Ram Nath Kovind is well positioned to defend the Constitution

Ram Nath Kovind elected as 14th President of India

Ram Nath Kovind’s overwhelming victory in the presidential polls offers a unique opportunity to test the head of state’s role as a defender of constitutional values. Mr Kovind’s detractors have suggested that, as with some previous presidential appointments, his credentials as a ruling party stalwart and his Dalit status will encourage him to conform to a template that sees the President’s role as purely ceremonial and essentially subordinate to the executive, the casualty of Indira Gandhi’s notorious Emergency-era 42nd Amendment of 1976. They would be wrong for two reasons. 

First, as a lawyer who has practised in the high court and the Supreme Court — he was the government’s standing counsel for more than a decade — and with considerable experience of the inner workings of Indian democracy as a two-term Rajya Sabha MP (Member of Parliament) and a stint as Governor of Bihar, Mr Kovind, who will become the 14th President of the Republic of India, is well positioned to appreciate the duties implicit in his position. In his long public life, he most certainly had a blemish-free ledger of personal or family integrity. The second reason is embedded in history. Though all regimes since the Emergency have sought to impose South Block’s dominance over Rashtrapati Bhavan, it says much for India’s argumentative democracy that several Presidents, including some who were considered beholden to prime ministers at the time, have tested the limits of their constitutional powers in unexpected ways. For instance, at the height of his stand-off with Rajiv Gandhi, whom he had helped to power after his mother’s assassination, Zail Singh exercised veto power over a postal Bill that would have given the government sweeping powers to intercept postal communication. 

Before that was the precedent established by Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy in making the appointment of the prime minister subject to conditions. When the Janata Party led by the then prime minister Morarji Desai split, Reddy asked Charan Singh to prove his majority in the House — that he failed to do so was another matter. Then again, K R Narayanan, the first Dalit President, left a distinguished precedent in the exercise of presidential powers by declining to rubber-stamp the dismissal of the Kalyan Singh government in Uttar Pradesh and, initially, the Rabri Devi government in Bihar. Pranab Mukherjee leveraged the authority of his position to speak out against the climate of intolerance fostered by political contestations of secularism. 

The scope for interpreting the spirit of India’s written Constitution, thus, remains as wide as it did when Rajendra Prasad, India’s first President, tested the powers of the post. In a young democracy, the role of the President retains a significance beyond the nominal taking of the Republic Day salute and reading speeches in Parliament approved by the executive. Mr Kovind’s victory over a fellow Dalit and former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar was considered a foregone conclusion owing to adroit mobilisation by the ruling coalition. His two-thirds majority suggests a considerable degree of cross-voting and, by extension, acceptability across party lines. His value as an essential lever of checks and balances in India’s fragile democracy, thus, is strong.