This may be apocryphal, but has a rich ring of credibility given the cast of characters involved. The story goes that Giani Zail Singh, as president of India, would walk down to the South Court of Rashtrapati Bhawan, defying protocol and the murmured advice of officials, to receive Prime Minister Indira Gandhi when she came calling. Very often, he would motion liveried presidential footmen aside to open the car door and usher Mrs Gandhi in himself. What is not apocryphal is that a little bit earlier, when it became certain that he would become India’s first citizen, the Giani said, with undisguised glee and gratitude, that he would gladly sweep the ground that Indira Gandhi stepped on.
It’s a porous line that falls between due humility and downright sycophancy. There is an established history to the palace atop Raisina Hill being used as residence-cum-office for notables that prime ministers of the time have found agreeably malleable. Or worse.
This isn’t about Draupadi Murmu who, barring the inconceivable, will become our first tribeswoman president in August. It cannot be about her yet because there exists very little to judge her by, and it would be patently unfair to pre-judge her. This is about reminding ourselves of the reasons that have come to dictate the choice of the head of the Indian State and why, shorn of the frills, they amount to nothing but the requirement of regimes to install in the highest office marionettes of fanciful description.
The Constitution sets out in fair depth the institution of the president of India, its role and regime, ceremonial though most of it is. And yet, some incumbents — K.R. Narayanan comes darting to mind — have enriched their seats with dignity and deliberation exercised within prescribed norms. Others have been happy to remain enshrined as dummies, in dubious dereliction of duty to nation on occasion. Presidents can, at the very least, become reference points of morality and ethics insulated from power politics whose conduct very often requires to be murky Machiavellian. Presidents can inhabit a higher voice and pronounce it from time to time in the interest of rectitude and correctness. They can become, as probably they were only meant to be, an entity a nation can look up to beyond its political preferences and prejudices. Making ceremonial speeches — by convention a readout scripted by the government of the day — is not all that presidents are permitted. There isn’t a gag on them. But most often, they keep the gag handy because it is an accessory of such convenience — it allows them to not bring their voice to bear on the national discourse when there might actually be a dire need to. There has been no dearth of occasions in the life of our nation when a respected non-partisan voice could have informed us of better sense and direction. True, in our chosen system, the president is nominal head of State and the prime minister the chief executive. But there exists neither an article of the Constitution, nor a law or edict — or even convention — that motions the president to silence and, as a consequence, virtual absence from the affairs of this republic. Alas, such silence and detachment have become an essential qualifying rite.
The other, increasingly fashionable, qualifying factor is identity to the exclusion of most other assets or abilities you might look for in a first citizen. So you are positioned as either the first from a minority community, or the first woman, or the first Dalit, or, as in Draupadi Murmu’s case, the first tribal. What did the Giani’s elevation to Rashtrapati Bhawan achieve for Sikhs? Should you look back to those years, you may not want that question even posed — 1984, the run-up to it, and the consequences of it all transpired during Zail Singh’s tenure: Operation Bluestar, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the horrific savagery wreaked on Sikhs. Tenures of other identity totems have mercifully been less tectonic but none has achieved for their purported constituencies anything demonstrable beyond sham symbolism. What did, for instance, Pratibha Patil’s tenure as the First Lady-First Citizen achieve for women? Or the outgoing Ram Nath Kovind’s time at the helm for Dalits? Some of the worst prejudices and atrocities came to confront Dalits during his time. Did the league of India’s Dalits, possessed of a razor sharp and politically aware vanguard, even remotely suggest that the man in Rashtrapati Bhawan was the one they could turn to? Were they even disappointed that little came their way from that direction? President Kovind did complain — about how little he earns as head of State.
We now await a new president. The rhetoric and resolve of Yashwant Sinha apart, the contest he has entered is a no-contest. Perhaps the only presidential election that lived up to being called that was the 1969 bout between Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, the Congress Syndicate’s man, and V. V. Giri, propped by Indira Gandhi. It was a tense battle, as much a contest for the presidency as who’d rule the Congress. Giri won by a whisker. Thereafter, the rubber stamp has been the favoured instrument to mark out presidential picks. When a besieged Indira Gandhi decided to proclaim Emergency in June 1975, the president’s signature was obtained well after the incumbent had repaired for the day. There exists an indelible cartoon rendering of the signing from the acid nib of Abu Abraham — the president in repose in his bathtub, reaching out to sign the dotted line.
There may be good reasons why Narendra Modi’s picks for Rashtrapati Bhawan mimic Indira Gandhi’s choice of Giani Zail Singh or, before him, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed. She — or at least her cultish, authoritarian phase — remains, very understandably, a thing of awe and aspiration. Little wonder Indira Gandhi is the least reviled Congress leader in the Modi scheme. Much like Indira Gandhi from the early 1970s to practically the end of her days, Modi likes to rule by personal writ, detests dissent, and covets cult-building of the ‘India is Indira, Indira is India’ resonance. Modi’s fawning votaries have often done better; one of them called him the avatar of god. And how must you behave when an avatar has put you in office?
But no, we shouldn't pre-judge Draupadi Murmu, or judge her by who brings her into office. We must expect of our would-be president just what the citizenry of a vibrant, pluralist, democratic republic should.
sankarshan.thakur@abp.in
