A landmark in Indian politics

POLITICS: Pratibha Patil, who has been elected India’s first woman president, was by no means a unanimous choice for the role.

Long associated with India’s Gandhi dynasty, Mrs Patil was a low-profile governor of the state of Rajasthan before emerging as the favoured presidential candidate of Sonia Gandhi, leader of India’s Congress Party.

Her candidacy failed to temper a bitter disagreement over the presidency between Congress, which leads a coalition Government, and opposition parties.

Although opposing parties traditionally agree to a consensus presidential candidate, Mrs Patil did face an electoral opponent - sitting Vice-President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

Correspondents say she will need a deft touch to straddle the often bitter divides of Indian party politics. Born in 1934 in India’s western state of Maharashtra, Mrs Patil has had a long and largely low-key political career.

A lawyer by training, she joined Congress in the early 1960s before spending some two decades in Maharashtra’s state legislature.

Next she moved into national politics, sitting in both the lower and upper chambers of India’s national parliament before leaving the political stage in the late 1990s.

Her appointment as governor of Rajasthan in 2004 saw her become the first woman governor in the north-western state.

But decades of apparently unswerving loyalty to Congress - and, more specifically, to the Gandhis - assured Mrs Patil of a hostile reception from some quarters on her return to the national stage.

She came in for heavy criticism from opposition figures and in the Indian media after emerging as a candidate for president.

Some criticised Mrs Patil’s character; others highlighted her time away from high-level politics.

The BJP attempted to portray her as unsuitable for the post of president, revealing that police were investigating both her husband and her brother in connection with the (unrelated) deaths of a teacher and a party worker.

Media reports focused on some of her public statements, including a 1975 suggestion that people with hereditary diseases should be sterilised.

But the reports were dismissed as “mud-slinging”, and as the vote approached Mrs Patil stridently rejected the criticism, insisting all accusations against her were politically-motivated.

Instead her supporters suggested Mrs Patil’s election would prove to be a landmark for women in a country where millions routinely face violence, discrimination and poverty.

Patil was a table tennis champion who studied law before taking to politics to build a career that is set to catapult her into Rashtrapati Bhavan as India’s first woman president. She was an athletic teenager when India became independent.

She studied both in Jalgaon and Mumbai to earn post-graduate degrees in arts and law, and practised as an advocate in Jalgaon. She was a champion in table tennis during college days, winning shields in inter-college tournaments.

Social work drew her to politics, and the Congress was the first choice in a state where the party held sway. She was elected to the Maharashtra assembly in 1962 for the first time. A Rajput, she married Devisingh Ransingh Shekhawat, a Maratha of Rajasthani origin, three years later.

From 1972 to 1978, the soft-spoken Pratibha Patil was cabinet minister in Maharashtra four times holding such portfolios as social welfare, public health, prohibition, rehabilitation and cultural affairs, and education.

When the Congress got dethroned in Maharashtra in 1979, she became the opposition leader in the assembly and came to be seen as staunch loyalist of the Gandhi family.

Pratibha Patil returned as cabinet minister in 1982, heading the urban development and housing ministry, and also held charge of civil supplies and social welfare.

She was elected to the Rajya Sabha, parliament’s upper house, in 1985, after nearly a quarter century of state politics.

She became deputy chairperson of the Rajya Sabha from 1986 for two years. She was elected to the Lok Sabha in 1991 in a general election marred by the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

One of her most noteworthy actions as governor was her refusal to sign the controversial Rajasthan Freedom of Religion Bill that banned religious conversions. She argued that it contained provisions that directly or indirectly affected fundamental rights related to religious freedom.

Her husband Devisingh’s family had migrated to Amravati in Vidarbha region more than a century ago. They have a son and a daughter. Pratibha Patil headed the Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee (PCC) from 1989-90.

Pratibha Patil has been involved in the cooperative movement in Maharashtra.

She also set up an industrial training school for the blind besides starting sewing classes for poor and needy women.

She set up hostels for working women in New Delhi and Mumbai, an engineering college for rural youths in Jalgaon, a sugar factory also in Jalgaon and also a cooperative bank for women in Jalgaon.

A widely travelled person, she has been part of various Indian delegations that went abroad. She attended the International Council of Social Welfare Conference in Nairobi and Puerto Rico and led a delegation to Austria on status of women.

She was a member of a Congress delegation to Bulgaria in 1985 and attended the Commonwealth Presiding Officers Conference in London in 1988. She has also travelled to China to attend the World Women’s Conference.

