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An open letter to Bhairon Singh Shekhawat

DEAR MR. Vice-President,

For almost five years you presided over the Rajya Sabha with great competence, becoming dignity, and commendable neutrality. Those of us whose professional responsibilities include reporting Parliament know how at times some of the more boisterous members of the Bharatiya Janata Party were cross with you because you would not tilt in their favour.

You have a right to feel that you are eminently qualified to be President. Perhaps you feel the nation owes you a stint in the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Perhaps you feel that hard-headed partisans, belonging to the Congress and the Left, are denying you an office you think you have earned. You even visited Jyoti Basu and were handed a rebuff.

There is no denying that you would make a good President under our constitutional scheme. Any Prime Minister would be grateful for the kind of advice and counsel you can offer.

Perhaps you feel that as President you would be occupying a pulpit that will afford many opportunities to set the nation's agenda, just as A.P.J. Abdul Kalam has been able to do. You are perhaps entitled to believe that the country needs to gain from your experience in Rajasthan and your empathy for the poor. In these times, when the political class has, by and large, not given a good account of itself, your very political persona makes public affairs a noble engagement.

Yet public life is not entirely a matter of honourable sentiments or honest ambitions. For better or for worse, we have a system of electing the head of the republic and in that system it is the parties that get to decide who they want as President. No one has been taken in by the fiction of you being an "independent" candidate.

You know all this very well. Yet you appear to have placed yourself at the disposal of the professional intriguers and cussedness-mongers. That too at the end of a distinguished career. You will recall that these very schemers had last November travelled up Raisina Hill to offer a second term to Mr. Kalam. Instead of starting a process of building a consensus in your favour, these leaders were trying to outwit the United Progressive Alliance establishment.

You do know you do not have the numbers, yet those who wish you well are afraid that your advisers and handlers will not allow you to retire gracefully from the contest.

A ruling party or combine has a right to get its "man" elevated to the Rashtrapati Bhavan. This is not a perverse restatement of the "might is right" axiom, but the proposition is central to the very architecture of power envisaged in the Constitution.

The Constitution does not envisage the Rashtrapati Bhavan as a rival centre of power, not even a rival source of influence. If an opposition party or a combination of parties can ensure the victory of someone other than the one favoured by the ruling combine, then it would amount to a vote of no-confidence against the incumbent government.

Given the numbers in the Electoral College, it is obvious you cannot win without generating needless bitterness in the body politic. Your presence in the contest will unleash an entirely unhelpful cold war between the ruling combine and the BJP-led opposition. You will become the cause for friction and antagonism and thereby deny the very essence of your political legacy. If you do manage to win, your friends and allies will insist on reading into your victory a vote of no-confidence in the Manmohan Singh Government, and instigate you to act in a manner that is not permissible in the constitutional arrangement.

Somehow your managers have come to convince themselves that your very presence in the contest will induce voters to abandon their party loyalties in your favour. They glibly talk of cross voting in your favour. This prospect is being characterised as a tribute to your personality.

Please do not be taken in by this insincere talk. Cross voting is nothing but another unclean political act. Even the noblest man gets sullied if he encourages unclean practices. Must the highest office in the republic be subjected to less-than-honourable methods?

As the principal opposition group, the National Democratic Alliance is under no obligation to give a walkover to the ruling combine or return the Congress stance in the 2002 presidential contest; but it cannot be based on a strategy to try to suborn party loyalties. It would be a very sad day if the contest for the highest office in the land were to get mired in the low calculations of money and caste.

Your candidature has become a pawn in the game of tired old political leaders who have taken their defeat in the May 2004 Lok Sabha elections with ill grace. They are now trying to use the Presidential contest to undo that verdict, instead of waiting till May 2009. Must you allow yourself to become an excuse for these discredited leaders to play out their bitterness?I do not know if you will be left alone by your "well-wishers" to take an honourable decision.

Respectfully,

Harish Khare

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