Sonia Gandhi owes a special thanks to Justice M.N. Venkatachaliah for saving her from being caught in the vortex of a potentially damaging controversy. As chairman of the recently wound-up Constitution Review Commission, Venkatachaliah had it entirely in his hands to decide whether the 11-member panel should recommend that foreign-born nationals should be barred from occupying high public offices. Any such recommendation would have electrified the political scene, much to the delight of the BJP and other opponents of the Congress. The debate on whether Sonia should be allowed to be a prime ministerial candidate despite her Italian origins seemed to have lost much of its steam in 1999 when the electorate ignored the party that raised the issue, Sharad Pawar’s Nationalist Congress Party (NCP). But when NCP leader P.A. Sangma, was inducted into the Commission as the only political member, the Vajpayee government appeared to open the possibility of reviving the foreigner issue. If that was indeed the motive, the government almost succeeded in its objective. Sangma sold his pet idea to half the Commission by saying it should not be seen only in terms of one individual or its immediate impact. When the Commission put the issue to vote, there was a 5:5 tie with members as diverse as newspaper editor C.R. Irani, retired Dalit judge Punnayya, Gandhi’s granddaughter Sumitra Kulkarni and former Lok Sabha secretary general Subhash Kashyap backing Sangma. The tie required Venkatachaliah to exercise his casting vote to decide the issue one way or the other. Thus, Venkatachaliah could very well have cast his vote in favour of Sangma’s proposal and conferred on it a legitimacy it never had. But, in the event, Venkatachaliah chose to stay neutral and the Commission as a result expressed no opinion on what was perceived as the ulterior motive of its very appointment.
