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B. S. Raghavan

IT was sad to watch Mr K. R. Narayanan, admitting to the interviewer from the STAR TV that he often felt distressed, as President, at finding himself helpless in the face of happenings that went against his conscience or conviction, and never more so than at the time of the communal conflagration in Gujarat.

He expressed his relief that at least Dr Abdul Kalam was adopting a "hands on" approach by seeing things for himself which might in itself act as a spur to corrective action.

Mr Narayanan has only himself to thank for his helplessness for, even without in any way overstepping the four corners of the Constitution he had plenty of scope for intervention whenever he found the Government's policies and actions doing violence to the basic tenets on which the Indian polity was founded. Indeed, he was bound by the oath taken on entering upon his duties "to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and the law, and devote himself to the service and well-being of the people." It would not have escaped his attention that this oath is entirely different from, and went farther than, all the other forms of oath prescribed for the rest of the creatures of the Constitution and laid on him an inescapable obligation to serve as a conscience-keeper of the sovereign masters of them all, the people.

In fact, Mr Narayanan started well by returning for reconsideration, and thereby forcing the Government to drop, the proposal for imposing President's Rule in Bihar. He was also able to generate a healthy country-wide debate on the eagerness of the BJP to review the Constitution, by his pithy observation that it was not the Constitution that had failed us, but that it was we who had failed the Constitution. It was no doubt because of this timely brake that the terms of reference to the Justice Venkatachaliah Commission were toned down from reviewing the Constitution wholesale to merely reviewing its working without affecting its basic features.

When the Government was stonewalling all discussion on the Gujarat disturbances in Parliament quibbling about the rules governing the motions tabled by the Opposition, or when MPs were causing unconscionable loss to their masters' money by bringing Parliament to a halt for days on end on flimsy grounds and indulging in unruly behaviour tearing to shreds the code of conduct that they had solemnly sworn to follow, it was open to, if not incumbent on, the President to send a message to both Houses under Article 86, recommending an appropriate course of action in keeping with fairness and propriety, constraining Parliament to consider it "with all convenient despatch".

Parliament would have found any such message hard to reject; in any event, it would have put heart into the people that the President was determined to play the role of their true guardian.

One hopes that Dr Abdul Kalam would pay heed to Mr Narayanan's lament and take care that he does not have to repeat it at the end of his tenure.

He will soon face his first test: The obnoxious Ordinance nullifying the Supreme Court judgment on the people's right to know the candidates' antecedents.

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