I find it is cruelly ironic that the united Opposition Parliamentary Parties of India candidate Yashwant Sinha should go on ungraciously calling the ruling Party and allied political parties candidate, Smt. Droupadi Murmu, for the Presidential elections as “rubber-stamp President”.
The preeminent Party in the Opposition ranks is the Indian National Congress and it would have behooved it to step forward and advise Yashwant Sinha not to disgrace himself and the election process and not to embarrass the Opposition parties by stooping so low while trying to conquer.
Presidential election campaigns should not descend to the level and style of rowdy local municipality or raucous MLA elections where candidates engage in vulgar, low-level acrimonious assault on each other. Thankfully, Smt Murmu has had the good sense and stately self-restraint not to be provoked into retaliating in kind against Mr Sinha and has maintained admirable and stoic silence.
Who may be called a rubber-stamp President ? I propose three tests to define one: (1) Is he or she one who obediently defers to the Prime Minister’s wishes as commands? (2) Is he or she one who endorses every position, stand or enactment of the Government of the day, irrespective of its merits, and accords it assent of the President’s office ? (3) Or, is he or she one who fails to uphold the Constitution fearing a head-on collision otherwise with the Government of the day?
If the answer is Yes and Presidents meet all all three criteria above, they certainly would qualify to be called “rubber-stamp President” …. but especially none more so than the one who ticks off number (3).
Fourteen persons have served as President of India since 1947. How many of them would fit the bill according to the three criteria above? Here is my assessment.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan , the philosopher-President was known to be a Nehru’s favourite scholar-academician. Nehru threw in his entire support and influence behind getting Radhakrishnan elected to the Rashtrapathi Bhavan. The PM and Prime Minister had a cozy relationship indeed. Was Radhakrishnan a “rubber-stamp” President? Maybe yes, but not until when it came to asserting his moral prescience and influence during the crisis of the 1962 Chinese invasion of Ladakh. Radhakrishnan put his foot down and told Jawaharlal Nehru that the latter’s protege, the then Defence Minister V.K. Krishna Menon must quit accepting moral responsibility for the military debacle the Indian military had faced against the Chinese.
Was V.V. Giri a rubber-stamp President to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ? Based on all three criteria above, he certainly was one. A single famous, much published and publicised photograph of the two conferring together on an occasion speaks eloquently, far more than volumes of written history can ever possibly do, about how Giri actually kowtowed to Mrs Gandhi while he was in office. Here is that monument of a picture:
Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed is most certainly the one who perfectly fits the description of the quintessential “rubber-stamp President”. Again, no other historical record of Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed’s craven, cringing and docile submission to the will of Mrs. Gandhi can ever capture that fact than Abu’s all-time masterpiece of a cartoon published in the Indian Express. Here it is:
Then there was Sardar Zail Singh …
Singh was most well-known for his blind, unwavering and cloying loyalty to Gandhi. On his appointment as president, Singh reportedly said he would sweep Gandhi’s courtyard if she asked him to. He was expected to be … and did in fact obediently remain during Mrs. Gandhi’s lifetime at least … a true “rubber-stamp president”. The fact that Zail Singh turned suddenly from a Gandhi-family supplicant to being the bete-noir of Rajiv Gandhi as Prime Minister is an entirely different story.
Pratibha Patil …. This lady who had the distinction of being the first and to-date still the only lady President of the country was not exactly a “rubber-stamp President” in terms of the above 3 criteria but she was known to have been made President thanks largely to the beneficence and patronage of Sonia Gandhi who was the all-powerful prima donna of India politics throughout the UPA regime of 2004-2014. This old photograph of them together and the body-language each exhibits therein clearly tells a story of a rubber-stamp in the Rashtrapathi Bhavan paying tribute to the “rubber-stamp holder”.
The rubber-stamp that she truly was , Patil knew only too well how to sponge on the bread and loaves of her office like a parasitical leach while she held it for a full tenure. Her tenure was one of the most insignificant ones of all other Presidents and was more known for spending way too much of taxpayers’ money for her foreign travels. Her foreign trips with her family members, cost the exchequer as much as Rs 205 crore. She would frequently take her entire family including grandchildren for foreign holidays at government expense. As President she had transported over 150 costly gifts she had received from foreign dignitaries while in office to her homestate in Amravati after remitting office, instead of depositing them in national treasury. She was asked then to deposit them all at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. Sonia Gandhi however had along indulged Pratibha Patil because she knew she could always rely on her as a rubber-stamp.
So, the long and short of it all is this classic irony :
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, V V Giri, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, Zail Singh and Pratibha Patil were all Congress Party-sponsored candidates for the Presidential throne and they were expected by their respective master viz. the Prime Minister of the day, to serve as “rubber-stamp president” only.
The same Congress Party today however chooses, embarrassedly but without any moral compunction, to look the other way when its chosen candidate Yashwant Sinha goes around boasting that he will not be a “rubber-stamp president” if elected President … while most ungraciously and uncharitably going on to forewarn the nation that if his competitor Smt. Murmu were to ascend to the highest Constitutional office in India, she definitely would turn out to be one! How the hell do you know that Mr. Sinha? You think you’re God Almighty?!
Yashwant Sinha appears so, so un-Presidential.
And the Congress Party appears so, so hypocritical.
Sudarshan Madabushi