The hung house riddle

That the electorate will return a hung Lok Sabha is the one point on which all are agreed.

Not one political party or alliance has claimed that it would acquire a majority.

The boast is that it would emerge as the single largest party. For the last two decades, since 1989, that has been the norm. President Pratibha Patil will therefore, not be facing an unprecedented situation on May 17 when all the results will have come in.

The rules are fairly clear. It is another matter that they have been distorted or
misunderstood by a good many including some who had no business to pronounce on the matter or knew no better. 

The Sakaria Commission was appointed to consider Centre-State relations, not the rules of the parliamentary system. The former President R Venkataraman was noted for skill in personal advancement. 

It is enough comment on his absurdity of the rule that the single largest party should be called upon to form a government. If Rajiv Gandhi had agreed to form a government in 1989 he would have exposed the President as well as his own party to ridicule. 

He wisely chose to sit in the opposition and let the national front headed by VP Singh form a government. Not one authority on constitutional law sanctions such an importation of arithmetic in the realm of parliamentary practice.

In truth the rules are fairly clear.  It is simply a case of applying them honestly and intelligently to a given situation. President SD Sharma was an honest man but in 1996 he stumbled and appointed Atal Bihari Vajpayee as PM. He lasted for 13 long days. Vajpayee was appointed PM on May 15, 1996 though the BJP had only 161 seats in a house of 543.

As Dr BR Ambedkar authoritatively stated in the Constituent Assembly on December 30, 1948, “Under a parliamentary system of government there are only two prerogatives which the King or the Head of the State may exercise. One is the appointment of the Prime Minister and the other is the dissolution of Parliament.”

An Instrument of Instructions was drawn for the guidance of the President.  It was chopped at the fag end of the assembly’s proceedings in the belief that “the matter should be left entirely to connection rather than put into the body of the Constitution as a schedule, in the shape of an Instrument of Instructions.” Those were existing conventions as well as ones to be evolved.

The draft instrument remains relevant. It directed the President “to appoint a person who has been found by him to be the most likely to command a stable majority in Parliament as the Prime Minister”. This is the test propounded in all works on the parliamentary system; in Britain, Canada and Australia, including the provinces of the last two. All manner of crises have been dealt with.
There is no difference between a pre-poll or a post-poll alliance a la Sarkaria.  If a post-poll alliance can work up a majority and provide credible assurance of its stability, the President will have no option but to invite it. The claims of the single largest party or of the pre-poll alliance must be rejected. The majority that is formed after the polls will bring down any other party or alliance in the Lok Sabha in the first test of confidence.  That was what Vajpayee suffered in May 1996.
The President will, however, be perfectly within her rights to demand assurance of stability — a minimum common programme — not its hideous recent perversion, common minimum programme, and written assurances of the allies’ support to the PM. A good Indian innovation is to impose on the PM the requirement to seek a vote of confidence in the Lok Sabha within a stipulated number of days.  There is danger in commissioning a leader to explore his chances to form a government.  He will rope in dubious support. 
Forty two years ago in May 1967, the then Union home minister YB Chavan invited three former judges of the Supreme Court — Justices MC Mahajan, AK Sankar and PB Gajendragadkar, former attorney general M Setalvad and the then Advocate General of Maharashtra HM Seervai to pronounce on the rules. The 1967 elections had yielded uncertain majorities in North India and as Ambedkar explained, “the position of the Governor is exactly the same as the position of the President.” So far as the rules of the parliamentary system are concerned, the Governor as head of state is bound by the same rules as the President. Hence the relevance of the opinions of the five. Sadly only two of them did their homework — Setalvad and Seervai. That explains the folly of asking “Constitutional experts” to air their very weighty opinions on TV channels in response to queries by their erudite TV anchors.