HVK Archives: A Sleight of Hand
A Sleight of Hand - The Times of India
Editorial
()
19 October 1996
Title : A Sleight of Hand
Author : Editorial
Publication : The Times of India
Date : October 19, 1996
Uttar Pradesh has thrown up a conundrum calculated to fox
the keenest student of the Indian Constitution. There
are no known answers to how the mess should be cleaned
up. Perhaps that is why the United Front government
decided to invent one. But unfortunately for it, its
answer - reimposition of President's rule without formal
ratification by Parliament - has raised a whole lot of
further questions without answers. We understand the
government's plight. After all, it was caught in a no-
man's land between a centrally administered regime whose
term was precipitously close to ending and a government
which was simply refusing to be born. Had it dithered
some more, it would have faced the absurd prospect of
leaving the state without any kind of rule which, techni-
cally speaking, is a constitutional impossibility. Thus,
by a sleight of hand as it were, U.P. has come under a
fresh spell of President's rule. A simpler, even if only
temporary, way out of the tangle might have been for the
governor to go by convention. He could have sworn in the
largest single party - in this case the Bharatiya Janata
Party - and then given it time to put together a govern-
ment. This might have amounted only to postponing the
inevitable, what with both the Bahujan Samaj Party and
the United Front refusing in writing to support the BJP.
Indeed, given the near-irreconcilable differences among
the three main players, there wasn't much a BJP govern-
ment could have done to prolong its stay in Lucknow.
Yet, such a move would have at least followed practice.
These events, by all accounts, are without a recent
precedent. The closest to a U.P.-like situation we can
find is in 1967 Kerala which was placed under Central
rule for similarly failing to form a government. But the
'50s and the '60s were periods of relative political
stability when the Centre was equipped to take such
upheavals in its stride. Not so today. If it was only a
matter of a fractured polity deciding to deliver frac-
tured verdicts, the simple exigency of a coalition gov-
ernment would have worked. But we have situation after
situation where all political groupings are almost equal-
ly placed and where coexistence is apparently not just a
problem, it is unthinkable for them. Each party is as
aware of its strength and as determined to be the one to
call the shots as the social group it represents, which
is what brings us again to a fundamental question. How
do we get around these seemingly impossible situations
with a Constitution that was clearly designed for more
predictable politics? Perhaps, we should invite Mr
Chandrababu Naidu, Mr Karunanidhi and Mr Jyoti Basu, who
have been clamouring to have Article 356 abolished, to
provide us with some insight. And, while at it, explain
also how they came to defend the application of the
selfsame Article in U.P. Could it be that the imposition
of President's rule in U.P. is not quite as innocent as
it appears? What we have in U.P. today is an assembly
which has been convened but whose members have not taken
the oath of office. There is a legal opinion that this
frees the members from the restrictive anti-defection
law, paving the way for them to go any which way they
want. If so, it could just be the nod they needed for
the horse-trading to begin.
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