Sorry, Shivraj

The Left had three qualifications for a presidential candidate: political career, familiarity with the Constitution and belief in secularism. Everyone has been given to understand that Marxists thought Shivraj Patil didn8217;t make the cut. The Congress, by agreeing to take him off the race, made the Left feel vindicated. The Congress also reckons the Shivraj Patil chapter is closed. But it isn8217;t. We don8217;t hold any brief for any wannabe or current presidential candidate. We have been sharply critical of Patil over some home ministry policy issues. But we sympathise with the home minister and support any discerning voter if either of them asks this question: by responding to the Left8217;s argument in the way they did, what message have the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, the prime minister and their advisors sent about the home minister? Or, put another way, are we to understand that the country8217;s home minister, who has one of the three most important jobs in the national government the prime minister and the finance minister being the other two, is deficient in some or all of the categories the Left had put forward.

Patil as home minister surely has to be politically savvy, conversant in constitutional matters and have a firm belief in the working tenets of secularism as a state policy. But by first making him the Congress8217;s prime candidate and then dropping him in the face of an ally8217;s near-public criticism, the Congress leadership is now caught in a contradiction that is wholly its own making. Remember, Patil survived all cabinet reshuffles and the Congress always let it be known that the home minister wasn8217;t under any real risk of losing his job. Where did this faith go, voters may well ask, when Patil was deemed unsuitable to represent the Congress for the presidential contest.

Either Patil8217;s bosses were wrong earlier or they are wrong now. Whatever the answer, a vital executive office has now been robbed of considerable authority. The moral of this story of course is that the search for a presidential candidate should have been much more

sophisticated and mature.