Who Elects new President?

Make your Choice Count!

     We the people elect. Pick your choice from list below or from over a billion outside, push your MP, MLA to vote for your dream candidate, to help emerge the most charismatic Indian as our next President to shine as Light of  the East!

Dr James Kottoor 

              "Enough is enough! We want a better president unlike the one we are saddled with!” is the kind of depressing views staring us in the face from print and electronic media or dinned into ears from closed door or street corner discussions as Prathiba Patil’s term of office gets over by the end of July. 

                One columnist described her as Prathiba sans Prathiba(shine). Another even asked why the UPA 1 didn’t go into all details – personal, family, financial and political – before deciding on her for the post, meaning they would not have settled on her, had they done it. That may be a bit farfetched view to swallow while all want Sonia Gandhi not to go for another similar rubber stamp.  But one truth  least known  is that the president is supposed to be elected by all of us according to our constitution, indirectly of course. Hence the urgency for us to wake up to make known our choice, demands and expectations. 

               So the social media is rife with heated debates  making evaluations of past presidents and hinting which model to look for and which to reject. In this context it is fortunate that neither the ruling UPA nor the opposing NDA -- going to pieces now -- has a brute majority to impose any of their pet candidate  on the nation. The usual practice was for the ruling party or coalition to nominate its favourite party candidate and get the decision  steam rolled with its majority.

Party or Consensus Candidate?

              A party candidate always supports the party, right or wrong, on controversial issues. So this time the BJP led alliance and all unattached parties including the Left  seem to be dead set to defeat any such  move from the Congress branded dictatorial because of its repeated failures to consult either the opposition or even its allies  on national issues. As though to correct that image the Congress is now consulting allies like DMK, Trinamool, though the  opposition is still complaining no feelers have approached them on Presidential election.   

                 But the BJP the main opposition instead of coopering, seem to be indulging in its headstrong instinct to oppose Congress on every count and to play a Muslim card  also to refurbish  its communal image,  to befriend parties like SP, BSP and also to pacify its own guilty conscience. The Left and other nonaligned parties also seem to be taking advantage of the week position of the Congress. So a consensus candidate has become a virtue out of necessity.

              But it is also a  fact that the Congress is said to have  the largest vote share in the electoral college, a full 30% plus, against the BJP’s 21% odd. While the BJP may increase its share  to 30% with the help of allies in the NDA. the Congress can easily mop up over 40% of vote with UPA allies. Still it will have to cobble up 10% votes to cross 50% mark to push through a UPA presidential candidate.

So the wise move suggested for the Congress is to stop alienating well wishers with terms like UPA candidate, NDA candidate or a third party candidate, instead to call for a non political candidate who bestrides all parties and  commands   respect of the whole nation. That alone  will help it  secure maximum votes in the Electoral College made up of  members of parliaments  and the state legislatures. About that election process a little later

Candidates & Opinion Polls

Realising the urgency, the printed media have started conducting opinion polls. Hindustan Times does not want a Luxury Suite President. Nor does it like to see Rashtrapathi Bhavan turned into a parking lot for retired politicians either. So it selected ten possible candidates, conducted a poll and announced the percentages polled: Abdul Kalam 50.98%, Gopal Krishna Gandhi, ex-governor of West Bengal 14.7%, NR Narayana Murthi Infosis leader 9.41%, SY Quraishi, Election commissioner 4.85%. Other candidates are Jeswath Singh, Somathan Chatterji, Hameed Ansari, Pranab Mukerji. 

               SiliconIndia has added to this list others like: Tech evangelist Sam Pitroda, Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar, Congressman Karan Singh, former speaker and NCP leader P.A. Sangma. Other sources have suggested more names:  Digvijay Singh, Farooq Abdullah,  visionaries like Ratan Tata, Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, Dr.M.S.Swaminathan, an internationally renowned Agricultural Scientist, Anna Hazare, Manmohan Singh, Sharad Powar, A.K. Antony and Shivraj Patil. 

Although more than half of those polled voted for Kalam 80, there is a public perception among certain thinking sections that a second term for him would amount to an open admission of a pronounced Human Resource Crunch in our nation of over a billion. Besides he was first brought in by BJP and now the Congress may want to pretend it has better ideas. Added to that the Left also has  said NO.

 As for Manmoham,   as the saying goes “Singh is King” but Sonia is on record saying there is no vacancy for the PM’s post now. But other well wishers of the nation say he should be “kicked up” as they see him  as a roadblock for India’s march forward. Pranab Mukerji is a good choice but how is the UPA to find a better trouble shooter for Congress trudging a path riddled with dynamites and facing a very grim future? 

No Christian Candidates?

Purno Agitok Sangma  of NCP and A K Antony are good choices to placate a Catholic group clamouring like the Mother of Sebathi-sons  for  seats on the right and left of Christ in his kingdom and why not? A K Antony is Sonia Gandhi family loyalist and would never dare say No to her. But that precisely is the problem. Many don’t want such a pliable rubber stamp president. Besides why embarrass him with muttering an extempore speech in English at  international photo sessions where one is expected to talk much and say nothing?