(BBC/Hindustan Times)

Looking ahead

Everyone knew it was a one horse race. There is nothing wrong in guaranteed losers going all out to make a foregone conclusion look like a real contest.

There is also nothing particularly wrong in exploiting weaknesses in the opposing camp, seeing that due diligence does not seem to have been done before nominating a person who was guaranteed, by the arithmetic of the electoral college, to be India’s 12th President. (The 2007 presidential election was actually the 13th in the series that began in 1952, but Dr. Rajendra Prasad was elected twice, making him the only President who was allowed two terms.)

But what was terribly wrong was for the Bharatiya Janata Party and the National Democratic Alliance to resort to a smear campaign of unprecedented viciousness, combining a modicum of fact with a maximum of falsehoods and dirty tricks; and for sections of the news media to participate in this intensely partisan propaganda.

Now that Pratibha Patil has been elected President of India with a higher margin of victory than was predicted from the party alignments - she won 2931 votes to her rival Bhairon Singh Shekhawat’s 1449 in the electoral college, which meant that the winning difference was a massive 306,810 in vote value - the extreme bitterness that characterised the campaign should be left behind.

The issue is no longer whether Ms. Patil is the right person for the Rashtrapati Bhavan. It is how she should conduct herself institutionally as the next President of the Republic.

Since these days all kinds of things are expected and indeed demanded from the President, it is necessary to be absolutely clear about his - and now, for the first time in India, her - role and functions in the constitutional scheme.

The office is high on ceremony and symbolism but strictly circumscribed in powers and functions - placing her or him on a par with the British sovereign, more or less.

In the Indian context, the head of state may be politically elected but the restraints imposed by the constitutional office are the same. Walter Bagehot’s classic exposition of the role in The English Constitution, which is as relevant today as it was in 1867, is that “the Sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights - the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn. And a king of great sense and sagacity would want no others. He would find that his having no others would enable him to use these with singular effect.”

What is more, the strictly circumscribed constitutional role requires that the right to advise and the right to warn must be exercised strictly in private and in confidence - and not through public statements. This restraint required by the head of state is not a mere constitutional formality but is based on sound democratic principles.

In the first place, in a parliamentary democracy, a non-executive head of state must not, through statements critical of the representative government, which has a greater democratic legitimacy, place herself or himself in conflict with it.

Secondly, the head of state must at all times appear non-partisan and remain above the fray when controversial and divisive questions are being debated in the political sphere; and must avoid any public statement that could give comfort to one side or the other.

But we need not rely only on Bagehot. “Under a parliamentary system of government,” India’s outstanding constitutional thinker, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, explained to the Constituent Assembly on December 30, 1948, “there are only two prerogatives which the King or the Head of the State may exercise.

One is the appointment of the Prime Minister and the other is the dissolution of Parliament. With regard to the Prime Minister, it is not possible to avoid vesting the discretion in the President.”

He also clarified, in response to a question, that “the position of the Governor is exactly the same as the position of the President.” Supreme Court rulings are clear on these points. This newspaper has consistently, over a long period, advocated such a conception of the office.

It can be demonstrated that virtually every case of presidential faltering - fortunately, such cases are few and far between - has been a case of overreach, an aborted attempt to exercise powers not vested in the constitutional office and not sustainable in a parliamentary democracy.

It follows that those who conducted a near-hysterical campaign to the effect that Pratibha Patil would be a ‘rubber-stamp’ President have been barking up the wrong tree. What India decidedly does not need is an activist head of state who dreams of breaking away from the constitutional restraints.

Thankfully, the election of the Vice-President promises to be free from nasty controversies of the kind that marred the presidential campaign. The ex-officio and substantive function of the office is presiding over the Rajya Sabha - in other words, keeping its proceedings in reasonable order.

Mohammad Hamid Ansari, the candidate of the United Progressive Alliance and the Left parties, is a man of undisputed integrity, and impeccable professional and intellectual credentials.

This time the initiative was taken by the Left, especially the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which took care to do due diligence. The choice of Mr. Ansari, a former diplomat who chairs the National Minorities Commission, has met with a positive response in the media and polity.

Given the numbers in the electoral college, which comprises all the Members of Parliament, including nominated M.P.s, the vice-presidential election too will be a one horse race. The BJP and the NDA now have a real opportunity to demonstrate that, under the changed circumstances, they can behave better than they did during the presidential contest.

(The Hindu July 22)