The virtues of obscurity

An irritated Bill Gates is believed to have once asked a pesky journalist, "If you are so smart, how come I have all the money?" India may well ask a similar question of Sonia Gandhi and her Congress party. "If you are in power, how come others get to veto you so often?" The latest veto comes over the top job in the country, that of President. It is now common knowledge that Ms Gandhi got the Congress to propose three names, one after the other. And as Bertie Wooster might have said, her coalition partners, the Left parties and the DMK turned down all three, flat as a bedspread.

It is worth noting that this would never have happened in the days of Indira Gandhi. In fact, she sabotaged her own party's presidential candidate and ensured his defeat in 1969. After which she proceeded to appoint one nondescript party hack after another to the highest office""one of them signed an illegal Emergency proclamation in 1975, before the Cabinet had approved it; another said he would sweep the floor if Mrs Gandhi asked him to. And as is typical of such elements, this one too turned and nearly sacked Rajiv Gandhi as Prime Minister before he finally laid down office and left the Constitution safer from assault. In short, who sits in Rashtrapati Bhavan is important. And it should be a matter of satisfaction if the Congress president or anyone else cannot unilaterally decide who will occupy it.

As it happens, Ms Gandhi eventually came up with a name that could only have been suggested by the official wag of the Congress party "" Pratibha Patil-Shekhawat "" because Sonia Gandhi wanted to get a Patil for the job and the BJP wanted a Shekhawat to get it. In what must be a new manifestation of the coalition dharma, everyone has got a bit of what they wanted but not in the combination that they might have wished.

The question is whether a democratic process in which all the major parties in the ruling coalition have had their say, has given the country a more satisfactory result than Indira Gandhi's imperious ways. Most people outside Maharashtra and Rajasthan would not have heard of Mrs Patil, so she is not a great choice in terms of being someone with national stature. Her being a woman is of course seen as a plus, but this is typical tokenism""India has had two Muslim presidents, and the Sachar committee's report tells us that this has meant nothing for the aam Muslim. India has also had a Dalit president, but the fate of Dalits has not improved by much, as far as anyone can tell.

Yet, Patil is commonly seen by political elements as a strong candidate, indeed a bit of a trump card that has been played. Other than the fact that she has the generally acceptable image of a politician from the old school, and that she happens to be married to a Shekhawat, her relative obscurity has worked to her advantage since she has made no enemies""which is what you would expect when someone has been in political oblivion. Yet she has long years of political experience, and some understanding of government functioning as well as of parliamentary issues, because of her stints as minister in Maharashtra and deputy chairperson of the Rajya Sabha. She also has other good credentials, such as a record of action to foster women's education and help working women.

But the most important factor must be that she has been a Gandhi loyalist for three decades""which was one of the qualifications in favour of Shivraj Patil. In other words, Ms Gandhi has got the kind of person she wants, and everyone else in the UPA is happy as well""an achievement worthy of the original Mrs Gandhi. Strange, it must be said, are the ways of Indian politics.