In the unenviable record of the United Progressive Alliance government, more and more events are taking place that are totally unprecedented in these 65 years of Independence. It started with a series of stinking scams and the consequential back-breaking inflation for the aam admi — issues that have dominated several Parliament sessions in recent years.
Never in any earlier Central government regime were Cabinet ministers first removed from the government on charges of corruption, and later, after being indicted by courts, actually incarcerated in the Tihar Jail.
In my last blog, which highlighted how the Uttar Pradesh (UP) elections were being shamelessly communalised by the Congress party, I had listed three unprecedented events in which a senior Cabinet minister, Law Minister Salman Khurshid, had first contemptuously defied the Election Commission (EC), next invited the EC’s sharp censure, and lastly, made the EC seek Rashtrapati’s immediate intervention.
Ironically, the upshot of this was a tentative move to curtail the powers of the EC in matters relating to any breach of the model code of conduct.
Happily, the unseemly fracas between the law minister and the EC came to an end, when better sense prevailed in government circles and the minister wrote the EC a letter of regret.
The latest in this sequence of first-time occurrences has been another central minister’s threat to the UP electorate: Either you elect the Congress to power in the state, or be prepared to see President’s rule inflicted on UP!
I do not recall any Central minister ever threatening President’s rule only because the electorate have not opted for the Congress party.
In the Constituent Assembly, Article 356 empowering the Union government to impose President’s rule on a state if the government in that state “cannot be carried on in accordance with the provisions of the Constitution”, had provoked several prominent members to warn the Assembly that the provision could be grossly misused by the Union government to undermine India’s federal set-up. This had made the then Law Minister Dr B R Ambedkar hold out this reassuring promise to the Constituent Assembly: “….. such articles will never be called into operation and that they would remain a dead letter.”
Dr Ambedkar’s assurance has been repeatedly violated by Congress governments. In these last sixty years since the adoption of the Constitution, far from remaining ‘a dead letter’ as
Dr Ambedkar had contemplated, Article 356 has been invoked more than 100 times, and for reasons having nothing to do with any failure of constitutional machinery. Union minister Jaiswal’s latest threat clearly falls in the same category — it is completely extraneous to the purpose of this provision.
Disregarding the serious objections of Smt Sushma Swaraj, leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha, who is part of the three-member selection committee headed by the Prime Minister, P J Thomas was appointed Chief Vigilance Commissioner last year.
The matter went to the Supreme Court. The court upheld the points that had been raised in the committee by Smt Swaraj. The Supreme Court then struck down the appointment.
In an article titled ‘Credibility Crash’, Bhavna Vij Aurora wrote in India Today about the Supreme Court order that the verdict was more an indictment of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Home Minister P Chidambaram (who was the third member of the Selection Committee) than of P J Thomas himself.
In an article written on the same issue a fortnight back in Business Standard, Shri Nripendra Misra, ex-chairman, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, and presently, director, Public Interest Foundation, has strongly urged that politics should be taken out of statutory appointments.
I feel it would be appropriate to decide now that a law be enacted to de-politicise appointments to key constitutional and statutory bodies. I would specifically commend inclusion of the EC, the Comptroller and Auditor General, the UPSC and the Public Enterprises Selection Board in this list. All that needs to be done is to include the leaders of Opposition (let these be of both Houses) in the selection committees that perform these functions till now.
Tailpiece
When news of India’s nuclear test reached the American government, Washington reacted with shock and outrage. India had learned from its experience two-and-a-half years before, when it had been caught red-handed in its test preparations by Washington’s satellites. This time it was Washington that was caught by surprise. The state department heard the news on CNN, and the Central Intelligence Agency heard it from the state department.
The United States need not have been surprised by Pokhran, as the signals were clear that India intended to test. First, there was India’s aborted nuclear test in late 1995. Second, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) 1998 election manifesto inasmuch declared that a BJP government would make India a declared nuclear power. Though the manifesto did not specifically commit to a nuclear test, it did promise to ‘re-evaluate the country’s nuclear policy and exercise the option to induct nuclear weapons’.
(Excerpts from a recent book on Indo-US-China relations by William H Avery)
Blog by Bharatiya Janata Party leader L K Advani on February 27
