Redemption On Raisina Hill

AT the stroke of the midnight hour on Tuesday, 21st October, when those disillusioned with the televised chaos in the UP assembly were returning despondently to their beds, the head of state was awake. Seventy-six-year-old K.R. Narayanan, India's scholar-President, former diplomat, member of Parliament and vice-chancellor, had been poring over the S.R. Bommai judgement since morning. One week away from his birthday, the staff at Rashtrapati Bhavan were busy with preparations for various functions. But the President had locked himself away, immersed in his readings.

He was examining the constitutional provisions for the dismissal of a state assembly and, after the lamp was switched on in his study at twilight, it continued to burn late into the night. Earlier in the day, when BJP leaders had met him in his chambers, he had heard out their protests in silence. All he had said was: "I will act in accordance with the law." At 10.30 pm, he had telephoned attorney general Ashok Desai. "I don't want to know anything else, Mr Desai," the President said, "nothing about politics or anything else. I only want you to tell me, what is the law?"

The ebullient attorney general, scion of an illustrious legal family from Mumbai, had gathered up his papers and raced to his car. As he sped up Raisina Hill, Desai scanned his files. Not just the Bommai judgement but even the Sarkaria Commission had recommended that the decision to declare President's rule in a state had to be mandated on the floor of the House. He arrived at Rashtrapati Bhavan to find that the President knew the Bommai judgement almost by heart. Nevertheless, he seemed anxious for Desai's views. Bending over the table, the two men talked into the night—the LSE-educated head of state and the bar-at-law from England, both acutely conscious of the contradictions of managing "Westminister in Bharat", both political theorists for whom the rule of law must be the final achievement of a people's government. President's rule in this instance, Desai said, would almost certainly be held unconstitutional by the courts.

The S.R. Bommai judgement held that President's rule was subject to judicial review. Further, recommendation of President's rule in the case of the UP assembly was not constitutional because: a) violence in the House could not be equated with a breakdown of the constitutional machinery; and b) President's rule had to be ratified by Parliament. After Desai left, the President went back to his papers and the light in his study burned on.

At 2.30 am, home secretary K. Padmanabhaiah entered Rashtrapati Bhavan with the Cabinet's decision. Harassed and sleepless, Padmanabhaiah was, in his last few days before retirement, faced with the unenviable task of ending his tenure with a decision that had already been described as a shameful subversion of democracy. He presented the Cabinet decision to the President. Within only half-an-hour, Kocheril Raman Narayanan had made up his mind. He withheld his assent and sent the Cabinet recommendation back, the first time that a matter relating to Article 356 had been refused the presidential assent. Rashtrapati Bhavan had spoken and declared, against the wishes of the very government that had supported his own candidature, that its decision was wrong.

 "The President's act exerted tremendous moral pressure on the cabinet," says constitutional expert Subhash C. Kashyap. Yet, Kashyap points out that activist presidents are not new in India. Rajendra Prasad had taken a stand against Jawaharlal Nehru himself and refused to give his assent to the Hindu Code Bill. Venkataraman had sent back a unanimous decision of both Houses allowing MPs to avail of pension after only a year in Parliament. And Giani Zail Singh had refused to give presidential assent to the Postal Bill, again passed by the House. "The President in India has not always been a rubber stamp," says Kashyap. "And the power of the office will only grow in an era of weak, power-hungry coalition governments."

"We have every reason to be proud of our democracy," the President had said in his 15th August speech. "But we will have to strain our every nerve to purify the processes of politics...sheer opportunism and value-less politics have taken the place of principles and idealism." Narayanan, recalls Eric Gonsalves, a former diplomat who served with him in London and Delhi, was someone who would never compromise on his fundamental principles. "He does his duty and he does it quietly. Someone like R. Venkataraman would probably have given a press conference after this decision, but Narayanan just went about his normal business," Gonsalves says.

A.K. Damodaran describes him as a "typical '40s intellectual", an old school Nehruvian democratic socialist, more comfortable with socialism than any other doctrine, moderate, a man of letters and like all India's early rationalists, committed to the law. "Also," adds Damodaran, "nobody knows that he is an expert on the Indo-Pak border question. In fact, his friends are disappointed that he hasn't written a book!" Narayanan would never behave like a rubber stamp, says his old journalist friend Madhavan Kutty—he is humble but believes very deeply in doing what is right. "During the Ottapalam elections, he never bad-mouthed his opponents, was always gracious, yet he won," he recalls.

Today the office of the President, says an old colleague, is as impartial and as fearless as the first draftsmen of the Constitution intended it to be. Rashtrapati Bhavan was once the Viceroy's house but 50 years after the sun set on that outpost of Her Majesty's Government, it now rises every day on an old-fashioned servant of the Indian people.