(This piece is a response to “India Needs a Presidential System to Check One-Man, One-Party Rule”.)
The essay “India Needs a Presidential System to Check One-Man, One-Party Rule”, published by The Quint on 27 May 2017, consists of a series of errors that arise from multiple conceptual confusions.
The allure of the presidential system has existed right from the time of the nationalist struggle for independence. In fact, the preference for a parliamentary model over the presidential one was hotly contested in the Constituent Assembly by a vocal, yet minority, group.
Since independence, many leaders and intellectuals have endorsed the presidential system, most famously the then Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani in the late 1990’s, and the current Lok Sabha MP Shashi Tharoor more recently. And there are indeed strong arguments in support of a directly elected executive that need not depend on a legislative majority – arguments that highlight its stability, efficiency and accountability. But the arguments provided in the essay are not among them.
Therefore, instead of evaluating the arguments for and against presidentialism as such, I would like to focus on the specific arguments made by the author, since they display a surprising lack of conceptual understanding.
Is the Problem also the Solution?
The author starts off by bemoaning the power of a single individual, who is unchallenged, both in the government and in the party. This is, in fact, a massive problem in our country where we have seen politicians build a cult of personality around them. The late Jayalalithaa, former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister, is the prime example of such a phenomenon, where no criticism or questioning of her was brooked, both within the party and the government.
A similar cult is being formed around Prime Minister Narendra Modi as well. The author argues that India needs to end the reliance on a single individual’s wisdom. For this reason, it is time India adopted a system of government that empowers smartly-crafted institutions, rather than centralise all powers into one person.
And yet, he offers the presidential system as the answer to this problem! A system that intentionally centralises the entire executive into the hands of one person, cannot address the creation of cult-like figures that brook no dissent.
On the contrary, the election of a single individual to embody the entire executive, will only strengthen the cult of personality around political leaders, as they vie for the highest office on the basis of personal qualities, at the expense of complex and nuanced ideological issues that need a thorough examination.
Any real solution to the centralisation of executive power in the hands of one individual must necessarily involve empowering the Parliament and the state legislative assemblies so that they are better placed to hold the executive accountable.
The presidential system cannot assure this, since the president, being directly elected, can point to their electoral mandate to sidestep legislative scrutiny and accountability. It will therefore only take us further from our goal of responsible government.
Federalism or Presidential System?
The rest of the essay lists out what the author thinks are virtues of the presidential system. But this is where the essay is mired in a myriad conceptual errors.
The author argues, and rightly so, that the US President has no authority over state governments, whether to dismiss or overrule them. He argues that this form of decentralisation is essential to effective administration, since each level of government is empowered through direct elections and clear assignment of responsibilities, thus making them directly accountable to the people.
What he has described, however, is federalism, a feature that is neither exclusive nor essential to the presidential system. Germany is a parliamentary republic, but has a strong federal system. The states have their own constitutions and residual powers rest with the state, unlike in India, where residual powers rest with the central government.
On the other hand, Chile is a presidential republic that is unitary in nature – its administrative divisions are governed by officials appointed by the president. India can, therefore, take concrete steps to increase the federal character of its political system without abandoning the parliamentary system. Such a simple mistake by the author displays his lack of conceptual distinction between federalism and presidentialism.
The author also cites with approval, the lack of control that the US president has over his own party, whether it is the appointment of officials, the setting of agenda or the timing of, presumably, intra-party elections. He would have us believe that the weak control of the president over his party is a feature of presidential systems. Again, this betrays his conceptual error. Political parties can be decentralised and function separately from the government, even in parliamentary systems.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru famously had multiple tiffs with members of the Congress – in fact, Nehru threatened to resign several times because of the opposition to his political objectives from within his own party. His preferred candidate for Congress President, Acharya Kripalani, was defeated in internal party elections, and the party successfully stymied or diluted many of his social and economic policies.
The internal organisation of political parties is not dependent on whether the president is directly elected or not. The author, therefore, makes a grave error by confusing decentralised party structures with presidentialism.
Misconception of Independent Judiciary
He makes a similar mistake regarding the independence of the judiciary in the US. He argues that the president’s authority is limited only to the nomination of judges, whereas the actual appointment of judges is done by the legislature, more specifically, the Senate. However, the US President actually has far more say over who becomes a Supreme Court judge than the Prime Minister does in India.
In fact, Supreme Court judges in India are chosen through an internal mechanism known as the collegium so as to, at least ostensibly, preserve judicial independence. Meanwhile, the appointment of Supreme Court judges in the US is a highly political decision, as witnessed by the conflict between President Obama and the Republican Party over the recent vacancy in the Supreme Court. Such a situation undoubtedly does not bode well for the independence of the judiciary in the US.
The author also states that it is the independence of the judiciary in the US that thwarted President Trump’s travel ban on certain Muslim nations, and that such judicial independence is possible only in a presidential system. However, from the very beginning, the judiciary in India has successfully limited the power of the executive and the legislature in several landmark rulings.
The most famous of these is the Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala case of 1973, in which the judiciary ruled that amendments to the Constitution of India cannot conflict with or seek to alter the basic structure of the Constitution.
Thus, there is no necessary connection between an independent judiciary and presidentialism. By overlooking these facts, the author has fallen into yet another error stemming from a conceptual confusion.
This not to deny there are legitimate problems with the parliamentary system, especially in India – problems that are too numerous to be discussed here. The presidential system is an intriguing idea and must be studied carefully, even if, in the final assessment, it is found to be unsuitable. However, the proponents of presidentialism in India are badly served by the author’s erroneous arguments and conceptual incoherence.
( Shyam is a former Legislative Assistant to a Member of Parliament (LAMP) Fellow and graduated from IIT Madras with an Integrated MA (Development Studies). He can be found at @Shyam_phronesis. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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