If the election throws up a hung Lok Sabha, President Abdul Kalam will have two clear options before him. One is to invite straightaway the leader of the single largest party or the largest pre-election alliance to form a government. The other is to ask him first whether he was “able and willing” to form a “stable government which could secure the confidence of the House”. In other words, the choice before Kalam is to ask first or invite straightaway. Though there are arguments and precedents in favour of both approaches, Kalam would be well-advised to take the ask-first option. We need to go back a little in time to understand why the ask-first option is better. This option was first exercised in 1979 when President Sanjiva Reddy asked rival claimants, Charan Singh and Jagjivan Ram, to give lists of their respective supporters in the Lok Sabha. But it proved controversial as Reddy’s subsequent invitation to Charan Singh exposed the president’s office to charges of bias. There was also the criticism that it militated against the salutary principle that the right place for a head-count in any form was the floor of the legislature and not the Rashtrapati Bhavan or Raj Bhavan. Exactly a decade later, President R. Venkataraman steered clear of the ask-first approach when the 1989 election yielded a hung verdict. In fact, swinging to the other extreme, Venkataraman decided to invite Rajiv Gandhi straightaway to form a government in the teeth of the massive mandate against the Congress party, reducing its strength in the House from 415 to 197. Venkataraman’s justification was that Congress was still the largest party in the Ninth Lok Sabha. Thus, it was only because Rajiv was gracious enough to decline his invitation did Venkataraman swear in V.P. Singh as prime minister. In a bid to keep his office above controversy, Venkataraman could be said to have reduced it to a constitutional zombie which would mechanically call parties in the descending order of their size. The pitfalls of the zombie approach came to the fore in 1996 when the BJP emerged as the largest party for the first time in the Eleventh Lok Sabha. Though the BJP was far short of majority and no party was willing to support it, President S.D. Sharma invited A.B. Vajpayee purely on the strength of his being the leader of the largest party. The collapse of the government in 13 days compromised the president’s office and strained the constitutional scheme. Without ever receiving the confidence of the Lok Sabha, the Vajpayee government made Sharma read out an address to a joint session of Parliament spelling out the BJP’s election promises. In his exit speech shortly thereafter, Vajpayee washed his hands off the entire fiasco by saying that when the president invited him to form a government, he took it as a duty he owed to the nation. Little wonder then that on the next occasion, in 1998, Sharma’s successor K.R. Narayanan reverted to the ask-first approach of Reddy. To be sure, Narayanan made one vital improvement on the 1979 precedent keeping in mind Vajpayee’s attempt to pass the buck to Sharma for the 1996 farce. By coincidence, Narayanan too had to deal with Vajpayee in 1998 as the NDA emerged for the first time as the largest pre-poll alliance. Vajpayee’s credentials to stake a claim, therefore, were far better in 1998 than in 1996. Yet, Narayanan took the precaution of asking Vajpayee to give evidence of his ability to form a stable government. In the process, Narayanan changed the terms of engagement. Vajpayee could return to office in 1998 only after he satisfied the president that he had enough support from within the NDA and outside. There was no room this time round for him to pretend that he was being altruistic in forming a government. On the contrary, by furnishing documents in his support, Vajpayee was forced to take responsibility for providing a stable government. In the event, his government came apart the very next year when Jayalalithaa precipitated a crisis in which Vajpayee lost a no-confidence motion by one vote and the House was dissolved prematurely. But that does not detract from the efficacy of Narayanan’s innovation which makes a prime minister accountable more than ever before for the stability of his government. Indeed, the ask-first approach seems more in tune with the discretion conferred on the president by the Constitution in identifying and appointing a prime minister. Venkataraman’s overweening concern to keep the president’s office above controversy defeats the whole point of that discretion. If Kalam still prefers to play a zombie and not ask questions about stability, he runs the risk of repeating the 1996 farce. Remember, once the formalities are over, the first session of the Fourteenth Lok Sabha will begin with Kalam’s address spelling out the vision of the new government.
