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Friday, Mar 11, 2005

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Involving constitutional offices in partisan politics

By Harish Khare

On May 30, 1996 this newspaper published on the front page a super-exclusive, report entitled, "A Confrontation Avoided." The story told of "a breathtaking but shortlived confrontation" between President Shanker Dayal Sharma and Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. President Sharma had refused to read out to the two Houses of Parliament an address prepared by the Vajpayee Government, whose majority was still to be tested. Instead, the President had sent to the Prime Minister a draft of an address he wanted to read out.

President Sharma's argument was that "in the ordinary course, an address by the President under Article 87(1) represents the polices and programmes proposed to be implemented by the Council of Ministers and invites the attention and consideration of Parliament in this respect." Mindful of Mr. Vajpayee's untested majority, the President had noted: "The circumstances obtaining relative to the summoning of the ensuing session of Parliament are materially different. Having regard to the composition of the 11th Lok Sabha and the provisions of Article 75(3) and Article 87(1) of the Constitution, I propose to address both Houses of Parliament assembled together and inform Parliament of the cause of summons as per the text attached herewith."

According to the May 30, 1996 story, which till today has remained unquestioned, President Sharma's alternative draft, attached with his letter of May 22, merely wanted to note the purpose of the Lok Sabha meeting. The crux of the draft text was: "The cause of summoning the present session of Parliament is to enable the House of the People to determine whether it has confidence in the Council of Ministers."

President Sharma's May 22, 1996 missive to the Government met all the standards of political correctness, but was against the grain of the constitutional arrangement. The Vajpayee-headed Council of Ministers correctly refused to be cowed down by the President; challenged into an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, the President blinked and two days later, on May 24, read out to Parliament the address as prepared by the Council of Ministers.

Whatever be President Sharma's calculations and considerations, The Hindu story of May 30 concluded: "Dr. Sharma chose to regard Mr. Vajpayee as a caretaker Prime Minister, a construction that cannot be easily read in the Constitution of India."

The purpose of recalling at some length this episode is to contrast the Bharatiya Janata Party's proclivity to embroil the Rashtrapati Bhavan in partisan disputes when it is out of power and to snub and disdain the President of India when in office. For most of President K.R. Narayanan's Rashtrapati Bhavan tenure, the BJP was sniping at him, but earlier had no hesitation in hailing him for sending back for reconsideration the I.K. Gujral Government's recommendation for President's rule in Uttar Pradesh in 1997. And, expectedly, the BJP does not want the Jharkhand Governor to read out an address prepared by a government which still has to prove its majority.

In the current Jharkhand controversy, the BJP leadership has sought to suck in the Rashtrapati Bhavan into the vortex of partisan politics. On March 2, the day the Jharkhand Governor administered the oath of office to Shibu Soren, the National Democratic Alliance leaders led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee and L.K. Advani met the President and sought "his personal intervention" to correct what they alleged was a mala fide decision taken by the Ranchi Raj Bhavan.

The next day, the NDA took "41 MLAs" in full media glare to the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Instantly, the operative word in the media discourse became that "41 MLAs were paraded" before the President. The fact of the matter was that the President did not receive 41 MLAs; nor did the Rashtrapati Bhavan do any head count or any kind of verification.

Healthy convention

As a matter of healthy convention, the Rashtrapati Bhavan does not usually issue any communiqué on such occasions; the result was that the NDA got away by creating an impression that the President was endorsing their complaint against the Jharkhand Governor. The NDA leaders further embroiled the Rashtrapati in their partisan dispute when they told the media that Mr. Kalam had "summoned" the Governor.

Again, on the night of March 2, the Union Home Minister, Shivraj Patil, met the President and Mr. Kalam is presumed to have brought up the allegations of the NDA delegation. Mr. Patil is understood to have suggested that the Governor could be asked to come to Delhi and explain to the President the considerations that went into his decision about inviting Mr. Soren.

But, again, in the absence of any correct statement of facts from the Rashtrapati Bhavan the NDA-instigated "the President summons" headline went unchallenged and it has become a fact, a "fact" even the Supreme Court of India subscribed to.

The BJP is not only inveigling the Office of President, it has now involved the apex court in the Jharkhand controversy. No court of law has the administrative agencies to arrive at political facts. Though the NDA is claiming to have the support of five "independent" MLAs, it has been keeping these five legislators under lock and key. What the apex court could not know — nor was it pointed out to the bench — was that these five MLAs came into the BJP's custody when the Arjun Munda Government was still in the saddle in Ranchi.

Reports from Ranchi suggest that not all of these five legislators are masters of their own free will. By relying on the "averments of the petitioner" the apex court allowed the BJP to get away with its strong-arm tactics. This script is now likely to be followed whenever there is no clear verdict and there may be a difference of only a few seats between this or that alliance.

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