EVER since the death of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in 1964, India has heard periodic cries for replacing its carefully chosen parliamentary system with a presidential one. They are raised by politicians across party lines as well as by industrialists and professionals. Last month, the idea was championed by a remarkable group of public figures.

The reasons adduced have been strikingly similar. Fifty years ago, India’s leading industrialist J.R.D. Tata advocated a “presidential system of federal government in which a chief executive at the centre and executive governors in the states are elected for a term of years in which they are irremovable and free to govern through cabinets of experts appointed by them and who may, but need not, include professional politicians”.

A similar plea was made last month by a politician: “We must have a system of government whose leaders can focus on governance rather than on staying in power. A system of directly elected chief executives at all levels – panchayat chiefs, town mayors, chief ministers (or governors) and a national president elected for a fixed term of office – invulnerable to the whims of the legislature, and with clearly defined authority in their respective domains, would permit India to deal more efficiently with its critical economic and social challenges. Cabinet posts would not be limited to those who are electable rather than those who are able.”

Constitutional changes cannot clean up the messiness of politics.

So, the executive must be irremovable and it must be free to draw on talents outside the legislature. The utter thoughtlessness and, indeed, irresponsibility that underlines the bright idea is astonishing. Between 1964 and 2017, India has witnessed a lot that should prompt furious reflection. In 1976, during the ‘emergency’ — a euphemism for Indira Gandhi’s dictatorship — a proposal for a presidential system was floated by her and a trusted aide was asked to prepare a paper. This was coupled with another proposal to convene a new constituent assembly to rewrite India’s constitution and thus legitimise her dictatorship. Significantly, she pursued the idea after her return to power in 1980. Murmurs of support were heard even during Rajiv Gandhi’s time. In January 1987, the BJP’s then president L.K. Advani picked up the refrain.

Least excusable was its championship by a distinguished former ambassador to the USA, B.K. Nehru. He was witness to the gridlock between the US president and his congress. When Newt Gingrich became speaker of the US House of Representatives, he ensured that the gridlock reached a point where the entire machinery of government came to a halt. Of what avail to president Bill Clinton were the two features people tout; namely, the president’s irremovable status and his freedom to enlist the services of persons outside the realm of politics?

It reflects both a profound distrust of the democratic process and a yearning for a ‘strong man’ at the helm. Surely the aya ram, gaya ram or the Iota who destabilises governments in a parliamentary system, by defecting to another party, can do much worse under a presidential system. He can engineer a deadlock and demand his price from the president. President Lyndon B. Johnson succeeded in pushing his programme through his congress because he resorted to those means of enlisting support which his long experience as a senator had taught him.

In the final analysis, there is no substitute for a healthy political process. Constitutional changes cannot clean up a messy political system. An executive can flow from a legislature, as it does in the parliamentary system, but no legislature can spring from the executive. That would spell destruction of democracy.

In his classic work Parliament, Sir Ivor Jennings summed up the cabinet system in Britain in these words: “The British government is one of the strongest, if not the strongest, in the world. It normally has at its command a stable parliamentary majority whose support is based on loyalty to the personnel and acceptance of the principles of the party from which the government is drawn, upon dislike of the alternative which would be drawn from the opposition...”

There is a fusion of the executive and legislative power achieved through the cabinet. The prime minister not only nominates and can remove its members, but also has the right of dissolution. It confers on the cabinet the power of destroying its creators. The prime minister can threaten defiant MPs with dissolution and send them back to contest a fresh election.

The French variant of the presidential system spells conflict between the president and the prime minister. Sri Lanka emulated it in 1978, but came close to discarding it. Professor Karl Loewenstein’s critique is irrefutable: “It appears in pseudo constitutional disguises or struts about without constitutional trappings as naked power.”

The writer is an author and lawyer based in Mumbai.

Published in Dawn, April 22nd, 2017