Power & Politics / Mail Today, August 16, 2010

THERE is only one thing worse than being remembered and that is not being remembered at all. This is a dilemma that President Pratibha Patil faces as she enters her fourth year in office. The record books will, of course, show she is the first woman president of the republic, though hers has been a rather unremarkable stint till now.

But it would appear from some of her recent engagements that she is keen to make a mark and is busy making up for lost time. According to a senior bureaucrat, far from being a rubber stamp, Patil is on her way to becoming an “ activist president”. And coming as she does from an agricultural background, it was just as well that she chose the subject of farming for a recent extensive brainstorming session with experts.

Last week, she summoned Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar, Union food processing minister Subodh Kant Sahay, the agriculture ministers from Punjab, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Haryana, the last represented by chief minister Bhupinder Hooda who holds the portfolio, besides 50- odd experts, a few dozen bureaucrats from the agriculture ministry and vice- chancellors of about 20 agriculture universities around the country, along with Dr M. S. Swaminathan, to Rashtrapati Bhavan for a “ colloquium on approach to sustainable farming in rain- fed areas”.

I know that is a mouthful, which many ministers from the states had difficulty comprehending. But the fact that the president frequently departed from her prepared text and made extempore remarks meant she knew what she was talking about. The brainstorming session that started around 5 pm went on till about 10 at night and at the dinner that followed, the president mingled with her guests where she is said to have touched on a whole range of subjects.

What makes Patil different from her predecessors is that despite spending a lifetime in politics, she lived in relative political obscurity until her election in 2007. She was a minister in the Maharashtra government but the media began to notice her only when some of her relatives began to indulge in activities that fall under the purview of the Prevention of Corruption Act.

Sonia Gandhi is said to have zeroed in on her only after coalition partners of UPA- I failed to reach a consensus on anyone else. As such, she was neither expected to scale the heights nor plumb the depths that some of her predecessors had in the past 60 years.

There was the humble Rajendra Prasad, the first president. He was followed by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, scholar, philosopher and teacher. Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed is best remembered for signing the Emergency proclamation, allegedly without bothering to even glance through the document, though ironically he was a lawyer by profession.

There was Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, who lost to V. V. Giri in 1969 and came back eight years later to occupy the high office. There was also Giani Zail Singh who opened up the palace on Raisina Hill to the aam aadmi and whose backslapping ways with even visiting heads of state left mandarins in the foreign office red faced.

In between and since, there have been men of eminence who occupied the office and some who, amid all the pomp and ceremony, forgot the presidential script.

In more recent times, it was our good fortune to have APJ Abdul Kalam whose unconventional style led to him being dubbed the “ People’s President”. My most abiding memory of Kalam saab was when he arrived to address a conference organised by India Today magazine in 2004.

He came with a power point presentation, but somewhere along the way, crossed cables or whatever, the system malfunctioned. Before his ADC or the retinue from Rashtrapati Bhavan could react, Kalam saab was already on the podium floor, fixing the cables and I still remember the deafening applause from the vast gathering that greeted the president when the screen came alive.
President Patil is not as tech savvy as Kalam. But of late, in between hosting visiting presidents and releasing the occasional postage stamp, she has been taking serious interest in subjects ranging from judicial reforms to development of the north- eastern states.

Her sudden interest in all things has set tongues wagging and her adversaries are spreading word that she is aiming for another term.

If that happens, she won’t be just India’s first woman president but also first since Rajendra Prasad in 1950 to serve a second consecutive term.

Wait two years to know.

Snippets / Mail Today, July 27,2009

IT’S BEEN a depressing two months for the Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi. The less than expected performance in the Lok Sabha elections was compounded by the BJP’s humiliation in the municipal elections in Junagadh where he had fielded several heavyweights, including Muslim candidates, meant as a test run of his new avatar as a minority friendly CM. His misery was further compounded when the high court last week gave permission to the SIT to include Modi among the 62 persons to be interrogated for the 2002 riots.

The party’s central leadership hasn’t lent him a shoulder to cry on, busy as the leaders are fighting one another. No wonder the poster boy of the BJP is suddenly feeling isolated, let down by his fair- weather friends in Delhi and the constituents he tried to reach out to. The latter is proof that image makeovers don’t work in politics. Modi has always turned adversity into an opportunity. We will wait to see if once again he will pull something out of nothing.

