My Rupee's Worth

Is it not ironical that a contest in which all the parties swore by consensus has turned out to be the nastiest and bitterest in recent memory? The august presence of Atal Behari Vajpayee and Chandrababu Naidu and Sonia Gandhi and Mayawati at Dr Kalam’s nomination-filing hardly obscures the fact that politics, not consensus, is the real winner. Perhaps, we were all tremendously naive to hope that in India 2002, in which the country is vertically divided into the BJP vs The Rest, that agreement could be reached on a single name. Perhaps, it would have been better to jettison the charade of consensus and conduct an open, no-holds-barred election. We would at least have been spared the bogus pieties.

The future resident of Rashtrapati Bhawan, despite his eccentricities and a penchant for banality dressed up as wisdom ("the nation is bigger than the individual"), is not as simple and politically innocent as he appears to be. He has successfully risen to the top, working with a variety of regimes and ideologies. Thus, he must surely possess a talent for survival and upward mobility, which in a government job means knowing how to keep your political masters happy. This training will serve Dr Kalam well. The apprehension that tricky constitutional decisions could trip him up is possibly overstated. One understands that our future Rashtrapati is a voracious reader and listener, and his colleagues confirm his genius lies not in technical wizardry but man-management. He is, in other words, a superb manager—skills he will most certainly need in his new post.

Dr Kalam must be getting a great deal of gratuitous advice. So, here is my one rupee worth: Pick those from whom you seek expert advice most carefully. The President has to make numerous decisions on a daily basis. For many of these a precedent exists. But when both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution have to be considered, the latter is sometimes as important as the former. The letter of the Constitution should not make our President go mute. With the kind of slippery and unscrupulous governments our country is saddled with these days, the President of India must, when necessary, speak boldly in defence of the Constitution. If that means criticising your government, so be it.