Presidential polls: What lies beneath

In every sense of the word, this has been the most exciting and eventful President’s election we’ve had, possibly surpassing 1969 (in the scale of ruptures and re-alignments that may potentially ensue) when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi sought to re-fashion political contours on her way to political hegemony by getting her handpicked party nominee to defeat the official Congress candidate.

This time round, marking a first, there was also possibly a hidden unwholesome side to the race for the house on Raisina Hill which hinted at the playing out of nether politics.
The story so far is that the process to elect the Rashtrapati has split the BJP-led NDA in two, raising serious doubts about the saffron-oriented alliance’s capacity to challenge the ruling UPA, which, all were agreed, was gasping for air. To what extent this leaves the field clear for the regional players (the putative rise of the Third or Fourth Front) can only be speculated, but the Congress — which pulls the UPA handcart — suddenly looks less spooked than it did even a fortnight ago. The party may not have recouped its élan, for that will take some serious heavy-lifting on its part, but it seems to have regained some of its poise.
The run-up to the President’s election has also divided the Left, and this helps to thin the anti-Congress space (at the Centre and in West Bengal), especially when seen in conjunction with the imperiousness with which Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) publicly asked questions of the BJP about its future plans from the once proud seat of the Magadh empire.
Recent events have naturally aroused in the public mind doubts about the state of the existing alliances and what the future may hold. No group looks especially strong or able, and the way out may be for the people to step in themselves in order to infuse some stability — spine, really — into the political set-up through their voting behaviour, by eschewing fractured verdicts as much as possible.
The question for them to ponder has to be: why can’t state or region aspirations not define or inform India’s national design, or dovetail into it, instead of standing out as a disconnect or impediment, as has been the case for about a year on issue after issue? Are the country’s core and the peripheries to be at loggerheads only because political parties love that game even when people don’t benefit from it?
It is the President’s election of 2012 that has brought these and related issues to the fore, leading to disjunctions and debates in every state and every constituency. The presidential poll process has also stimulated the articulation of some aspirations (a regional party Prime Minister), but not yet to a political exposition that may meet with public expectations.
That will probably happen in the fullness of time — as elections to a clutch of state Assemblies, including Gujarat (which the BJP and other parties view as a possible turning point as it is intertwined with the fate of Narendra Modi, the forceful but deeply divisive chief minister of the state), approach later this year and last-lap preparations come to be made for the big event, the next Lok Sabha election which is due in 2014 but may well be upon us sooner.
These open questions arising, coincidentally, from the process of the President’s election — which is unusual — were not the only issues that were thrown up. There was suppressed politics too regrettably, and whispers. The upshot of the dynamics of this, had it succeeded, could easily have been to destabilise the polity.
The way of this would have been to force fresh elections on the country by secretly getting some UPA parties and allies to vote against the UPA candidate for President, make the rival nominee victorious and, as the final act, bring together as a phalanx the parties that thwarted the government’s presidential hopeful in a bid to bring down the government on the floor of Parliament.
Apprehensions about this secret recipe came to be voiced when some, who were thought to be on the UPA side, publicly flaunted the name of a former President (who might conceivably have attracted adherents across political divides) as a possible candidate, exactly as Sushma Swaraj, BJP’s Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, had done just weeks earlier.
After Ms Swaraj’s idea was publicly repudiated by a close ally, Nitish Kumar, nothing more was heard of it until former President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s name was whipped out by Mamata Banerjee and Mulayam Singh Yadav in a surprise act, creating a sensation. Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy, who has lately joined the NDA, spoke of his urgent efforts to bring Dr Kalam on board. Who had tasked him is unclear, but BJP stalwart L.K. Advani’s name was suggested by a television channel.
In a desperate move, Mr Advani indeed made three phone calls to Dr Kalam in a single day to urge him to contest when it appeared that the latter was no longer receptive to the idea. Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat also publicly canvassed for the former President. It is hard to recall if a leader of this “cultural organisation” had endorsed a name for the presidency in the past.
Arguably the most noteworthy aspect of this operation was that the Bihar chief minister — who had objected to Dr Kalam’s candidature from the start — had been completely bypassed, although the JD(U) is arguably the BJP’s most critical ally. Mr Kumar was evidently not privy to moves to present the former President as a candidate. It is this that points to secret manoeuvres with a view to prematurely eject the UPA from power. Defeating a government openly is a legitimate political preoccupation in a democracy, but the use of what look like subterranean moves harms the system.
As matters stand, Pranab Mukherjee, a most deserving candidate, has as good as won the presidency. But the man of the moment is Mr Kumar, whose strong political intervention helped ease pressures on the polity.