How to become a people’s president

AS ANNIVERSARIES go, this was as quiet as it could get. Last Thursday, Pratibha Patil completed two years in office as the President of India and but for Rashtrapati Bhavan sending out a press release to commemorate the occasion, it was a low key event that went virtually unnoticed.

Two years ago, Patil came into office in a blaze of controversy, but since then has gone about her job in a businesslike manner, laying the odd foundation here, unveiling a statue there, giving a bhashan somewhere else and occasionally taking off on a foreign jaunt. Going by the coverage she gets, even the media doesn’t seem to have much of an idea of what she is up to.
But go through the Rashtrapati Bhavan website and you will get the picture of a president who keeps herself really busy. The press release issued last Thursday headlined “ President completes two years in office working towards building a compassionate and people centric society” gives an idea of the areas of her concern. From inclusive and balanced growth to people centric administration, efficient and affordable justice delivery to battling social evils, the country’s first citizen is pitching in everywhere with her bit. The more I went through the website, the more I was convinced about the excessive self praise and wondered if previous presidents also indulged in the same.

Unfortunately, while the website lists all previous presidents, it doesn’t provide links that would take the reader to their tenure on Raisina Hill. I don’t know if these existed in the past. If they did, were they removed and why? It is such a shame really because all rulers are judged in comparison with their predecessors and it would have been revealing to know how she fares relatively. Patil still has three more years to go and to be fair, presidents are best judged after they demit office. By that yardstick, Abdul Kalam’s crowded calendar would indicate he has been the most popular in recent times. That’s why he was called the People’s President.

THE Maharashtra Anti Terror Squad’s attempts to bounce back after being sidelined in the aftermath of 26/ 11 is finally bearing fruit. Warnings almost on a daily basis from the IB and other agencies about Mumbai being targeted once again has woken the Congress- NCP government in Maharashtra from its deep slumber. Stung by the serious criticism over the shoddy treatment of the crack outfit, the government has launched a massive plan to revamp the ATS, giving it additional powers, men, state of the art equipment and bulletproof interceptor jeeps.

The ATS was marginalised after 26/ 11 when it was taken off all cases relating to the Mumbai attacks. Internal politics and factionalism led its then chief and bravest officer Hemant Karkare to walk into a deathtrap. Since then senior police officers were hesitant on an ATS posting which was seen as a dumping ground. K. P. Raghuvanshi, who was an earlier chief, had demanded the restoration of the agency’s powers as soon as he was reinstated in the wake of Karkare’s death.
The government has yielded a lot of ground.

Under the revamp plan, young officers would be posted and given proper security cover and weapons. They will also have powers to deal with all terror related issues and will report to Director General of Police ( Ops), a post which has been created recently, and not, as was the practice until recently, to the state DGP. It is to be hoped that the ATS will get down to its primary task of pre- empting and preventing terror attacks rather than keep itself busy fighting internal saboteurs.

Those who hide behind the NSG

LEADERSHIP is something that cannot be left in the hands of cowards. The message that came out after all the noise in Parliament last week after the reported moves of the union home ministry to review the security cover for our “ VIPs” was that this nation is being led by a bunch of cowards. Home Minister P Chidambaram has shed the elaborate security detail meant for himself. We have a lot of VIPs who wouldn’t be seen in public unless surrounded by men in black wielding fearsome looking guns.

It was a good social and political symbol that Chidambaram wanted to take away from the undeserving, for which he laid out plans to downsize the security cover of many politicians.
That triggered a convergence of strange bedfellows. Politicians who wouldn’t even deign to attend each other’s funeral joined hands to oppose it.

Mulayam and Lalu Yadav said the government would be responsible if anything happened to them, while Mayawati’s BSP contingent brought Parliament to a standstill. Politics has always been a paying profession, but it is also a dangerous one and anyone in public life — even a low profile MP — is a soft target. When a CM insists that she will settle for nothing less than Z+ security which doesn’t tally with IB’s assessment, she is merely inflating her importance.
My mind goes back to 1993 when Jayalalithaa was Tamil Nadu Chief Minister and PV Narasimha Rao the prime minister.

There was no love lost between the two. The Tamil Tigers were having a free run in the state, yet the Rao regime withdrew the NSG cover to the lady. I am privy to the letters exchanged by the two and recall that in one of his letters, Rao had asked Jayalalithaa how she could be trusted with the security of the state when she feared so much for her own life. Jaya then set up the state’s own elite guard, the Greyhounds, and shamefully, other chief ministers followed suit.