All the president’s voters

Imagine an election result with both the Congress and the BJP getting around a hundred seats and the post-poll arithmetic looking extremely complicated. In an age when MPs can engage in human trafficking, there is no assurance that the process of cobbling together majorities will be easy, or will not involve bizarre parades in front of the president. We could be faced with a scenario where no simple metric of who should form government would easily work. This scenario may not come to pass, but it is a high probability outcome. Much will then depend upon the procedural proprieties that the president follows. The office will require someone who has a sense of judgment and can exercise a deft touch in the service of constitutional morality. Paradoxically, as the political system weakens, the president becomes even more important. But rather than investing the office with greater seriousness of purpose, political parties are intent on diminishing its authority. The run up to the presidential polls has, to put mildly, been something of a disgrace.

The disappointment with the process is at many levels. The first is simply the menu of options the UPA could conjure up. Of course it is unfair to second-guess how people will behave once they get into office. Some leaders are not born great, do not achieve greatness but can rise to the occasion when greatness is thrust upon them. Most of the candidates discussed, from Nirmala Deshpande to Shivraj Patil, were not commanding presences. Pratibha Patil is also not exactly the most overwhelming, accomplished or charismatic politician. Besides, mere decency is not enough for a position of this kind. Circumstances are such that we require a president who has a reputation for not being easily circumvented. There is nothing in any of the Congress candidates’ records to suggest they have this reputation.

The Congress comes out badly for a number of reasons. It is a sign of how little stature the party and its leadership command that it could not get any of its ostensible frontline candidates through. It is a sign of its political pusillanimity that it could not even contemplate the possibility of taking a fight for its convictions to the electoral college. It is also indicative of the vacuum in the party that it does not have too many choices that command respect. There may be a diabolical political logic to this choice: a woman who can possibly neutralise Shekhawat on a caste basis and carry the Maharashtra lobby. This is a hard combination to oppose, but not for reasons having to do with qualification for office. This choice is not about dignifying the office of president. This choice is more about aiming at the lowest common denominator. If the Congress wanted a woman it could have made that clear from the start. But the process by which the Congress circulated names and changed criteria led to its own leaders being publicly humiliated.

We can debate endlessly who is responsible for the impasse that made a consensus candidate difficult: the UPA by proposing names that were implausible or the NDA that was determined to fight. There is a deeper underlying trend: there simply aren’t many names who can elicit widespread enthusiasm. We inhabit a world where leaders walk with diminished stature, or are trapped by sectarian loyalties incapable of transcending narrow horizons. Even the so-called non-political candidates did not have much to show by way of service to the nation beyond their professional accomplishments. In such a world, it is too much to expect commanding figures to embody the dignity we so yearn for. The solution to this lack of consensual credible figures ought to be procedural. At the moment, the presidency, as often in the past, is the outcome of brokered deals carried on behind close doors. These smack more of the bargaining culture of BCCI than the conventions that should govern high constitutional office.

But perhaps the only answer is to genuinely democratise the system. Let there be an open contest in the electoral college. Let parties declare that their members are free to vote for the candidate they wish. Let candidates, rather than parties, make the case for their constitutional credibility. There can be two ways of getting a ‘non partisan’ choice. One is consensus. Since this is not possible, encourage individual legislators to vote with their conscience. Formally, with secret ballots and unenforceable whips, this is the procedure. But it would have been nice if all parties for once did not treat their legislators as mere fodder that comes in neat bundles that party leaders can simply deliver to someone of their choice. This is the premise of the current bargaining game. We need to shift from a focus on arithmetic which allows party leaders to act with hubris. Instead we need space for a more basic question: which candidate, in a free contest, would appeal to legislators nationally?

It would be wonderful for the system if individual legislators showed spine and voted with their conscience anyway. The outcome of this during the last vice presidential election was not altogether unhappy. We know that fissures run within parties as much as across them, and that cross-cutting coalitions should be possible on particular issues. Our political system can mature, and policy can advance more rapidly if it, on occasion, allows for legislators to vote their individual views rather than toe leadership lines.

The presidential election is a good place to start. But it is a sign of the poverty of our democratic imagination that we still think of the presidency as a fiefdom to be handed out through cabals, rather than a reward openly earned.

The writer is president, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi