Adieu to a calm, unfazed President

President Pranab Mukherjee, whose five-year term ends today, will be remembered as the country’s most distinctive head of state and also among its more distinguished. In his time in Rashtrapati Bhavan, Mr Mukherjee transitioned quite seamlessly from being an adept politician-administrator, who bore the burden of dozens of high-level duties and connected responsibilities — probably more than any single Cabinet-level minister at the Centre in the annals of Indian administrative affairs — during two successive UPA governments of which he was a highly regarded member, to being the calm and unfazed First Citizen to whose lot fell the task of maintaining balance as India hit an ideological and political inflection point of extraordinary proportions.

Given Mr Mukherjee’s vast experience and acumen, many thought he might be ideal as Prime Minister. But the Congress took him out of the executive branch and made him President instead. There was little out of the ordinary in Mr Mukherjee’s first two years in the highest office. The country had a Congress-led government and the President was a man who had risen up the political ladder over four decades as a committed Congressman of the Nehru-Indira orientation.

But cataclysmic political change overtook India in 2014, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi rode to power, determined with his compelling majority in Parliament to comprehensively eclipse all traces of the social and political compact developed under the Nehru-Indira politico — ideological framework as RSS-driven Hindutva (political Hinduism) thought took centrestage.

Mr Mukherjee managed this unprecedented turn in national life with a deep constitutional sense, even some elegance. He asked Mr Modi’s government questions when this became necessary, for example when the PM himself pushed for running important aspects of the administration based on ordinances instead of parliamentary clearance.

The President held fast to his secular outlook against which those of the Hindutva orientation chafe, but which is the bedrock on which our democratic structure stands. The finest example of this was his intervention through numerous statements on “tolerance” and India’s core civilisational values in the 2015-16 period when dissidence was under constant attack by leading lights of the establishment, and cow-vigilante killing of Muslim citizens in the face of governmental silence began to shame us.

On the other hand, the President may have disappointed some of his fellow citizens when he refused to express himself, even obliquely, on a single question of policy. In this sense, he turned out to be a “textbook” President. Mr Mukherjee’s cause was helped by the fact that the PM showered him with institutional courtesy at all times, to the point of calling the President his “guide” and “mentor”. The RSS too played it low key and left the Rashtrapati Bhavan alone to be an island of constitutional good grace.

Goodbye, Mr President, for standing by constitutional proprieties.