74 (1) read: '…to aid and advise the President who shall, in the exercise of his functions, act in accordance with such advice.' It is of course the job of future historians to discover the reason behind the amendment. But it is not unlikely that the then Prime Minister was anxious to prevent her despotic younger son Sanjay Gandhi from using this unstated opportunity in the Constitution to grab Parliament’s power. After her electoral rout in 1977, the Janata Government too tinkered with the Article. However, instead of restoring it to its pre-1976 concision, the 44th amendment of 1978 gave President the limited liberty of sending back to the Council of Minister an advice 'for it reconsideration', if he so wished.
Times change, and so do ideas of threat. Lawmakers of the past wanted their government, or the executive, and the President in whom the executive power of the state vests, to prove their loyalty every day and not just once in five years. But now the wages of this daily test are proving unsustainably high. Since single parties have long since ceased to run governments, it is now the aggregate number of parties big and small that must remain intact. And the constituents are regional parties to whom the state – with its panchayats and municipalities – come first and the nation remains someone else’s concern. It has made governance a bizarre exercise. The union government may be deep-sixed by a band of 10 or 15 dissenting MPs.
The current economic downturn is a direct outcome of having too many local leaders running the Center. The local politician interest usually shuns reform because it has a price. Instead local leaders want populist measures like giving water or electricity free to the people, regardless of who would foot the bill. He will not allow Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in organised retail as that would clean out the middlemen who is usually his party worker but who contributes nothing to the value of his ware. He doesn’t like land to be acquired for industry as it displaces voters even though they are mostly usurpers of the land. He would rather get the energy regulator under his thumb to maintain a cap on energy price than let him set the price a tad higher, as price rise means vote loss.
United Progressive Alliance 2 and its uncontrollable anarchy, lauded as ‘federalism’, has already got India into a pretty pickle. It has slipped, from the 9 per cent growth rate band till recently, into the 5-6 per cent level, where it must indefinitely postpone the idea of catching up with China. In two years flat, the US dollar has become 20 per cent costlier in rupee terms. The capital market is in deep coma. People keep their savings in gold now; they do not trust their currency. And declining faith in India’s future growth is evident from the rising number of empty seats in capitation-fee engineering colleges and business schools.
It is a situation that should make Indians revisit their national goals. The President of India is best suited to be the man of the hour, being elected truly by legislators across the nation. His leadership is stable as he cannot be impeached at the drop of a hat; it requires not less than two-thirds members of a House. If the damage caused by the 42nd amendment can be undone, a re-energised President not only can veto the bad laws. He can even trade-off his assent to some of the laws in which politicians are 'interested' with a couple of bold laws that can carry the nation forward. Without giving the President any power, does it matter who fills the chair?
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