Vice President Jagdeep Dhankhar’s resignation was a kind of cold play. He left for home on Monday evening in control of his keys, but could not enter his office the next day. They must have sent his personal stuff home, but he may not have had access to all his papers.
One doesn’t know if Dhankhar kept a diary and made notes after chairing Rajya Sabha sessions. One wonders if he recorded his spats with all their provocation and rancour, and after meeting colleagues and dignitaries, bending his tall figure to make hushed conversations. He is a trained lawyer, but one is not sure if he was so clinically organised like Richard Nixon in these matters. If he did keep a diary and had kept it in his office, it may have suddenly become State property.
Dhankhar was left with no time to secure anything, least of all his legacy. There was such swiftness in the operation that the dismissal was instantly made to wear the cloak of voluntary exit. Although as per the book he could not be sacked by the government, it appears a threat of impeachment was enough to secure his signature on a rather politically-correct draft where everybody was thanked and a health contingency was invoked.
Dhankhar was domineering, confrontational and articulate, qualities that did not sit well in either his earlier role as West Bengal governor or as vice president. Both by the Constitution and convention, they are conceived as elderly, mentoring roles. They are not meant to hold the steering wheel of government, but are thought of as permanent standby roles in the event of a constitutional crisis. They do not put a final seal on anything, only step in temporarily. However, their placement in ceremony and protocol tends to create a grand delusion that they are important.
It appears Dhankhar had bought into this delusion. While he should have enjoyed being sandwiched between the President and the Prime Minister as VP, he attempted to create a distinct grandeur for his chair, often with vanity. While his role allowed him to philosophise at times, he hectored all the time.
If that was not mistake enough, he was perhaps the only VP who asserted his caste denomination and its traditional profession of farming. K R Narayanan, as VP and later President, never played his Dalit identity. Dhankhar, it seems, was attempting to create a constituency of his own. This portended not just a challenge to the executive, but exposed his ambition and an infinite capacity for mischief small and big.
Dhankhar’s compulsive articulation had become a threat to not just himself, but to the government’s views on the law, people and the judiciary. He spoke much more than what Manmohan Singh spoke as the executive head for a decade. Since Dhankhar’s exalted position could not be countered or fact-checked, he had slowly started giving an impression that he was an alternative voice of the government. He loved to play the oracle.
It is unsettling when a person meant to be a constitutional figurehead begins contributing to political commentary and chatter on a daily basis. The quiet mentoring he was expected to do by the virtue of his position was defeated by this. His words also complicated the perception of the Modi government’s commitment to democratic processes and larger policy.
For instance, when it came to the Constitution, in early 2023, Dhankhar waded unprovoked into the issue of the basic structure doctrine. He argued for the supremacy of parliament, and said its amending powers could not be curtailed. He almost sounded like Indira Gandhi during the Emergency. He said this when the opposition was building a perception about the constitutional fidelity of the Modi government in the build-up to the 2024 general elections. It is now history how the opposition’s campaign fared.
The VP’s office should have operated in dignified isolation, but Dhankhar was the busiest man in the chair. His frequent travels across the country, his speeches, his pro-active networking with different sections of the political and business classes, and his protocol fetish could not have missed the scrutiny of people who had put him in the chair. He thought he was number two in the nation’s hierarchy. It was clearly his delusion asserting.
The first VP, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, spoke his mind freely too. But he had a very different intellectual energy, stature and sense of humour to go with it. His context and political circumstances were entirely different. Plus, he had a trusting and warm relationship with the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. It was Nehru who had coaxed him to take the VP’s chair. Radhakrishnan always maintained that he belonged to the “decorative side” of the government. For him, it was a “caged and honorific office”.
Radhakrishnan’s biographer, S Gopal, wrote: “It did not seem to him worthwhile to give up the chair at Oxford and his work outside India for such a limited role. But Nehru assured him that he hoped to develop conventions which would expand the role of the vice president, particularly on the political and diplomatic sides.”
Radhakrishnan helped Nehru navigate politically piquant moments, he handled for Nehru some of his difficult colleagues and always with the singular interest to strengthen Nehru. He never opened an independent channel with Nehru’s critics to weaken him. Is Dhankhar guilty of this?
In a public speech in September 1952, Radhakrishnan warned the Congress against complacency, he deplored their “pampered living and confused thinking which had taken the place of idealism and tenacity of purpose”. Urging Congressmen to carry through the unfinished task of social revolution, he said, “Hurry up, otherwise it will be too late.”
This speech caused a stir. Maulana Azad told Radhakrishnan that Nehru had remained silent when some Congressmen had criticised him. The VP offered to resign the next day when Nehru met him. Nehru assured him that no one had criticised him in his presence and the matter ended there.
This trusting relationship between the Prime Minister and his constitutional mentors changed over the decades, and the first to diminish such institutions was Indira Gandhi. Dhankhar, with his loud stint in office, has made it difficult for the next VP to be his or her own person.
Sugata Srinivasaraju | Senior journalist and author of The Conscience Network: A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship
(Views are personal)
(sugatasriraju@gmail.com)