Enduring Article

earlier sessions of the committee, an impression had gained ground that with some safeguards, the Article could be retained in the Constitution, its last session failed miserably to reach any agreement on the safeguards. With each of the chief ministers expressing his own viewpoint on the Article and the safeguards, the only agreement they could reach was to refer the issue back to the Council. When a smaller, compact body could not take a decision, it was too much to expect the Council to cut the Gordian knot. As a result, the much-misused Article will remain as a potent weapon in the hands of the Centre.

The let-down is all the greater for the lameness of the excuse. Lack of a consensus is the last of the grounds that can be pleaded for avoidance of a belated Central initiative on the Article. Contrary is the conclusion from the past Council meetings and Chief Ministers’ conferences, including the one sponsored by Rajasthan Chief Minister B.S. Shekhawat at Jaipur recently.

The outcome of all these deliberations amounted to a consensus in favour of retaining Article 356 in the Constitution but with added provisos against its abuse. Some parties like the CPI and the CPI(M), which had themselves been victims of the Article, had come round to this view. None of them, of course, has ceased entirely to be partisan in the matter. The BJP, for example, could not be less solicitous about safeguards for Laloo Prasad Yadav against an easy invocation of the provision to evict him from power. And, Kerala’s Marxist Chief Minister E.K. Nayanar is for invoking it only in “definable” circumstances such as a “threat to the nation’s security or integrity” which are, in fact, particularly hard to define and can serve political ends of a specific kind.

The point, however, is that most parties, including those which plead for its unceremonious abandonment before, are now agreed on making the Article, instead, safer for federal democracy. The sole exception provided by Punjab’s ruling Akali Dal only proves the rule. There can be no conscientiously cited reason why the UF Government cannot proceed with its Common Minimum Programme on this count. All-party unanimity cannot be the absolutely minimum condition for steps to outlaw arbitrary use of the Article to dislodge elected governments without giving them a chance to defend themselves and the people an adequate explanation. The pledge of a Prime Minister cannot be a substitute for such statutory steps.