Presidential musings• AFTER much deliberation, Sonia Gandhi finally declared the UPA-Left candidate for the post of the 13th president of India. Pratibha Patil emerged as the surprise consensus candidate. The move is tactically smart. The Congress has done a ‘Kalam’ by throwing an option that most political parties will have difficulty to oppose.While the Patil nomination does serve the UPA well, the fact that the woman president card was brought in so late into the discussions does indicate that it was not keen to have a woman candidate right from the start. Any insinuation that it was a planned move to install a woman at Raisina Hill is specious. The Congress may take the moral high ground on the issue, but some tough questions arise. Does Pratibha Patil fit the bill because she is a woman or because she is a Gandhi-Nehru loyalist? Is loyalty to a political family more than to a political cause the only criterion for selecting a president? Did the NDA, for all its tokenism in installing a Muslim as the president, not choose a candidate that made the nation proud and who was not a BJP loyalist? If Sonia Gandhi was so keen to give women their due in the 60th year of India’s independence, why didn’t she declare her preference from the start? These questions will find scant answers from the UPA.— Karan Thakur , New Delhi • WE had expected the incumbent president to be the unanimous choice of the entire political class for a second term. That did not happen because of political opportunism. By rejecting A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Sonia Gandhi has failed to respect the prevailing mood in the country and has diminished the credibility of Indian democracy. — Hansraj Bhat, Mumbai • IT’S a tragedy, Dr Karan Singh laments, that his unflinching and honest practice of Hinduism (IE, June 16), came in the way of his candidature as president of this country. He may or may not be right, but he is no less deserving of the highest office than anybody else in India. There is a trend with some political players to deny their own religious identity in the name of secularism. To them I would quote an old saying of Mao Ze Dong: “A great thing can never be accomplished through a cunning method.”— Mohite K. Dasgupta, Gurgaon• PRATIBHA Patil’s candidature as president sets a new benchmark for Indian women. Petty politics prevents the NDA from endorsing her candidature. It should remember that electing a president is not a political contest but one which has moral and ethical dimensions. Once someone becomes a president, he or she will have to shun political affiliations. Not doing so would be akin to doing injustice to the country’s highest post.The whole nation therefore needs to be united in its choice of president. — Anjum Husain, Aligarh
