No president of India would be averse to a second term in office. No vice-president would mind becoming president. No governor would be so self-denying as to say ‘vice-presidentship? Oh no, that is not for me.’ That said, not a few among these incumbents of their high offices keep their aspirations to themselves, and quietly.
Such being the case, we should acknowledge to ourselves the sobering thought that we have a president and a vice-president today who, as the governors that they were, did not work or scheme towards that elevation and seem, from all accounts, to have been rather surprised when the great doors suddenly opened out for them.
They may have, as all mortals do, their set of individual limitations but ‘vaulting ambition’ is not the most striking among those.
We can be thankful for that aspect of humility in them.
But it is one thing to not be ambitious for oneself, another to not be ambitious for the office one holds. One should, in the best traditions of personal ethics, not seek personal advancement in and through office-holding. One should, in the highest traditions of office-holding, seek to reach the very limits of that office’s legitimate and proper scope. For the sake of that office’s validity, the call of its title and the ring of its mandate, a president, vice-president and governor must serve it to her or his fullest capacity.
And — here is the test — do so egolessly, logolessly, without the thought, ‘I must go down in history and up in media mastheads, as the best, the tallest…’
Tagore did not write to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, nor Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan reach the highest standards of pedagogy to win his Bharat Ratna. Their sheer focus and standards brought the ribands to them.
This brief column is about the high office — higher than most of us may imagine it to be — of the vice-president of India to which its fifteenth incumbent has just been elected.
Of the fourteen predecessors of Vice-President C.P. Radhakrishnan, six became president of India — S. Radhakrishnan, Zakir Husain, V.V. Giri, R. Venkataraman, Shankar Dayal Sharma, K.R. Narayanan. Two — B.D. Jatti and M. Hidayatullah — were sworn in as acting presidents. Two more — Krishan Kant and Bhairon Singh Shekhawat — came within a whisker of becoming president. The first died very soon after being told he was out of consideration; the second decided to contest for the office and lost, sportingly.
So the dome of the Rashtrapati Bhavan holds its long shadow over the home called Upa-Rashtrapati Nivas. It is for the Upa-Rashtrapati to be unaffected by it, to take it as a passing cloud, not pick up a measuring tape to mark its length at the hour the sun rises, at its median, or when it sets in a splash of confusing tints.
For he has work to do.
I have said ‘he’ not just for the sake of idiomatic convenience but because in our minds the Upa-Rashtrapati has been a ‘he’, no woman having thus far been elected to that office — a real regret considering that outstanding women in public life lived through most terms of India’s Upa-Rashtrapati, such as Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Muthulakshmi Reddy, Hansa Mehta, Rukmini Devi Arundale, Aruna Asaf Ali, Durgabai Deshmukh, Lakshmi N. Menon, Sucheta Kripalani, to name but a few.
The Upa-Rashtrapati’s karmabhumi is, of course, the Rajya Sabha, of which he is, by virtue of being Upa-Rashtrapati, the chairman. The Constitution of India enjoins him to preside over the deliberations of the upper House. Our equivalent of the United States of America’s Senate is often referred to by that term, or as the Council of States, and, by the term now almost forgotten — House of Elders. Derek O’Brien, MP, has made certain requests to our just-elected Upa-Rashtrapati about how he may conduct the proceedings of the upper House so as to make its fairness transparent. I do not need to repeat or match those suggestions in this column.
But there is just one attribute of the Rajya Sabha’s chairmanship that I would venture to flag. And that is that the upper House is the home of reflection, of unhurried contemplation. It is the platform for cogitation, for calm consideration, outside the pulsations of the heated moment, the yo-yo of political diastoles and systoles. It is the Abode of Second Thoughts. The Rajya Sabha is where one may think and say, ‘On further reflection, Chairman Sir…’, or ‘To give the matter the benefit of vichara not prachara…’ It is where the nation’s Second Citizen presides over Second Thoughts.
This, in turn, requires the incumbent to be a thermostat, a quality, we are all told to our relief and our reassurance, our new Upa-Rashtrapati is possessed of in ample measure — unruffled equanimity, a freedom from the desire to sound clever, or adroit. A state of mind where not the eye of the filming camera, not the mike of the recorded word, but the silence of the knowledge that what is right is being done. Right, as in right and wrong, not as in one right over another, one claim to rightness over another demand for that claim.
How, it may be asked, is the chairman to be calm when the House is anything but?
How, indeed. The question or doubt is valid, justified, and must be faced by anyone wanting the chairman to be a model of unexcited wisdom.
There are three ways in which, if I may be impudent enough to suggest, this can be done.
The first is to show by an early and defining step, taken in full view of the House and the nation, that establishes the objective veracity of the Chair. Nothing can beat the power of example. And this example being set not as a display of power or hubris, but of principle and method. Manifest impartiality from the Chair cannot but lead to reciprocal cooperation from the MPs.
The second is to seek and acquire the trust of all MPs by unceasing interaction. If the House is the sanctum, the chairman’s chamber is the sanctum’s atrium where the real can meet the actual.
The third and the most important is through the worth of the word. The chairman’s word is not uttered lightly. Not that it has to be heavy, loaded with sanctimonious tare, no. It has to simply ring true, ring true simply. And when that is how it rings, the word that is given to him in return will find it difficult to play false. And if that word does turn false, then let its creator’s conscience become the chairman’s ally and deal with it.
Beyond the Rajya Sabha, the Upa-Rashtrapati is not just a shadow president but is our closest approximation to the highest office of the land. And by being that, he is a bridge between the First Citizen and all citizenry by virtue of accessibility in intellectual as well as human terms. He is the Constitution’s federative principle that connects the Indus to the Galathea.
Gala… what ?
Precisely.
All of us know of the Indus, that northernmost icon of a river after which our country is named. Not all of us know that the Galathea is India’s southernmost river. Yes, our southernmost river, flowing in the Great Nicobar island.
The office of the president or the Rashtrapati is a lofty pinnacle. The vice-president’s height is not pinnacle as much as vestibule that can effortlessly connect the north and the south, the east and the west, metaphorically and otherwise. In his office, the height of the Constitution’s vision flows into the plains of its spread, in a level sameness, erasing the barriers of longitude and latitude. The Rashtrapati heads the nation’s integrated will, the Upa-Rashtrapati heralds it.
May the fifteenth in that great seat be worthy of the first.