A cautionary note

THE PRESIDENT, MR. K. R. Narayanan, has spoken out his mind on the contentious move of the BJP-led coalition regime for a review of the Constitution and the occasion he chose for the purpose was the special function held in the central hall of Parliament to commemorate the golden jubilee of the Indian Republic. The strong reservations he has expressed about the proposal do reflect a substantial segment of political and legal opinion which is convinced that the so- called weaknesses and shortcomings of the Constitution, cited by the pro-reviewers, are not attributable to its basic framework, but have to do with the way the Constitutional scheme is worked, and as such no major review of the type envisaged by the ruling establishment is called for. It is however open to debate whether the President should have gone public with his dissent the way he did, suggesting an open confrontation and rift between him and his own Council of Ministers, an impression that stood reinforced when viewed in the context of the Prime Minister, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee, putting forth a stout defence of Government's move at the same function. The President's remarks also are in sharp contrast to his own address to the joint session of Parliament setting out the Government's agenda though he was not on this occasion performing any Constitutionally-mandated function as the Head of State.

Substantively speaking, the position Mr. Narayanan has taken is basically sound and the note of caution, if not warning, he has struck against tinkering with the Constitution is well-merited. For his part, Mr. Vajpayee has held out an assurance that the ``basic structure and core ideals'' of the Constitution would remain unchanged and ``inviolable''. In real terms, this means nothing in view of the Supreme Court's unequivocal verdict defining constraints on Parliament's power to alter the ``basic features'', although what they are have not been spelt out in detail by the court. He has also chosen to buttress the case for `review' by projecting the all-too-familiar `stability' argument in the context of the ``pressing challenge'' to remove regional and social imbalances by ``reorienting the development process to benefit the poorest and the weakest'' and the ``impatience'' of the people for a faster socio-economic development. The President had, in his national broadcast on the eve of the Republic Day, spoken of the persisting regional and social inequalities and the danger of the poor being ignored in the process of economic liberalisation, and capped it all with the warning ``beware of the fury of the patient and long suffering people'', and one finds an echo of these sentiments in Mr. Vajpayee's address.

While the contours of the `review' the Vajpayee regime has in mind are yet to be delineated clearly, the context in which the idea came to be floated by the BJP and the pronouncements its spokesmen - Ministerial as well as organisational - make from time to time leave no one in doubt that the exercise is mainly intended to ensure (governmental) stability, the need for which, in the words of Mr. Vajpayee, has been felt ``acutely'' both at the Centre and the State levels. The changes being canvassed vigorously in this context include a guaranteed five-year tenure for the Lok Sabha and State Assemblies and a `constructive' vote of no-confidence against an incumbent government, besides a more stringent anti-defection law. Fixity of term, apart from giving room for more pernicious practices, will deny an incumbent regime the eminently-sound democratic option of seeking a fresh mandate for a specific and legitimate cause. In any event, it would be unwise to rush into such systemic changes of dubious efficacy in response to what could well be a transitional phase of instability, for which much of the remedy needs to be sought elsewhere in the political system. The ruling coalition is in any case not in a position to push through any Constitutional amendment right now, given the composition of the Rajya Sabha.

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