First to suggest poll reforms

At the time, it stunned political and media circles. As he himself put it later, ‘‘It was as though I had exposed some vital national secret. In reality, all I had done was to make explicit what we all knew to be a fact of the country’s political, social and economic life.’’

His subsequent articles in a national daily on the subject of electoral reforms triggered off a national debate; one that continues till today.

It was a subject close to Kant’s heart, about which he spoke frequently — till he became the country’s Vice-President in 1997.

Only last week he told friends that he would to take up the issue again, now that he would be free of his constitutional responsibilities and the constraints it had imposed on him.

The remedy he had offered for the ills of the first-past-the-post system — which enabled a party to be victorious only with 33% of the popular votes, and which encouraged division in society on caste and community lines — was not the mantra of state funding of elections. It was to provide the voter with the choice to reject all the candidates.

This political expression of the voter, he suggested, should be counted in the total number of valid votes polled. However, this had to be accompanied by another provision: that any winning candidate must get more than 50% of the votes polled. If no one got more than 50% of the votes polled, there would be a second ballot among the top two candidates.

Such a process of power, he felt, would exercise a healthy check on money and muscle power, and the 51% provision would help unify rather than divide the polity.

Krishan Kant was known not just as a thinker in politics but a gentleman politician, universally acknowledged for his decency and unfailing courtesy. He was a man of clean habits, financially and in every other way. And a stickler for the Constitution, rules and procedures.

Though Chandrababu Naidu was his chief backer when he became vice president in 1997 — along with former PM I.K. Gujral — Naidu was not happy with Kant to begin with.

As Governor of Andhra Pradesh, Kant had insisted on a floor test when Chandrababu Naidu broke with his father-in-law N.T.Rama Rao. It was only after NTR resigned from his hospital bed that Kant swore in Naidu as CM. It was later that Naidu began to appreciate his Governor, though he did not push hard enough for him to become President.

What is not so well known about Kant is that, along with Yunus Saleem, former Governor of Bihar, he had almost reached a breakthrough on resolving the Mandir issue in 1990 towards the tail end of V.P. Singh’s premiership. The duo had been in touch with the Shankaracharya of Kanchi and other Hindu saints on the one hand and Ali Mian of Nadwa and the Muslim clergy on the other.

V.P. Singh recalls that they had persuaded both sides to agree to form a joint body and decide the final settlement to be implemented by the Government. But small men leaked the news, and pressures started to build on both sides. The agreement failed.

A Young Turk — with Chandra Shekhar, Mohan Dharia and Ram Dhan — he fought against the influence of big business in politics in the sixties and the early seventies. Having been a Rajya Sabha MP of the Congress for 11 years, he went with Jayaprakash Narayan in 1975 and later joined the Janata Party, and won from Chandigarh for the Lok Sabha in 1980. He became Governor of Andhra Pradesh in 1990. All through he was a protagonist of the bomb, and a supporter of Pokharan I and II.

A firm believer in the institution of family, he would personally escort his mother, who went to jail several times during the freedom movement, to the dining room for all the meals.

It seemed as if he had a premonition of what was to come and was getting ready for his Maker. There was a ‘maala’ found in his hand this morning when his wife went to wake him up at around 7.15 am and could not do so. Doctors told the family that he had suffered a massive heart attack sometime around 4 am.