Modi, BJP and the presidential form of government

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent statements during the campaigning for Himachal Pradesh and Gujarat Assembly polls carry seeds of a renewed push for India to adopt a presidential form of government.

In the last eight years, the PM has often suggested that constitutional amendments are needed to have ‘one nation, one election’. The demand that India jettison its Westminster-style parliamentary democracy as a presidential system will serve it better is not new.

At the fag end of the Himachal poll campaign, the PM said that every vote for ‘kamal ka phool’, the BJP’s election symbol, would ‘come directly to Modi’s account as a blessing’.

As political observer Prakash Patra points out, this was not even for a Lok Sabha election, where the people elect their MP to represent their concerns at the national level but for an Assembly election, where the issues are local. In the Gujarat Assembly polls, the PM’s slogan is, “Aa Gujarat, mai bnavyu chhe” (I have made this Gujarat)”.

One of the early demands of the Jana Sangh, the earlier avatar of the BJP, Patra says, was that a western-style parliamentary democracy didn’t suit India.

The Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led NDA government set up a national commission in 2000, under retired chief justice of India M N Venkatachaliah, “to review the working of the Constitution”. The then Union Home Minister L K Advani and Law Minister Ram Jethmalani thought a presidential government was more suited for India.

After criticism, including from then President K R Narayanan, the commission didn’t broach the subject directly. The Vajpayee government shelved the report.

In mid-1984, with Indira Gandhi-led Congress holding a comfortable majority in the Lok Sabha and consolidating its position in the Rajya Sabha, then Union Minister Vasant Sathe and the party’s legal cell tried initiating a national debate on the issue barely eight months before the general elections.

Sathe said the presidential form of government could cleanse the nation of political and economic corruption. Opposition leader Charan Singh said Indira Gandhi’s concept of a presidential form of government is a naked form of dictatorship.

BJP’s Vajpayee said his party would fight tooth and nail any such move. The Congress legal cell even demanded constitutional amendments to make “the opposition more responsible”.

Opposition leaders suspect, with the BJP holding a majority in the Lok Sabha but still far from comfortable numbers to carry out constitution amendments, which require a two-thirds majority, in the Rajya Sabha, the forthcoming Winter session of Parliament would give a peek into its plans.

“According to my feedback, the chair is likely to be much stricter in dealing with MPs who protest during the proceedings and would suspend Opposition MPs forthwith as soon as any come near the chair, which will have the added advantage of shaping an artificial majority,” an Opposition leader, who didn’t want to be named, said.