By Anirudh Prakash
The President Ms. Pratibha Patil will be demitting office in July, and the UPA government will not be able to have another candidate of its choice in the Rashtrapati Bhawan as political equations have changed over the years. This time around the next President won’t be someone useless, someone blind to corrupt family members and someone whose only qualification is her comfort level with the leader of the coalition running India. With all due respect to the Constitutional post, the person occupying it is a travesty, and certainly no patch on the person who occupied it before her.
Some would suggest that Vice President Hamid Ansari should be elevated though they would suggest that not because of his deep learning or wide experience but because of their outdated notion that his identity as a Muslim will galvanise co-religionists to make Rahul Gandhi our next prime minister. Firstly, the tradition of elevating vice-presidents was discarded in the last century.
Secondly, as the recent BMC elections in Mumbai and UP assembly elections have shown, Muslims (like many non-Muslim voters) have deserted the Congress party, simply because it is all talk and no action.
Thirdly, our Vice President is not a political man, and now that the Centre has weakened and the states are asserting themselves, the regional leaders will ensure that a political person is chosen as our next President. This is because everyone expects that, barring some game-changing major incident, the 2014 Lok Sabha elections will produce a result that will require a political President.
There are some people who will whine and moan about having a non-political President, pointing to the enduring popularity of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. (There are some who engage in shameless self-promotion the way a certain software industry titan did last time around. Fortunately, he was ignored by the political class.)
According to urban legend, Dr. Kalam did his duty to the nation by refusing to swear in a certain person as prime minister (there were, it is said, strong objections from the armed forces and the intelligence agencies) and so he had to swear in Dr. Manmohan Singh instead. I’m not sure about that, but my own theory is that each individual has their one moment of greatness in their lifetime, and that’s it. And so Dr. Kalam will not be returning to Rashtrapati Bhawan (he’s too dignified to do so).
So who will it be? As always it will be a last minute surprise but one thing is certain. It will not be dictated by the Congress party. The main reason is the arithmetic: it controls too few votes in the state assemblies and it is in a minority in the Rajya Sabha.
However, a party with creativity and energy need not force its way in such an election, but could set the agenda for the election, or at least initiate an open dialogue with other political parties/formations. The Congress party leadership, however, may not recover in time from its UP debacle in order to plan its strategy for the Presidential election. The wipe-out in UP is perhaps just sinking in for Rahul and Priyanka; the family could very well be in low spirits for some time to come. Their senior ministers and party colleagues are no help either: the squabbling between heavyweights like Pranab Mukherjee and P. Chidambaram, or between the old guard (like Mukherjee) and the youngsters (don’t laugh, that’s what the likes of Kapil Sibal think of themselves), or between clean (A.K. Antony) and Chidambaram; all this will worsen. Such a mess is not conducive to planning a successful Presidential election.
So the initiative will be with the non-Congress chief ministers who have already made their mark by postponing the start of the misbegotten National Counter-Terrorism Centre. It’s clear that several (if not all) of these chief ministers will use the central government’s weakened position to extort the money their respective state’s bad financial management requires. They will stamp their authority with the selection of a President. While much will be made of West Bengal’s Mamata Banerjee having her say, or Tamil Nadu’s J. Jayalalithaa, or even the UP CM’s dad, Mulayam Singh, I think the person who will be running the show from behind the scenes will be a man to whom all three of the aforementioned will defer (for a variety of reasons, including support during their respective electoral comebacks): the Maharashtra strongman, Sharad Pawar. He’s a man who keeps his cards close to his chest.
If the non-Congress leaders wanted to really throw the UPA off-balance, they could do worse than to suggest that they would support Dr. Manmohan Singh as the next President. Congress chief Sonia Gandhi has already ruled that out in her post-UP poll press conference, when she said he would stay until 2014. I’m sure Dr. Singh too wants to hang around till the end of this Parliament’s natural life (or else he would have resigned long ago). Possibly they need more time to figure out how to have Rahul lead the party in 2014. A suggestion by the combined non-Congress that it would support Dr. Singh would throw a spanner in the works because the potential successors from within the party are busy squabbling, as mentioned earlier and also because, Dr. Singh, seeing the writing on the wall may decide that fleeing to Rashtrapati Bhawan is the best option for him.
But of course this isn’t going to happen. The best part of the Presidential elections is the complete unpredictability of it. And the Congress can do nothing about it. INAV