Should there be a presidential system in India? Or… is the parliamentary system working just fine?
Author Bhanu Dhamija presents a strong case for the presidential system in his book Why India Needs the Presidential System. In this post we will consider his argument and see what this could mean to the Indian political landscape.
The beginnings
Let’s start from the very beginning. India had just got its independence from the British Empire. Now it was looking to create its own system of governance. What would that be? The question arose. And the immediate response was: let’s adopt the parliamentary system, with which we are familiar.
That does not sound too good a reason, argues Dhamija, but that’s how it was. It seems that Jawahar Lal Nehru, who became India’s first prime minister in 1947, had already made up his mind in 1937. It was then that the British had allowed the first Indian-only governments in the provinces. The Congress party under Nehru’s leadership had won an overwhelming majority and formed Congress-only governments. Nehru refused to share powers with Jinnah and his Muslim League followers (who would later go on to create Pakistan) because this system of government allowed one faction to rule.
Jinnah declared that he was ‘irrevocably opposed to… a majority-community rule… under the guise of democracy and a parliamentary system of government.’ However, Nehru did not relent. In a joint meeting of Nehru’s Union Constitution Committee and Patel’s Provincial Constitution Committee to reconsider his decision to have the president elected by the legislature, instead of directly by the people, he refused to do so. This led to a major split between Patel and Nehru. Patel’s committee had approved that the chief executive of state governments, the governor, be elected directly by the people. This was even approved by the full house. But the assembly would later be compelled to drop this feature because it didn’t fit in with the Union Constitution.
To put it quite simply, India adopted the parliamentary system of democracy because that’s what suited the Congress leadership at that point. Thus, the fate of the world’s largest democracy was sealed.
What if there were a presidential system in India?
When we talk about the presidential system, the first name that comes to mind is that of America. As Klaus Von Beyme once remarked, “In the American model of constitutionalism, everything that could lead to concentration of power was avoided.”
But what consequences it might have, in real terms? Quite a lot, actually — as we find in Dhamija’s book.
Every Indian would know that with the three decades of its independence, its parliamentary system turned into a brazen dictatorship when the then prime minister Indira Gandhi extinguished country’s democracy with her Emergency. She could only do so because the system allowed a leader of the political party, who came to power with less than 44 per cent of the votes, to rule the entire nation without being answerable to anyone.
A single centre of power, however, was not this system’s most menacing failing. There were two others that were even more so: it fragmented Indian society and it produced inadequate leaders. The system rewarded fragmentation of political parties because it handed power to party bosses. Factions began to form their own political parties almost from the very beginning, but the process only accelerated with time. So, while there were roughly seventy parties in the first general election in 1952, that number grew to over 900 in 2007. This had two terrible outcomes: the nation’s legislature became utterly unrepresentative; and the governments became progressively weaker.
Genuine federalism has eluded India because the parliamentary system is unfit for a federal set-up. There are two reasons for this. First, it has no institution like the US Senate that provides equal representation to state governments. And second, it allows the Centre to dissolve state governments. The latter is contrary to the basic principle of federalism.
All this — and much more — would have been different, if only there was ever a presidential system in India.
Note: This is just one side of the argument. Keep following this space to see the case for a parliamentary system in India.
Kalampedia 