PRESIDENT WARNS AGAINST HERO WORSHIP
President Pranab Mukherjee on Friday said the country “must always guard against majoritarianism” and that India needed a strong Opposition standing guard. The President, speaking at an event in Mumbai, left people in little doubt that his comments were in the context of the Bharatiya Janata Party winning in Uttar Pradesh and other states, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi emerging as the country’s most popular leader. Possibly with Modi’s rising popularity in mind, the President cautioned against “hero worship” and spoke about the “misadventure” of Emergency by a “strong” leader like Indira Gandhi. ARCHIS MOHAN reports
President Pranab Mukherjee on Friday said the country “must always guard against majoritarianism” and India needed a strong Opposition standing guard.
The President cautioned against over-centralisation of power, and said a diverse country like India was best served by a parliamentary, and not a presidential, system of governance where power is delegated. He asked scholars and political scientists to analyse the consequences and longterm implications of moving away from the classic tenets of a parliamentary system.
The President, speaking at an event in Mumbai, left people in little doubt that his comments were in the context of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) winning in Uttar Pradesh and other states, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi emerging as the country’s most popular leader.
Mukherjee said he was “extremely happy” to hear Modi speak about the need for humility in the aftermath of his party’s victory in the recent elections, where the PM said while elections are determined on the basis of “bahumat”, or majority, the states will be governed on the principle of “sarvamat”, or consensus.
Possibly with Modi’s rising popularity in mind, the President cautioned against “hero worship” and spoke about the “misadventure” of Emergency by a “strong” leader like Indira Gandhi. He also spoke at length about the first PM Jawaharlal Nehru’s commitment to civil rights, democracy and his respect for Parliament as a forum for discussions and debates.
“(Jawaharlal) Nehru used to say, ‘I do not want India to be a country in which millions of people say yes to one man, I want a strong opposition’,” the President said. Nehru, Mukherjee said, “strongly discouraged all forms of hero worship” and had said that India was “too large a country with too many legitimate diversities to permit any socalled ‘strong man’ to trample over people and their ideas”.
Mukherjee said former PM Atal Bihari Vajpayee was a leader in the Nehruvian mould, who combined courtesy with political sagacity. “I have also been deeply impressed by the focussed approach, energy and capacity for hard work of Prime Minister Narendra Modi,” he said.