All kinds of rumours relating to President Sanjiva Reddy have been floating in the Capital. Conventional wisdom would suggest that one should ignore them. But their persistence and sweep make it difficult and perhaps even undesirable to do so. It may well be helpful to air them openly.
It is likely that both the President and the Prime Minister would deny that their relations are anything but cordial. It is, however, widely assumed that they are anything but cordial. While it is possible that this assumption is unwarranted, it is not wholly incredible.
It will perhaps be wrong to suggest that neither Mr Reddy nor Mrs Gandhi has forgotten the events of 1969 when the latter took the extreme step of splitting the Congress and the risk of losing power precisely because he was not acceptable to her as the party’s nominee for the office of president. Indeed, a case can be made out that by refusing to invite Mr Jagjivan Ram to try and form a government in the summer of 1979 President Sanjiva Reddy paved the way for Mrs Gandhi’s return to office in 1980.
But not many among Mrs Gandhi’s supporters and in fact even among her detractors take Mr Reddy’s actions in July-August 1979 as strong enough proof of a rapprochement between the two leaders. The general view is that President Reddy did not expect the poll to produce a clear majority for any party and that he calculated that such a result would vastly strengthen his personal position and role. Again, this impression may not be well founded. It may speak more for the times in which we live than for the President’s ambitions. But it cannot be denied that the impression exists.
Activist View
Leaving this “distant” past aside, reports have been circulating which suggest lack of co-ordination between the President’s secretariat and the Prime Minister’s secretariat leading first to acceptance of certain foreign invitations by Mr Reddy and then to cancellation or postponement of his visits. Official explanations have, of course, been put out in all these cases. Only they have not carried much conviction.
There is another element in the situation which makes it difficult for one to assess it dispassionately. Mr Reddy is after all a seasoned politician. As such it cannot in all conscience be ruled out that he takes an activist view of the President’s role and wishes to function in that manner. The fear that he would tend to do so was precisely the reason why Mrs Gandhi opposed his election as head of state in 1969 and that was also presumably why he was not Mr Morarji Desai’s first choice in 1977. Mr Desai had a lot to say about Mr Reddy’s role after quitting office as Prime Minister.
All this does not clinch the Issue. It is possible that Mrs Gandhi was prejudiced against Mr Reddy in 1969 just because he was the candidate of the organisational bosses whom she suspected of trying to remove her from office. It is equally plausible that Mr Desai turned bitter because Mr Reddy refused to call him to try and form a government after he had once lost the majority in the Lok Sabha. But if the issue is not clinched one way, it is not clinched the other way either.
Other presidents have taken an activist view of the role of their office. Dr Rajendra Prasad said in a public speech that the powers of the President needed to be clearly defined in the Constitution because in his view an elected head of state could not be equated with the hereditary British sovereign as the Constitution did. And he made no secret of his difference with the then Prime Minister, Mr Nehru, on the Hindu Code Bill and other policy issues. Dr Radhakrishnan was not a politician by training and profession and he owed his office as President solely to Mr Nehru. But that did not prevent him from criticising the latter’s China policy after the debacle in 1962. Mr VV Giri advertised his differences with Mrs Gandhi’s handling of the railway strike in 1974 after he quit office as President.
Wrong decision
We do not know whether Mr Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed was also raising some difficulties for the government in 1976. But we do know that Mrs Gandhi regarded it necessary to amend the Constitution in order to leave no scope for doubt at all that the President was bound by the advice of the council of ministers headed by the Prime Minister. In view of the trauma of the emergency, the Janata wanted to undo this amendment and vest wider powers in the President. But while it did rewrite the Constitution to enable the President to refer back a decision to the cabinet, it finally decided to retain the above provision which asserts the primacy of the Prime Minister in the system.
Like the founding fathers and subsequent Congress governments, the Janata, too, ignored an important aspect of the problem. What happens when no single party or coalition of like-minded organisations with an effective leader enjoys a majority in the Lok Sabha? This problem surfaced in July 1979. Whatever one’s view of the way Mr Reddy handled it, the fact remains that as a result we had in office for several months a government which did not face Parliament even once. This newspaper found it truly extraordinary that Mr Reddy should have not only allowed Mr Charan Singh to avoid seeking a vote of confidence from the Lok Sabha but also accepted the latter’s recommendation to dissolve it and order fresh elections.
We had little doubt then and we have little doubt now that this was a wrong decision on the President’s part. In our view he should have persuaded Mr Charan Singh to seek a vote of confidence by the date he had himself fixed earlier and once Mr Singh had failed to get the mandate from the Lok Sabha, Mr Reddy should have given the new leader of the Janata, still the largest single party in the Lok Sabha, an opportunity to form a government. The fact that most party leaders favoured the course adopted by the President does not persuade us of its correctness.
The end result might not have been very different. The Janata might have failed to secure a majority in the Lok Sabha, making it necessary for the President to order fresh elections. But in that event he could have justly claimed that he had explored all possibilities of providing a government acceptable to the Lok Sabha before dissolving it. It is not easy to be sure that his actions were the result of his activist perception of the President’s role. But it is evident that these raised an important issue which the country’s political elite should have debated and tried to settle at least after the 1980 poll. It is a pity that this question has been completely bypassed in our preoccupation with the debate on the relative merits of the presidential and parliamentary systems of government.
This issue needs to be faced and we should try to settle it when we have a party which commands a sufficiently large majority in Parliament to enable it to push through the necessary amendment to the Constitution. But right now it is more urgent to establish the President’s role in the existing situation.
The constitutional position is crystal clear. The President has no choice but to be guided by the advice of the council of ministers headed by the Prime Minister. He may be unhappy with the way the government is functioning at the Centre and in a state or states. He can communicate his unhappiness to the Prime Minister but he cannot override her decision. In Bagehot’s famous words, he can guide, advise and encourage. Legitimately he can do no more. Even if the constitutional position was not as clear as it is, the President could not have acted differently if he was interested in the smooth functioning of the parliamentary system.
The President is above partisan politics regardless of whether he is elected with the support of one party or more. It was thus wrong for Mr Giri to have proclaimed to all and sundry that he was not a rubber stamp president because he did not owe his office solely to the ruling party. A president is a president however he is elected. At the very least his office obliges him not to enter into political discussions with opposition leaders except to keep himself informed so that he can advise the Prime Minister properly. He can commend restraint if opposition leaders are willing to listen to him; he cannot commend action against the government even if he comes to hold it in contempt for its acts of omission and commission.
Efface himself
A person who agrees to be elected President of the republic has to be willing to efface himself or herself. It is not easy to combine the psychology of self-effacement with the pomp and show of that office. But it is necessary so long as the political system is not in total disarray. Then we shall be in a different ball game which will produce its own rules.
The self-effacement should apply to a president not only when he is in office but even after he has served his term. For if he wants to play a political role after retirement, it will be extremely difficult for him to take a non-partisan view of his role while he is in office.
So far, we have not had a president who has sought to provoke a crisis with the government in order to make a dramatic exit and emerge as the “conscience” of the nation. It will be a sad day for the country when we will need to worry about such a contingency.
What if there is a genuine crisis and a massive and spontaneous campaign to draft a former president? The answer is obvious. It is for him to decide whether to respond to the call or not. The rules and conventions will then have broken down. They will not be there to guide him or anyone else.
The Times of India, 16 December 1981