As for Sangma even his daughter Agatha Sangma MP from Tura, Meghalaya from 2009 has come out pleading to consider her father on Christian and Tribal cards. But how can he now gravitate to a Sonia after quitting the Congress with Powar on the foreign birth issue? That is a ticklish  one though not insurmountable.

 Anna Hazare could then  be a very good choice. Only, one has to be afraid of his innate urge to turn the nation’s focal point Rastrapathi Bhavan into a fasting venue to bring zero corruption in India and that in the company of Baba Ramdev now. What about sterling characters like Quraishi and Ansari? Quraishi is very good but he had the guts to censure the Congress law minister Salman Kurshid during election campaign, too recent for the congress to forget.  As for Ansari how can anyone of us ever forget what the nation saw at midnight on TV, his infamous adjournment of the Rajya Sabha to scuttle  the Lokpal debate? 

 But how can anyone object to persons like Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, or an Agricultural Scientist, Dr. M.S. Swaminathan or ex-governor of West Bengal Gopal Krishna Gandhi? My fault finding machine is simply getting stuck before each one of them! That is no excuse to  have three presidents. Shall we then cast lots and take one? There comes up another Gandhi and I think no one should be sorry because he is also the grandson of the Father of our nation besides being a person who holds high his spiritual, moral, intellectual and political values besides being a  forceful writer and speaker. Of course others are most welcome to come up with better suggestions. But the final hurdle for the selected candidate is to get the majority vote of this nation of over a billion strong, we hinted earlier.

Voting Process & Your Role

That brings us to the question, who elects our President. The answer is: you and I and the rest of India put together through an indirect process, a bit complicated one and therefore not known to most of us. Yes “we the people” elect the President through a college made up of MPs and MLAs whom we elected from various states and union territories.

               Presidential election in India involves proportional representation of people from various states.  The value of a qualified candidate’s vote  is decided by the number of people that MP or MLA represents in his/her constituency or state. As the size of  population varies from state to state the value or weight of a vote of a representative also differs from state to state. This value is arrived at by dividing the total number of people in a state by the number of elected representatives in each state, which again is divided by 1000, since the number of people an MLA represents is counted in thousands. Thus the number of people in UP the biggest state in India is 199,581,477 according to 2011 census and it has 403 assembly seats. So the value of each MLA in UP is 495 after two divisions are done.

When it is applied to Kerala, its Population of 33,387,677 is divided by 140 assembly seats which is divided by 1000 (to get the number of thousands  each elected member has) to arrive at: 238 as value of each vote. So while an elected MLA’s vote in UP has a value of 495, in Kerala it has only 238 when the principle of proportional representation is applied. It means the value of votes in a state would be one and the same for every voting member  and different in another state since the size of its population is bound to be different. According to a report in Deepika of 2/5/12, total value of Presidential Votes is:10,98,882, what is needed to win is: 5,49.442, UPA has: 4,60,191,  NDA: 3,04,785, SP: 68,812, BSP:  43,349, ADMK: 36,920, Left: 51,682, BJD: 30,215 Trinamool: 48,049, Congress alone: 3,30,485. For more information see Wikipedia.

Get Your MLA Vote your Choice

                 The harsh truth is that  MPs and MLAs would be casting their votes in our name even when  they  vote for a person whom we don’t approve of, as  happened in the case of the President demitting office end of July. So we still have more than two months to make our voices heard by our representatives so that they vote for our choice, not theirs. It is their duty to consult us the electorate to know whom we want them to vote for.  But we know they never do that. They get our votes only to switch their loyalties to where their bread and butter are – vested interest groups offering power and pelf. It is to defeat this tendency that we should shout out our choices by taking part in public discussion, phone calls and email campaigns so that at least a good number of our elected representatives hear our demand and vote for the person of our choice.

                 Apart from various names you and I have suggested  our main demand can be reduced to what  Jawharlal Nehru said long ago as the portrait of an Indian President:  “A good man, who will have authority and dignity in India and abroad” or as Soli Sorarbjee points out in his column in Indian Express  29/4/12, he should be like the King of England, “who has great dignity and the people respect him more than any prime minister”. Besides he must be  above suspicion like Caesar’s wife, and should not be a mere ornamental emblem,  but one who uses  his  right to disagree with ministerial advice in the first instance and sends it back for reconsideration, and may even refuse a request  for dissolution of the House, according to Sorarbjee.

                  High thinking and simple living are the rock bed foundations the father of our nation has laid to build this Bharat of his Hari Jan (people of God) to shine as the light of the East, for the nations of the world. He was just that and continues to be that Light. In my view he was the first Christian in word and deed who trod on this land and he was a Hindu to the core. The second Christian was Mother Teresa and she was an Indian to the core. This should be consoling to those clamouring for a Christian President. This land of Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, Narayan guru, Lal Bahadoor Sastri and Dr.Radhakrisnan cannot settle for anything less precious and sublime. Let my country awake into that heavenly freedom of universal outlook in the election of our New President.
 

The writer can be contacted at: jameskottoor@gmail.com

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