The Sonia Bill

The private member's Bill moved by a BJP MP in the Lok Sabha to debar naturalised citizens from holding the posts of president, vice-presi...

The private member8217;s Bill moved by a BJP MP in the Lok Sabha to debar naturalised citizens from holding the posts of president, vice-president and prime minister does not do the party proud. The party8217;s views on the issue are well known as it was one of the major planks of its election campaign. Besides, it also figured in the election manifesto of the National Democratic Alliance.

It would, therefore, have been entirely in character for the party to have brought forward such a Bill. Instead, just a few days after Law Minister Ram Jethmalani clarified that the government did not consider restricting the three highest posts to natural citizens so urgent as to take it up in the current session of Parliament, it allows a party MP to move a private member8217;s Bill. Given the BJP8217;s stress on discipline, it is difficult to believe that Kirit Somaiya, an MP from Mumbai, took the initiative to move the Bill on his own, particularly after Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee strongly defended the right of party MPs tomove such Bills on any issue featured in the NDA manifesto. Thus it is the circuitous manner in which the ruling party has sought to address the issue much like the Freedom of Religion Bill that was introduced during the Janata Party rule in the seventies that is intriguing.

Shorn of its sophistry, the Bill is aimed at one person 8212; the leader of the Opposition Sonia Gandhi. Never before in parliamentary history has a Bill been moved with such a limited objective 8212; that of tackling a single person. And that is what makes the legislative venture questionable. It is tantamount to the ruling combine admitting that the people of India cannot be trusted to decide such matters as to who their leaders should be. The founding fathers of the Constitution had stipulated the conditions that a citizen has to fulfill to hold these posts and it is not easy to fulfill, let alone circumvent, them as even Sonia Gandhi, with all her family connections, would have realised by now. If any political party feels that she or,for that matter, any person is not suited for such a post, it is free to campaign against such a person as the BJP and its allies did with some measure of success in the last elections. But to amend the Constitution for fear that the NDA will not do well in the next elections and the Congress under Sonia Gandhi will have a runaway victory is to espouse a very narrow objective indeed.

The Bill may be aimed at one person but it amounts to redefining the concept of citizen which, in other words, means changing one of the basic features of the Constitution. This needs to be pointed out in the light of the words of caution President K.R. Narayanan sounded when he said, on Friday, that the Constitution should ensure freedom of action, thought, belief and worship and guarantee opportunities to all. It is often mentioned that the US Constitution does not allow a naturalised citizen to become the US president. But then India8217;s Constitution is not modelled after the American. If, in spite of all this, the BJP feelsthat the Constitution has to be amended at any cost, let it be more open and follow parliamentary procedures before the matter is debated and put to vote. In other words, let it come clean on the issue.