President of India
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Elections
How the President is elected
Manoj C G, June 25, 2022: The Indian Express
The President is elected by an electoral college consisting of MPs of both Houses of Parliament and MLAs of the states and Delhi and Puducherry. Nominated members of Rajya Sabha, Lok Sabha and the Assemblies, and members of state Legislative Councils, are not part of the electoral college.
The votes are weighted, their value determined by the population of each state as per Census 1971. The value of each MLA’s vote varies from a high of 208 in Uttar Pradesh to a low of 7 in Sikkim. This means that UP’s 403 MLAs contribute 208 × 403 = 83,824 votes to the electoral pool, while Sikkim’s 32 MLAs contribute 32 × 7 = 224 votes. The weighted votes from all the Assemblies add up to 5.43 lakh.
The process demands that the 776 MPs (543 in Lok Sabha, 233 in Rajya Sabha) should contribute the same total of votes as the MLAs. Thus, the value of each MP’s vote is 5.43 lakh divided by 776, rounded off to 700. The combined electoral pool from the Assemblies and Parliament adds up to 10.86 lakh.
How are the ruling alliance and the opposition placed?
The BJP-led NDA is far ahead of the Congress and its allies, but still short of the halfway mark at the moment. Adding up the votes of the MLAs and MPs on either side, but not counting the 57 vacant Rajya Sabha seats (16 of which go to polls on Friday while the other 41 have had MPs elected unopposed), the NDA has 48% of the votes (BJP 42% and allies 6%), while the Congress (13.5%) and its allies (10.5%) have 24%. These allies include the DMK, Shiv Sena, NCP, JMM and smaller parties like the Muslim League, VCK, RSP and MDMK. Beyond the two alliances, the Trinamool Congress has 5.4%, YSRCP 4%, Biju Janata Dal 2.85%, and the Left parties 2.5%, with the rest of the votes held by various parties.
The BJP is banking on the YSRCP and the BJD and some other parties to support its candidate. Support from either YSRCP or BJD would take the NDA candidate beyond the halfway mark. Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik met Prime Minister Narendra Modi on May 30, and Andhra Pradesh CM Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy called on the PM last week.
On the Opposition side, it remains to be seen which way the TRS, Samajwadi Party and AAP will vote. The TRS, which was once considered a fence-sitter and even backed the government on some key Bills, has been attacking the BJP of late. The AAP is at loggerheads with both the Congress and the BJP.
How keenly contested have previous elections been?
1952: The first election was a no-contest. Rajendra Prasad won with 5,07,400 votes. Chaudhary Hari Ram polled 1,954, contesting because he did not want Prasad to be elected unopposed. The Left fielded K T Shah, a former alumnus of the London School of Economics and a member of the Constituent Assembly, who got 92,827 votes. The fray also had Thatte Lakshman Ganesh (2,672) and Krishna Kumar Chatterjee (533).
1957: Prasad was fielded for a second by the Congress. It was again a no-contest: he got 4,59,698 votes against Nagendra Narayan Das (2,000) and Chowdhry Hari Ram (2,672).
1962: The Congress fielded Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, who was Vice President during President Prasad’s tenure. He got 5,53,067 votes against Chowdhry Hari Ram (6,341) and Yamuna Prasad Trisulia (3,537).
1967: The Congress candidate, Vice President Zakir Hussain, won 4,71,244 votes against Kota Subbarao (3,63,971). Subbarao, who retired as Chief Justice of India that year, was the Opposition’s consensus candidate.
1969: This election, necessitated by the sudden passing of President Hussain, was the most controversial of them all. Under Article 65(1) of the Constitution, Vice-President V V Giri assumed office as acting President, but resigned in July 1969 as Vice President and also as acting President. Tensions within the Congress — between Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and a group of veterans known as the Syndicate — came to a head when the party officially fielded Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy while Gandhi threw her weight behind Giri, contesting as an independent. She famously called on party MPs and MLAs to vote according to conscience. Giri won with 4,01,515 votes to Reddy’s 3,13,548. The Congress split after then party president S Nijalingappa expelled Gandhi. Among other candidates, C D Deshmukh, fielded by Swatantra Party and Jana Sangh, polled 1,12,769. There were 12 more in the fray, and the law was changed to prevent non-serious candidates from contesting.
1974: The Congress fielded Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, and the opposition veteran Tridib Chaudhuri, a Lok Sabha MP from the Revolutionary Socialist Party. Ahmed polled 7,65,587 votes to Chaudhuri’s 1,89,196.
1977: Following Ahmed’s death, Vice President B D Jatti took over as acting President. When the poll was held, 37 candidates filed their papers but on scrutiny all but one were rejected. The only valid one was Congress’s Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, who was elected.
1982: The Congress’s Giani Zail Singh (7,54,113 votes) won against H R Khanna (2,82,685). Nine opposition parties had fielded Khanna, a Supreme Court judge who had resigned in protest against the appointment of M H Baig as CJI in 1977. Khanna had come into prominence a year before, when he disagreed with majority judges that Article 21 can be suspended by the declaration of Emergency.
1987: The Left parties fielded legal luminary and former Supreme Court Justice V R Krishna Iyer against incumbent Vice President R Venkataraman, who won comfortably (7,40,148 votes against Iyer’s 2,81,550). The third contestant Mithilesh Kumar, an independent candidate from Bihar, got 2,223 votes. The elections became politically interesting as incumbent President Singh, whose equations with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi had hit a low, was prodded to contest as an independent candidate by some Congress dissidents and Devi Lal of the Lok Dal(B), but he declined.
1992: The Congress’s Shanker Dayal Sharma (6,75,804 votes) won comfortably against the opposition’s George Gilbert Swell (3,46,485), a former Lok Sabha Deputy Speaker, a former Ambassador Norway and Burma, and a tribal who was a force behind the movement that culminated in statehood for Meghalaya. His candidature was pushed by former Prime Minister V P Singh and the BJP backed him. Two others were in the fray: Ram Jethmalani (2,704 votes) and the famous Kaka Joginder Singh aka Dharti-Pakad (1,135), who contested — and lost — over 300 elections during his lifetime.
1997: K R Narayanan, fielded by parties in the United Front government and the Congress and backed by the opposition BJP, won one of the most one-sided polls ever, polling 956,290 votes against former Chief Election Commissioner T N Seshan’s 50,361. Seshan had the support of the Shiv Sena and some independent MLAs.
2002: The Congress and most opposition parties decided to back scientist A P J Abdul Kalam, the BJP’s choice. The Left fielded Captain Lakshmi Sahgal. Kalam (9,22,884) won a one-sided contest against Sahgal (1,07,366).
2007: Pratibha Patil, the UPA-Left nominee, became India’s first woman President with 6,38,116 votes against BJP candidate Bhairon Singh Shekhawat (3,31,306 ). The Shiv Sena, then part of the NDA, chose to back Patil, who is from Maharashtra.
2012: UPA candidate Pranab Mukherjee became the 13th President, polling 713,763 votes against the BJP’s P A Sangma (3,15,987).
2017: In the last election, the Opposition fielded former Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar against Kovind. She had the support of 17 Opposition parties but the JD(U) chose to support Kovind. Kovind bagged 7,02,044 votes, and Kumar 3,67,314.
First ladies
Activities
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
