Commentary/Saisuresh Sivaswamy

Don't nightmares never cease for India?

The time: the summer of 1998. Tired with playing eternal brides-in-maid, Congress president Sitaram Kesri decides to withdraw his party's support to the United Front government. Having lost its tenuous majority, the minority government's Cabinet resolves to dissolve the 11th Lok Sabha and recommends the same to the President in its resignation letter.

In sharp contract to what happened a little more than a year ago with S D Sharma, the Rashtrapati summons the Congress president to his bhavan where he is given a dressing-down for betraying democracy. Extending the argument that the economy could not afford another round of elections and also that the Cabinet's recommendation was merely advisory and that he could not let the high office become a rubber stamp, the President accepts the government's resignation, places the House in suspended animation and takes over as the head of what he calls a national government represented by all political parties.

Reads like a political commentator's imagination running wild? Not if the Rashtrapati concerned were to be Tirunellai Narayanayyar Seshan, who has finally made public his intention to contest for the highest office in the republic.

Towards this end, he is prepared to sup with the devil and sleep with the enemy. Thankfully for the country, the President is not directly elected by the people and he has to depend on the politician for support -- yes, that very same breed for which the honourable Seshan, when he was Chief Election Commissioner, had naught but contempt. "Throw them all into the Arabian Sea," he would thunder. Since habits die hard, it is likely he would still say the same thing, but with a rider, "after they elect me President.''

In essence, the man is like a big bull in an unregulated share bazaar and megalomaniac would be a minor term to describe his deportment when he was occupying a constitutional post till last year. Now that he is aspiring for another constitutional office, would he have kicked the habit?

No, for power pumps the adrenalin like no other drug. Even a cursory look at Seshan's past, when he was a bureaucrat -- another breed for which he showed nothing but contempt, after ceasing to be one himself (if memory serves me right, he compared them to prostitutes) -- should leave no one in doubt as to his real nature.

Among the various posts he adorned before moving on to Nivachan Sadan, office of the Election Commission, he was also Cabinet secretary to the Rajiv Gandhi government, which posterity has recorded as among the most corrupt administrations to rule from New Delhi. Since presumably his conduct rules forbade Seshan from blowing the whistle, he made up for it by blowing his trumpet after becoming CEC. It took the savvy ex-bureaucrat little time to discover that he was no more at the mercy of the dhoti-topi clad breed and that he could be removed not by a minister's fiat but through Parliament's impeachment, and he let his true self blossom.

Which, as we all saw, simply entertained the country for six years. The tabloids, of course, had seen nothing like it and as his stout frame peered through the cheap quality newsprint, the high society wasted little time in adopting him as one of their own. His barbs for the low life -- which encompassed everything barring himself and were particularly aimed at the politician and the editor -- were the toast of the caviar set and the process grew through the trickle-down principle. The journos were his foot soldiers. Though he abused them and questioned their intellect in public fora, they bore it all with stoicism and reflected the public opinion that was building in his favour.

One needn't go very far back; it was just around a month ago when he visited Bombay where he met the press. But prior to that he had met the Shiv Sena leader Bal Thackeray and, when the journalists asked him what transpired between the two, he roundly berated then. "What I do with my time is none of your business," words to this effect were attributed to him by the journalists who, placing duty above self, reported him verbatim. Now that he has admitted having spoken to Thackeray too about his candidature for Rashtrapati Bhavan, we all know at last what the two spoke about.

All right, he is a great defender of democracy, the greatest in fact since Abraham Lincoln or Jawaharlal Nehru, closer home. Strange, however, that he showed no concern for the creed's fourth pillar, the press, and one editor who in particular was given the Seshan Deluxe treat of a telephone call every few minutes -- through the night -- would readily vouch for this.

To be fair to him, yes, there was a lot he achieved during his tenure at Nivachan Sadan: he did show the political parties their place; he lent teeth to forgotten laws that governed the conduct of elections in this country, for which all of us are deeply indebted to him.

What one objects to is his manner. In the months since he left the Election Commission, polls have been successfully held in some states. There has been a successor to him who has gone about the same duties -- with fewer words and less bravado.

And that is exactly the kind of occupancy needed at Rashtrapati Bhavan in July -- not the obstreperous, sneering, all-knowing demi-god persona that Seshan has shown to be. The President is an elder statesman who is seldom seen or heard. But his voice is there behind the government, never once rising to a cacophony.

Does such a rule fit T N Seshan?

It does not and he knows it. He knows it, too, that his image and past go against him. But so great is his craving for another constitutional post that he tells the press corps that he has changed for the better. He also actually laughed with them and not at them, so the change must be there to see.

But sceptics there will be and you can count me as one. This man, if made President, will run riot with our delicate parliamentary system. Only once in the past did Rashtrapati Bhavan become a parallel centre of power to South Block and that was at the end of that incumbent's tenure, but the tremors almost did the country in. With Seshan in the saddle, one can bet that the josting for attention will start in no time and 'Thus spake Seshan' will become part of our daily lives once again.

Luckily, the politician has a long memory for slights, at least where toothless Alsatians are concerned, and the man's ambition will certainly be thwarted in time.

But help! Seshan still has a way out. He has considered this possibility too and says his next step would be convert his Deshbhakti movement into a political party in time for the next elections.

Oh, why don't ex-CECs simply fade away?!

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