- As the presidential poll nears, everyone has an axe to grind
Sunanda K. Datta-Ray
A story doing the rounds last week had
Mamata Banerjee as Pranab Mukherjee’s ardent secret champion. Determined
that a Bengali should at last hold one of the country’s two top jobs,
she suggested Manmohan Singh for the presidency in the certain knowledge
that it would leave the field open for Mukherjee to become prime
minister. When that gambit failed, she appeared to resolutely oppose
Mukherjee’s presidential candidature, again in the certain knowledge
that nothing else would force Sonia Gandhi to swallow her reservations
and belatedly nominate him.
So much for
fanciful fiction. The serious aspect is that the decoy duck in that
story had the good sense in real life finally to withdraw. But the
exhibition A.P.J. Abdul Kalam made of himself justifies a constitutional
amendment forbidding former presidents trying to recapture the past. No
one expects such undignified hankering from Mukherjee who is diminished
by being called Bengal’s candidate. He is a “son of the world” as
Banerjee said on television, though it was not taken then as a
compliment. Not that kinship ties don’t matter. Many a truth is spoken
in jest and there may have been something in that other tale about
Prafulla Sen turning up at Promode Dasgupta’s obsequies with the
explanation that he tried not to miss any hatches, matches and
despatches among fellow Baidyas. Judging by the division in the Marxist
politburo over supporting Mukherjee, Dasgupta would probably have done
the same for Sen. Jayaprakash Narayan’s detractors accused him of
being casteist about the landowners whose districts he plunged into the
chaos of total revolution.
Purno A.
Sangma’s claim to be a tribal candidate is an explicit assertion of
identity politics that disdains euphemisms like “minority section” or
“forward castes”. But which tribes will rally behind him? Presumably,
his own Garo hills will. So, perhaps, will neighbouring Nagas and Mizos.
But will the Santhals of Odisha or Jharkand’s Oraons? Are the Todas of
Ootacamund interested in his candidature? Have the Jarawa and Onge in
the Andamans or the Shompens in the Nicobar Islands even heard of the
office he is contesting? Sangma might get some additional support from
Roman Catholics in the northeastern hills but, by the same token, not
from Baptists and Presbyterians. India’s tribes are as much a patchwork
quilt as India itself.
Instinctive
loyalty will be muted to some extent since legislators and not ordinary
citizens vote for the president. But even this supposedly elite group
understands traditional networks and hierarchies better than borrowed
political theories and institutions. Western abstractions like democracy
become meaningful only when presented in indigenous terms. Saudi Arabia
hardly qualifies for government of, for and by the people, which our
theoreticians revere as the hallmark of democracy, but when an American
expressed surprise at a fellaheen addressing Ibn Saud, the
kingdom’s founder, as “brother”, the king replied, “Can a man insult me
by calling me his mother’s son?” That affirmation of the essential
brotherhood of man can underpin democracy more effectively than
Westminster rituals that make for token representative government.
It’s mainly
because Western terms and concepts are so superficially applied that a
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh spokesman can get away with a monstrosity
like “Hindutva is the true synonym for secularism”. The word
secularism has no resonance for the unenlightened masses. Bigots at a
higher level who exploit popular faith and ignorance twist and turn it
in a Humpty Dumpty act so that secularism means exactly what they want
it to mean. The term “pseudo-secularism” Lal Krishna Advani coined, and
which his acolytes mindlessly parrot, is a prime example of this
semantic jugglery. Anyone who shudders at the vision of Narendra Modi
trying to claw his way up the Bharatiya Janata Party ladder is denounced
as a pseudo-secularist. No one, least of all Advani and his imitators,
has ever bothered to define what the term means. This is the cunning of
political semantics. Someone who is pseudo is an imposter, a fraud,
whose motives are dishonest and who must, therefore, be silenced. If
anyone queries the secular part of the term, he is presented with the
RSS’s morally deceitful and linguistically absurd claim that only
champions of Hindutva are true secularists. All others are pseudo-secularists.
In making an
issue of secularism in the current debate, Nitish Kumar may well be
trying to advance his own fortunes. Nevertheless, what he says is
unexceptionable. Secularism, social justice and democracy are three
props of what is aptly called raj dharma. They are essential
qualities for harmoniously governing a country of more than a crore of
people of diverse faiths, cultures, languages and ethnicities, to say
nothing of extreme disparities of social, educational and financial
standing. Those among the chattering classes who may be dazzled by
propaganda about the Modi miracle in Gujarat and swallow hook, line and
sinker the meaningless cliché that he has “outgrown the state” should
understand that raj dharma is not a devious scheme to suppress
Hindus or pamper Muslims. It’s the only practical formula to provide
fair governance to all.
Economic
growth is meaningless without social stability. There can be no peace
if, for instance, a tribal prime minister mounts a pogrom against
non-tribals. Or, if policemen under a Muslim prime minister remain
impervious to Muslim mobs butchering Hindus. India’s demographic variety
allows many such combinations and permutations. All would be equally
dreadful for the country if the man at the top is a narrow-minded
sectarian with loyalty only to one group. Secular in the Indian context
need not be irreligious. It’s enough to be strictly impartial.
But why does
one think of these permanencies of governance when a largely ceremonial
incumbent with a tenure of only five years is being elected? The
long-term answer is that with Mukherjee in Rashtrapati Bhavan, the
presidency itself may be in for some reinvention. The immediate
provocation is the nature of the contest in which the candidate is one
of the least important factors. Everyone has his eye on something else.
For many it’s the Gujarat state elections, the 2014 national elections,
hopes of bringing it forward to benefit some fringe parties, or the
possibility of fostering a third front. Some seek advantages for a
state, some for a community. Others are bent on settling old scores,
splitting a party, or doing in a rival, actual or potential. The
deafening roar of axes being ground permits no sane discussion of the
candidate’s merits and demerits.
India is
poised on the brink of interesting times. No one need any longer fear
scandals over lavish bungalows on encroached military land that a
percipient member of the constituent assembly, K.T. Shah, anticipated
when he proposed “a pension, or retirement allowance” so that the
president would “be free from temptation, from want, and from penury”.
But we can expect a new and invigorating vitality. It’s impossible to
think of Rashtrapati Bhavan not being a centre of political activity as
long as a president worth the name occupies it. King George VI’s offer
(mentioned in my last column) to become “president of the Indian
republic” might have provided a respite from politics. But even if that
impossible suggestion had been accepted, imagination boggles at what the
local, presumably Indian, representatives of a distant head of state
might have got up to.
For all that
he is a dyed-in-the-wool Congressman in spite of having flirted with
two other parties, Mukherjee can be expected to live up to the demand by
another constituent assembly member, Tajamul Husain, that “the
president must not be a mere tool in the hands of the majority party”.
It will suffice if between the two extremes of Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed’s
subservience and Zail Singh’s recalcitrance, the next incumbent insists
on the British constitutional monarch’s right to be consulted, to
encourage and to warn.
sunandadr@yahoo.co.in
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