I do not know why Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is once again seeking entry into parliament through the back door, the Rajya Sabha. This is an Upper House. A country's prime minister has to face the voters directly to assess his popularity. The Lok Sabha, the House of the People, is the appropriate place. Singh can select a safe seat if he fears that after having been the prime minister for three years, his government's performance is not good enough to win him a tough election.
But he cannot use the Rajya Sabha as a stalking horse to hide his identity. By evading the Lok Sabha election, Singh is devaluing the office of Prime Minister. No prime minister since independence has tried to escape the Lok Sabha poll. Indira Gandhi, when made prime minister, was also a member of the Rajya Sabha. She resigned and contested the first available by-election to the Lok Sabha. So did H.K. Deva Gowda and Inder Kumar Gujral, her successors. Both were members of the Rajya Sabha.
Yet, after they came to occupy the office of prime minister, they resigned their respective seats and sought election to the Lok Sabha. In contrast, Singh has filed his nomination papers for the Rajya Sabha for the fourth time from Assam. He is as good as elected because the Congress party has the requisite strength. The formal announcement will come in the next few days when the poll takes place. But this is not fair.
Whether Singh comes from Assam or Punjab, which is his home state, is not relevant. My point is that the Rajya Sabha does not legitimise his position. It is a House which comprises members who have been elected indirectly. State assembly members are the ones who face the electorate directly in their respective constituencies.
The question is a larger one: whether the prime minister should be a member of the Lok Sabha, the directly elected House, or of the Rajya Sabha, the indirectly elected House. The choice is obvious. The prime minister has to win at the polls on the popular level. That means the Lok Sabha. While contesting for the Lower House, Singh would have come into contact with people at the grass roots. Dust and din of electioneering might have given him an insight of politics which may be dirty, but is nevertheless real.
Sitting in the ivory tower that is the Raja Sabha, he has missed the information he would have gathered from the ground on how India's heart ticks. It is rather odd that the prime minister has no vote in the house which decides on the motion of confidence in the government he leads. Our constitution-makers may not have spelt out that the prime minister should be from the Lower House. But, in their scheme of things, the Lok Sabha had the pre-eminent position. The Lok Sabha is the real house around which parliamentary activities revolve.
Too short
This is the House which decides the fate of political parties and their allies. Even one vote less than the majority will be too short to sustain a government in power.
I am afraid if the importance of direct election is not underlined, even members of the legislative council, the second House, and would like to make it to the office of the chief minister. At present, not all the states have the legislative councils.
I can understand Singh's diffidence over contesting for the Lok Sabha because some of the Congress bosses were responsible for his defeat when he did so from South Delhi, a Lok Sabha constituency of highly-educated voters, a few years ago.
Many states will be willing to offer him the Lok Sabha seat if he so decides. I am sure Punjab would want him from the state because he is a brilliant son of the soil. He has only to indicate his desire. One sitting MP from Punjab has told me that he is willing to vacate his seat for Singh. This member does not belong to the Congress party.
I concede that after the perverse judgment by the former Chief Justice Y.K. Sabharwal's bench, Manmohan Singh does not have to bother whether he is "ordinarily resident" of Assam. The Supreme Court did away with the domicile qualification for a Rajya Sabha member. However, Manmohan Singh has won the point in an earlier petition where he was declared qualified to contest from Assam on the basis of his ration card, the electricity bill and the rent receipts of the house he had occupied in Guwahati.
The judgment says that a Rajya Sabha member does not have to be a resident of the state whose assembly returns him or her. I do not want to open the case of eligibility, nor do I propose to discuss Chief Justice Sabharwal's judgment. I have no doubt that some day a larger bench will quash it because the judgment defeats the very purpose of the Rajya Sabha, the council of states. My point is a limited one. The prime minister has to be a member of the Lok Sabha because this is the House of the People and this is where the sovereignty rests.
Kuldip Nayar is a former Indian High Commissioner to the UK and a former Rajya Sabha MP.
