Is a smoothly functioning party system crucial to government formation in a democracy? Can India run her representative democracy if a significant party overlooks the basics, and proceeds with the nod of the head of state to form government in which elected MPs have been given no formal opportunity to express their preference for their choice of leader?
In contrast with secret confabulations or confidential exchanges, a formal event has the virtue of placing a matter on record.
In Pakistan next door, in the absence of a worthwhile party system, reasons for which have been elaborated by the historian Ayesha Jalal, there was confused politics after the death of Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Some years later Ayub Khan mounted a military coup and subsequently floated the idea of a “party-less” democracy – in the Pakistan context, another name for a military dictatorship rather than rule by an individual or a single party. The country would pay a heavy price and is yet to recover.
After the Election Commission issued certificates on June 5 to the winning candidates of the just ended Lok Sabha election, the party with the highest number of seats, the Bharatiya Janata Party, did not call a meeting of its newly elected MPs to elect their leader in the House. To this day that meeting has not been called. Yet, Rashtrapati Bhavan swore in former Prime Minister Narendra Modi, making him PM-elect.
This amounts to an egregious deviation from the convention established after India’s first general election. Doubtless, following the British practice, from which many Indian parliamentary norms emanate, the president is at liberty to appoint the person most likely to command a majority in the Lok Sabha.
There is an element of permissible latitude here in the event there is more than one likely claimant for leadership of the parliamentary party or bloc which has been elected with the highest number of seats, or there are contending blocs. However, the number of likely contenders in a party can only be revealed in a formal meeting of the MPs of the party with the highest number of seats.
If there is consensus on a single contender in the largest party, that may become clear through informal caucuses or informal consultations prior to the holding of the meeting of the MPs of the leading party, but that consensus needs to be brought out into the open in a formal setting at a duly called meeting of the parliamentary party – in this case the BJP Parliamentary Party.
This is the convention in India, i.e. a settled norm based on prevalent values. Conventions may evolve if values underlying them change. Such is the gravity of conventions that there is no written British constitution, for instance. A body of conventions is treated as its constitution. The constitutional law in the world’s first modern democracy is founded entirely on its conventions and much of the world has found it useful or necessary to take a cue from there.
In Britain, the leadership contest for government formation can frequently be sharp, even brutal. In India, brutal instances are not common. Nevertheless, one case stands out: the election of the leader – the future prime minister – of the Janata Dal (JD) government when the stalwart Chandra Shekhar, who felt he had been betrayed by colleagues who went back on informal assurances, stormed out of the Parliamentary Party meeting called to elect the leader, and the way was cleared for V.P. Singh to become prime minister.
In a formal meeting, a name is proposed and seconded to complete the process of electing the leader before it is taken to the president to stake a claim to form government.
Singh, who had led his newly formed party’s election campaign, would not have got the chance to be prime minister if the Congress leader Rajiv Gandhi had staked his claim. The Congress was far ahead of the JD in parliamentary numbers but Gandhi was mindful of propriety. He declined to stake claim since he was the prime minister before the election but under his leadership the Congress could not win back the required number to make government, i.e. half the seats in the House. It was upon his refusal that the JD found its opportunity.
The JD did not have the numbers and would have to find support from other parties. Even so, it was obliged to call a meeting of its Parliamentary Party to elect its own leader first. There was no question. Such support may or may not have been forthcoming if there was another leader. The formal support from other parties – the Left parties and BJP – was a subsequent matter.
In the present scenario, under Modi’s leadership, the BJP could not win enough seats to reach the halfway mark. His situation is analogous to that of Rajiv Gandhi in 1989-90. Yet, unlike Gandhi, Modi rushed to claim a victory though the people of India had withdrawn their pleasure, denying him a win. He did this on the evening of June 5 at a gathering at his party’s office before a smallish and far from enthusiastic crowd.
More, he dubiously claimed at the gathering to have created a record of a third consecutive win, the first time since the 1960s.
Without referring to Jawaharlal Nehru by name, he was claiming to have equalled the record of the country’s first prime minister in the Lok Sabha election of 1962. Modi has repeated this false claim many times over since then, including at the recent G-7 outreach meeting in Italy.
Since Modi, in reality, had led his party to a defeat while claiming to be an all-conquering messiah at the start of the election process, with most of the country swallowing his propaganda, the rising political pressure upon him from within was all the greater when the shock results began to come in.
In fact BJP’s performance under Modi and his arch collaborator Amit Shah turned out to be the worst in Uttar Pradesh, electorally the most significant state. In the PM’s own seat of Varanasi in the state, the nature of his win remains controversial. Modi’s margin of victory was humdrum. Worse for the so-called party of Hindus and of Hindutva, the BJP lost the Faizabad (Ayodhya) seat around which Modi and his acolytes had hoped to concentrate their Ram temple-centred campaign.
Would there have been a challenge to Modi’s leadership, or a questioning, if the BJP Parliamentary Party had been formally called to elect its leader? We shall never know but such a meeting was crucial since it was evident that before the BJP went to the president to stake a claim to form government, it would have to gather firm commitments of support from other parties in parliament.
Regrettably, Rashrapati Bhavan failed to put its foot down in ensuring that an important convention of the party system and government formation was being upheld. Will the president’s conduct of swearing in the prime minister-elect without ensuring that the largest party has duly elected its leader, stand constitutional or judicial scrutiny? The answer cannot be unknown unless there is a challenge before the Supreme Court.
However, if fundamental practices and conventions are permitted to be given the go-by so casually, nothing prevents a future usurper from seizing power without emerging as the proven leader of the largest party. If the cabinet system is deemed the arch-stone of the Westminster model of democratic governance, then a functioning party system can be said to be its lifeblood. Without it, elected legislators will be an undistinguishable mass of independents that can be overrun by a warlord. They might as well not exist.
Compare the unseemly events surrounding Modi’s elevation as PM-elect by a lax President’s House with 1962 when Nehru won his third consecutive election. Under Nehru’s leadership the Congress won 361 seats out of a total of 508 Lok Sabha seats at the time, well over 100 more than the halfway mark of 254. Modi in contrast could only return with 240 on 543. Is that equalling the record set in 1962?
It is evident that the tawdry display we have seen – Modi muscling his way to Rashtrapati Bhavan to be officially named Prime Minister-elect when he didn’t have the verifiable numbers, in the process overturning a key convention – became necessary because he was nowhere near the mark recorded in 1962.
Anand K. Sahay is a journalist and political commentator based in New Delhi.
