RAMASWAMY Venkatarman, who passed away in New Delhi on Tuesday, was the eighth President of the Indian Republic. He steered the presidency at a time when the country was making the delicate and difficult transition from one party rule to coalition governance. No predecessor or successor President has seen years as eventful or turbulent as Venkataraman did between 1987-92.
Unlike recent times, when the selection of the President is left undecided till the last possible moment, Indira Gandhi had apparently decided almost a year before the due date to elevate Venkataraman as Vice President, and this was conveyed to him, even as he was asked to keep the information under wraps. Those were still days of one party rule.
President Venkataraman worked with four prime ministers, negotiating the challenges thrown up by four governments which offered different models, unforeseen by the fathers of our Constitution.
After he took over as President in July 1987, Rajiv Gandhi was in power with a brute majority of 415 Congress members in the Lok Sabha. He witnessed the decline of Rajiv Gandhi, the rise of V P Singh, his fall and replacement by Chandra Shekhar whose 50 plus MPs were supported by the larger Congress from outside in an experiment that did not last long, and the elevation of one time colleague P V Narasimha Rao as Prime Minister in 1991.
He witnessed - and guided - three models of coalition government. The first headed by V P Singh was led by the centrist Janata Dal supported from outside by both the Left and the Right in 1989. This was replaced by Chandra Shekhar-headed breakaway group which was backed by the Congress from outside . And the third was a minority government led by Narasimha Rao which ran on the basis of a political consensus.
It was not just the number of PMs he worked with - earlier he had also worked under Indira Gandhi and Lal Bahadur Shastri - his tenure in Rashtrapati Bhavan also saw momentous events which changed the direction of Indian politics, whether it was the Bofors scam, entry and exit of the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka, the Mandal decision to give reservation to OBCs in government jobs or the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi.
Unlike K R Narayanan who referred to himself as a ‘Working President’, Venkataraman used to describe himself as a “Copybook President”. The President was like an “emergency light”, he used to say, which came on automatically when there was a crisis and “no power” and “by that I mean political power”. Once the crisis passed off, the light went off automatically.
Even as his views were conservative about the role of the President - Zail Singh who he had succeeded had toyed with the possibility of dismissing the Prime Minister - Venkataraman was often radical in his views and prescriptions for the polity.
In January 2000, he had criticised the multi-party system, arguing that the smaller parties blackmailed the bigger parties in a coalition-something that has resonance in the mainline parties today. He made a case for derecognising regional parties. The then Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee had considered him as a possible choice to head the Constitution Review Panel but his name was opposed by the DMK because of his remarks against the regional parties. The Dravidian party forced the Government to drop his name and plump instead for Justice M N Venkatachaliah as the head of the panel.
He had difficult relationship with the Nehru-Gandhi family. He was a Congressman to the core, and held important ministerial portfolios under Indira Gandhi. But he was opposed to the emergency she had promulgated in 1975 and is believed to have written articles against it in the magazine “Swarajya” brought out by C Rajagopalachari.
Rajiv Gandhi made him President but he came to have differences with him later on, and his book,” My Presidential Years” provoked critical comments from many Congressmen.
A lawyer by profession, a participant in the country’s freedom struggle, mentored by K.Kamaraj, moving from state politics to the national scene, Union Minister for Finance and Defence, Vice President and President, his was a journey which lasted almost a century, and was witness to events that were momentous. He was mentally alert till the last and those who saw him four months ago recall him reminiscing about the past, concerned about the future, and coming out to the porch to see off his guests.
