Opinion - Editorials   

Buoyed by regional sentiment

With the Shiv Sena invoking Marathi sentiments and breaking ranks with the National Democratic Alliance to support Pratibha Patil, the candidate of the United Progressive Alliance and the Left parties, the outcome of the Presidential election is doubly certain. At a time when the NDA needed to win new friends to ensure the success of Vice President Bhairon Singh Shekhawat, the announcement of the Sena chief Bal Thackeray that his party would seize the opportunity to get a Marathi elected as President and vote for Ms. Patil effectively ends the Presidential election as a contest. The newly formed third front, the United National Progressive Alliance, which tried to infuse winning-post excitement into the contest by proposing A.P.J. Abdul Kalam for a second term, cannot lift the fortunes of Mr. Shekhawat. By asking him to run as an Independent, the NDA was hoping to win for Mr. Shekhawat the support of the amorphous third front. But the tactic backfired. The NDA, while still unsure of support from the members of the UNPA, ended up alienating the Sena, one of its key constituents. True, the Sena might have been compelled to support Ms. Patil because of the Marathi factor, but by not putting up Mr. Shekhawat as its own candidate, the Bharatiya Janata Party, which heads the NDA, gave Mr. Thackeray a chance to ridicule his candidature. Mr. Shekhawat did himself no favour by offering to withdraw in the event of Mr. Kalam deciding to contest, and he was thus unable to shed the impression that he was a candidate without a winning chance.

The UNPA is now without a candidate after Mr. Kalam corrected his earlier misjudgment in agreeing to be a candidate if there was “certainty” and sensibly stepped back from the contest. It cannot, without creating internal dissensions, overtly support the candidature of Mr. Shekhawat with his BJP roots. Although some of the UNPA members — such as the Telugu Desam Party, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, and the Indian National Lok Dal — have at one point or another allied with the BJP, the Samajwadi Party, the biggest party in the front, is firmly opposed to extending any form of support to Mr. Shekhawat. But whatever its decision, the UNPA cannot hope to make much of an impact in the Presidential election. The gap between the two candidates is much wider than its numbers could possibly bridge. The country is thus poised to have its first woman-President in Ms. Patil. The Presidency, even in a parliamentary form of government, is much more than ceremonial and symbolic, and Ms. Patil can be expected to bring to it an understanding of the constitutional functions as well as the limits.

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

Buoyed by regional sentiment
A demonstration of statesmanship
Improving legal education in India
Flaw in creationists’ argument
Corrections and clarifications
Crazy about English in China
Iraq war’s casus belli — peak oil
Africa united in rejecting U.S. request for military HQ
Regionalism galore
Kalam’s ‘no’
On malnutrition
Sunita’s record
Humour on page 1
SC recommendation

Copyright © 2007, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu