Revision as of 09:53, 24 June 2022

First ladies

Activities

Rumu Banerjee, First of its kind? First Lady puts officials in template problem, Sep 14, 2017: The Times of India

The President's secretariat was stumped when First Lady Savita Kovind wanted to write a letter to the wives' welfare association of a paramilitary force. The dilemma for the staff -there was no prior template for such a communication.

“It was a ceremonial letter being sent by the First Lady to the CISF Wives' Welfare Association. The rule is that precedent is followed, so a search for a similar correspondence by the previous First Lady was launched.However, no such correspondence was available,“ said an official.

The former First Lady was Pranab Mukherjee's wife Suvra, who passed away in 2015 after ailing for some time. Just before Mukherjee, Pratibha Patil was the president. Her predecessor was A P J Abdul Kalam, who was a bachelor.

Sources said the staff had to finally rely on correspondence by Usha Narayanan, wife of former President KR Narayanan. “Correspondence by Usha Narayanan was used as a template for the letter finally . The letter to the CISF Wives' Welfare Association is part of the ceremonial correspondence that the First Lady has been penning in the past one month,“ said the official.

Sources say the current First Lady has kept a low profile, and has been participating only in those activities where her role is required.

Rajvanshi Devi, wife of India's first President, Dr Rajendra Prasad (from 1950 until 1962), kept a very low profile and even stayed away from public events.

Sources said Saraswati Bai, wife of India's 4th President VV Giri, was the first one to take a more public role as the First Lady . She attended and hosted events and became a recognisable public figure.

Issues

Role of the President

Chakshu Roy, June 11, 2022: The Times of India

All of our Presidents other than President APJ Abdul Kalam have been political personalities. There are some commonalities between their political careers before they became President. For example, Zakir Hussain, VV Giri, Shankar Dayal Sharma, Pratibha Patil and current President Ram Nath Kovind had previously been Governors. Kovind, Patil, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, Zail Singh, Pranab Mukherjee all started their legislative careers in Rajya Sabha. And two of our Presidents, R Venkatraman and Mukherjee have been finance ministers.

EC set timelines for the election of the next occupant of the President’s House. For the first 20 years after Independence, however, presidential elections were a much simpler affair. Anyone could stand for election to the highest office in the country. An interesting nugget is that a lawyer from Rohtak, Choudhary Hari Ram was a candidate in the first five elections. History books record his name as the runner-up in the 1962 elections in which Dr Radhakrishnan was elected President. Parliament plugged this loophole by requiring a prospective candidate to get his name proposed by voters in the presidential election, ie MPs and MLAs. The law now requires at least 50 proposers and 50 seconders for a valid candidature.

During the framing of the Constitution, there was an extensive debate on how the President would be elected. The draft Constitution proposed an electoral college made of MLAs and MPs and a two-term limit on an individual holding the office of the President.

But Constituent Assembly members like KT Shah wanted the President to be directly elected by the people. His reasoning was that a President elected by adult franchise would “not be a creature of party majorities in the Centre or local legislatures but a real representative of the people”. However, this line of reasoning was contrary to the parliamentary model of government being proposed by BR Ambedkar and Jawahar Lal Nehru.

Nehru defended the electoral college mechanism for the presidential election. He stated that it was a middle ground that ensured that the President was not elected by the majority party dominating Parliament. And that it gave members of the state legislature a role in the election of the President. The final Constitution retained the electoral college mechanism for electing the President but rejected the two-term limit.

Constitution framers were also concerned with the nature of the President’s powers. Ambedkar equated the position of the President in the Indian Constitution to that of the King in England. He said that the President “is the Head of State but not of the executive. He represents the nation but does not rule the nation. He is the symbol of the nation. His place in the administration is that of a ceremonial device of a seal by which the nation’s decisions are made known. ”

But shortly after Independence, differences arose between President Rajendra Prasad and Prime Minister Nehru on the powers of the President. The point of contention was whether the President could act independently of the advice of the council of ministers.

This question has been central to the debate about the office of the President. Its criticality became evident when President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed imposed an emergency in the country on the advice of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. During the emergency, Gandhi’s government changed the Constitution to specify that the President shall act on the advice of the council of ministers. After the emergency, the Janata Party amended the Constitution, and it allowed the President to ask the council of ministers to reconsider its advice.

The office of the President occupies a unique position in our country. The President is labelled a rubber stamp, one who blindly agrees with the council of ministers. And if he/she disagrees, the President is called an activist and not in conformity with the spirit of the Constitution. In these circumstances, it is the oath of the President’s office that is instructive of the role and responsibility of this high office.

Under our Constitution, ministers and members of Parliament bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution. But the President takes the oath to “protect and defend the Constitution and the law”. Over the next few days, it will be clear whether political parties will choose candidates who will be rubber stamps or defenders of constitutional values of the country.

The writer is Head of Outreach at PRS Legislative Research