Needed: A Lok Sabha Prime Minister

Kuldip Nayar

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's election to the Rajya Sabha was never in doubt. I do not know why he sought an entry into Parliament through the backdoor. The Rajya Sabha is the Upper House. A country's Prime Minister has to face the voters directly to assess his popularity. The Lok Sabha, the House of the People, is the right place for him. Manmohan Singh could have selected a safe seat if he feared that after having been Prime Minister for three years, his government's performance was not good enough to help him win a tough election. But he cannot use the Rajya Sabha as a stalking horse to hide his identity.

By evading the Lok Sabha election, Manmohan Singh is devaluing the office of Prime Minister. No Prime Minister since independence has tried to escape a Lok Sabha poll. Mrs Indira Gandhi, when made Prime Minister, was also a member of the Rajya Sabha. But she resigned and contested the first available byelection to the Lok Sabha. So did H.D. Deve Gowda and Inder Kumar Gujral, her successors. Both were Rajya Sabha members, but after they came to occupy the office of Prime Minister, they resigned their respective seats and contested the Lok Sabha election.

Manmohan Singh's election to the Rajya Sabha is from Assam. He has already given to the Supreme Court the proof of his residence in Guwahati on the basis of his ration card, electricity bill and the rent receipts of the house he occupies. It is not that he does not fulfil the qualifications to be a Rajya Sabha member, what is objectionable is that the country's Prime Minister has been elected indirectly. Whether Manmohan Singh comes from Assam, or Punjab which is his home state, is not as relevant an argument as the one that questions whether the Rajya Sabha legitimises his position. It is a House which comprises members who are elected indirectly. State Assembly members are the ones who face the electorate directly in their respective constituencies. A Prime Minister who represents the whole country is too tall to ride on their back, as Manmohan Singh is doing from the Assembly in Assam.

The question is a larger one: whether the Prime Minister should be a member of the Lok Sabha, the directly elected House, or of the Rajya Sabha, the indirectly elected House. There is nothing to beat about the bush on this. The choice is obvious. The Prime Minister has to win polls at the popular level. That means the Lok Sabha. There is no escaping this.

Our Constitution-makers may not have spelt out that the Prime Minister should be from the Lower House. But in their scheme of things, the Lok Sabha had a pre-eminent position. The Lok Sabha is the real House around which parliamentary activities revolve. This is the House which decides the fate of political parties and their allies. Even one vote shorter than the majority will be too short to sustain a government in power. This happened in the case of the Atal Behari Vajpayee government a few years ago. It lost by a solitary vote and had to leave office.

True, our Constitution has no provision which enjoins upon the Prime Minister to be a member of the Lower House. Pakistan has that. Even where there is no such provision, the parliamentary system practised all over the world is followed â€" that the Prime Minister must be a member of the elected House. Great Britain, which in a way is the mother of all Parliaments, has not had a Prime Minister from the Upper House, the House of Lords, for generations, and it will be ridiculous to imagine that Lord So-and-So can ever be a future Prime Minister of Britain.

While contesting for the Lower House, Manmohan Singh would have come in contact with people at the grass roots. The dust and din of electioneering might have made him think that politics is dirty, but it is real nevertheless. Sitting in the ivory tower that the Rajya Sabha is, the Prime Minister has missed the reservoir of information he would have gathered from the ground on how India's heart ticks. It is rather odd that the Indian Prime Minister has no vote in the House which decides on the motion of confidence in the government he leads.

I am afraid, if the importance of direct election is not underlined, even members of the Legislative Council, the second House, would like to make it to the office of the chief minister. At present, not all states have a Legislative Council. More than that, there is a precedent for the Legislative Assembly member to be the chief minister. Once, before the Constitution was introduced, Congress leader C. Rajagopalachari became chief minister in the then state of Madras. But rightly he had to quit a few months later. Since then the chief minister in the states has been from the Legislative Assembly.

I can understand Manmohan Singh's diffidence about contesting an election for the Lok Sabha, because some Congress bosses were responsible for his defeat when he contested the Lok Sabha polls a few years ago from South Delhi, a constituency of highly educated voters. Maybe he is afraid of sabotage, and is worried that he might meet the same fate once again, especially when some Congress leaders want to see the Prime Minister out. Yet it is far better to face them through election than to live under the illusion that they are behind him.

Many states will be willing to offer Manmohan Singh a Lok Sabha seat if he so decides. I am sure Punjab will want him from the state because he is a brilliant son of its soil. He just has to indicate that he so desires.  A sitting Lok Sabha MP from Punjab has told me that he is willing to vacate his seat for Manmohan Singh. The member does not belong to the Congress party. I concede that after the perverse judgment by the former Chief Justice Y.K. Sabharwal's bench, Manmohan Singh does not have to bother whether he is an "ordinarily resident" of Assam. The Supreme Court did away with the domicile qualification for a Rajya Sabha member. The judgment says that a Rajya Sabha member does not have to be a resident of the state whose Assembly returns him or her.

I do not want to question the case of eligibility, nor do I propose to discuss Chief Justice Sabharwal's judgment. I have no doubt that some day a larger bench will quash it, because the judgment defeats the very purpose of the Rajya Sabha, the Council of States. My point is a limited one. The Prime Minister has to be a member of the Lok Sabha because Lok Sabha is where sovereignty rests.

(Courtesy: Deccan Chronicle; May 21, 2007)

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