Insipid choice
That ‘common minimum’ criteria

There was no strident response to “what’s bad about it?”, yet more telling was the stony silence elicited by the counter-query “what’s so good about it?” It was no rabbit from the magician’s hat that Sonia Gandhi and her UPA came up with. For the highest office in the land, they scraped the bottom of the barrel. In cold print the political curriculum vitae of Mrs Pratibhasinh Patil is lacklustre. It is fair to ask if she enhanced the stature of any of the assignments she has handled, or earned for herself a countrywide image, or ever progressed beyond a bit-part on the national stage. Certainly her only “exposure” at the apex level, a stint as Deputy Chairman of the Rajya Sabha was far from memorable. She lacked the personality, warmth and even humour to carry the House, treasury benches included, along with her.

Clearly her impending nomination, technically the process to elect the successor to Dr APJ Abdul Kalam has yet to kick-in, is not the outcome of a consensus among the UPA and its allies, but of a crudely crafted compromise. An exercise based on the elimination of negatives rather than a projection of positives. Virtually contemptuous was the term used by a Marxist stalwart ~ “logjam”. Remember that under focus is the nation’s next First Citizen, its Head of State, protector of the Constitution, Supreme Commander of the Defence Services. Why the logjam which the Left would now claim to have helped break? Pranab Mukherjee missed out on high office once again because he is perceived as too dangerous/ambitious, not “too valuable”. Mayawati would never permit Sushil Kumar Shinde to take top spot among the supposedly oppressed classes. And, in addition to proven incompetence as home minister, Shivraj Patil was undercut by Maharashtra politics: though, conversely that has worked in Pratibha Patil’s favour. The Shiv Sena has endorsed her. Not exactly a certificate for a person embarking on a national / international journey.

There are some sinister angles to the UPA’s projection of Mrs Patil: the “woman” factor is mischief of Machiavellian magnitude, if the aim was to demolish the “male bastion” image of the Presidency that should have been highlighted from day one. Not that gender bias is countered merely by putting women in high places, they must also have the requisite credentials. And there are other women in the Congress fold who do have some. To also point to Mrs Patil’s husband being of Rajasthani descent is an utterly shameless bid to scuttle the Vice-President’s aspirations to shed the prefix. Yet in some ways Mrs Patil is the victim rather than the culprit. She has been catapulted to her present status by the hugely unbecoming state of national politics. We have come to live with unprincipled alliances; divisions on religious, regional, caste and linguistic lines; the use of money and muscle during elections; corruption and inefficiency. We have reconciled ourselves to the TINA factor (there is no alternative), indeed it has worked again. To be fair the UPA nominee and hence front-runner in the upcoming contest, she is not the worst of the bad bunch that was considered. Rashtrapati Bhavan now awaits another less-than-distinguished occupant.