New Delhi, May 13 :    New Delhi, May 13:  The BJP has been trying to make a virtue out of evolving a consensus for the next presidential election, but every President since 1952 - except for Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy in 1977 - had to face a contest. Reddy was elected unopposed because after the Emergency, the Congress was incapacitated. It was routed in the Lok Sabha elections and Charan Singh, who was home minister in the Janata Party government, dismissed nine of its state governments. The Congress had no choice but to settle for a consensus candidate. Ironically, he happened to be the same person who was humbled in the 1969 presidential election by V.V. Giri. Veteran political watchers remember the 1969 election. As former Lok Sabha secretary-general Subhash C. Kashyap put it, it was the 'most keenly contested one'. Reddy had been declared as the Congress' official nominee. But days before the nomination was to be filed, party president Indira Gandhi named Giri, then the Vice-President, as her candidate and asked her party members to vote according to their conscience. Reddy was the Lok Sabha Speaker and although he had quit his office he did not resign his Lok Sabha seat. Giri polled 4,20,077 votes (50.2 per cent) and Reddy came a close second with 4,05,427 votes (48.5 per cent). The difference was less than two per cent but the election led to a split in the Congress, with Reddy's supporters floating their own Syndicate Congress. While the 1987 presidential polls - that saw R. Venkataraman installed in Raisina Hill - was certainly not so close, old-timers describe it as one of the 'most serious' contests. It took place under the shadow of the much-talked-about tensions between the incumbent President, Giani Zail Singh, and Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. Pitted against Venkataraman were former Supreme Court Chief Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer and a relatively unknown entity, Mithilesh Kumar. But it was Kumar's presence that added an uncanny twist. It was rumoured that the life of the frail and old third candidate was in danger and he might not even be allowed to file his nomination. But his proposers and seconders from Bihar landed in time, while Kumar was put up in a government house on Balwant Rai Lane under round-the-clock medical attention and security. The election eventually went off without a hitch and nothing was heard of Kumar since. Venkataraman won comfortably with 72.3 per cent of the votes polled. Iyer finished a distant second with 27.5 per cent. In a history replete with ironies, Zail Singh was pitted against H.R. Khanna, a former Supreme Court judge who was superseded for promotion by Indira Gandhi in an unprecedented step. For the rest, the contests were glaringly unequal: larger than life figures like Rajendra Prasad and S. Radhakrishnan were up against mostly unknown candidates and the victory margins spoke for themselves. The first time in 1952, Prasad fought against K.T. Shah, an economist from Bombay University. The second time his contender was N.N. Das, an ex-Congressman. Radhakrishnan's opponent was C.H. Ram, of whom nobody recalled a single detail. 'In those days there was no requirement of 50 proposers and seconders,' Kashyap said. 'They were absolutely unknown people who very often wouldn't give their deposits.'