Ram Nath Kovind was elected the 14 th President of the Republic of India by State legislatures, as required by the Indian Constitution. He is the first incumbent from the ranks of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which leads the governing coalition at the Centre, headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
President-elect Kovind defeated the Opposition-led Congress nominee Meira Kumar by a decisive majority of 66 per cent to 34 per cent, the margin of victory inflated by cross-party voting, with many Congress party and Trinamool Congress legislators casting their ballots for Mr Kovind.
Mr Kovind, hereon will put aside party affiliations and loyalties and speak and act as the head of state, Commander-in-Chief and supreme representative of the citizens of India. He has broad enough shoulders and a wise head to carry his responsibilities in a manner befitting his high office.
The defeated candidate Ms Meira Kumar gracefully acknowledged his victory and wished the President elect well, as becomes a contest held in the open according to prescribed constitutional prescriptions within the embrace of a democratic framework based on universal adult suffrage, irrespective of faith, ethnicity or caste.
The fact that both Mr Kovind and Ms Kumar are Dalits, the lowest caste subjected to ancient practices of discriminations which exist to this day in many parts of India in varying degrees, is surely significant. The national conscience, far from making cowards of us all, has emboldened leaders and ordinary citizens alike to strengthen a political and social initiative to right old wrongs and injustices for the common good.
President-elect Kovind, at a ripe 71 years, has had a long and honourable career, as lawyer and social activist in Dalit organizations. He was Governor of Bihar, a state where Dalit distress has been acute down the years. His election as President does not entail a clean slate with no oppression of Dalits in sight. A practice rooted in centuries of custom cannot vanish overnight. Its eradication will require steadfast resolution and imaginative policies, inevitably allied to the vast transformational changes presently under way across India.
Evolving modernization of the economy, driven by science and technology is sprouting newer industries based on skills development incubated in better and more accessible education across a whole range of disciplines. The pains of labour are proof that a new and invigorated India is in birth.
The people of India and India’s friends abroad will appreciate the true significance of these developments amid the tumult on other domestic issues and myriad vicissitudes, if not now, then in the fullness of time. Those of goodwill have occasion to rejoice in the election of President Ram Nath Kovind. Jai Hind!
Senator Larry Pressler spills the beans
Former Republican Senator Larry Pressler, a true and understanding friend of India – the genuine few to be separated from the time-serving many - was known and respected for his integrity, wisdom and vision. Pressler was concerned at Pakistan’s covert nuclear weapon programme with the discreet connivance of successive US administrations. These facts are now in the public space thanks to a number of works such as ‘Deception: Pakistan, the United States and the Global Nuclear Weapons Conspiracy,’ by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark. They revealed how Richard Barlow, the CIA’s Pakistan desk officer, was sacked as mentally disturbed because of his persistence in drawing attention to Pakistan’s clandestine operations to manufacture nuclear weapons.
Senator Pressler was equally persistent in this regard, finally pinning down the elder Bush to accept Pressler’s legislation requiring the George H.W Bush Administration’s (1988-92) written certification that Islamabad was not involved in nuclear weapon activity. Without such certification Senator Pressler undertook to block all economic and military aid to Pakistan. His efforts and were diluted through sophistry. The price for the United States has been heavy. Billions of dollars in military and financial aid to Pakistan, without staunching the flow terrorists into Afghanistan, where the US remains mired in a futile and draining counter-insurgency conflict. ‘Calling Pakistan’s Bluff’ is the title of an article in Foreign Affairs by Whitney Kassel and Philip Reiner, who call for a suspension for all US aid to Pakistan. It is shutting stable-door after the horse has bolted.
Now in fruitful and honourable retirement Senator Pressler has written a book entitled ‘Neighbors in Arms: An American Senator’s Quest for Disarmament in a Nuclear Subcontinent’. So what does Larry Pressler reveal of his experience at the top level of his country’ political establishment? No more than the warning of departing President Dwight D, Eisenhower in his valedictory address in 1960: that America’s military industrial complex exercised vast irregular power in the nation’s affairs, and that this should be curtailed to preserve the democratic values on which the nation had long been reared.
Pressler gives chapter and verse of this pervasive power undiminished, if not expanded, some three decades later when he was senator. The military industrial complex was a suffocating presence, with the Pentagon reflecting and executing its influence and authority. The US military, says Pressler, got on well with military dictatorships of whatever political stripe across the world, hence Pakistan became the cynosure of its attention and affection.. India, in contrast, was perceived as perverse and stubborn, an irritant to be tolerated, at best.
Those with recall to history or who lived through that fraught period, know how the Nixon Administration turned against India with unbridled vengeance during the East Pakistan crisis of 1971, the Indo-Pakistan war that followed, climaxed by the emergence of a sovereign Bangladesh. American cooperation with Mao’s China led Nixon to encourage Beijing to attack India and open a second front along the Himalayan border in a bid to save their common client, the military dictator Yahya Khan from a calamitous defeat. Nixon went as far dispatching the nuclear-armed Seventh Fleet to the Bay of Bengal, but shadowed by Soviet nuclear submarines, the intended intimidation went no further. The Chinese, too, were fully aware of a possible Soviet strike across their land border in case of any adventure against India.
Life moves on and Indo-US ties today are a far cry from what they were during the Cold War. To be trapped by the past would be unwise; to forget its lessons would be folly.
Pressler laments that Indo-US ties are predicated on defence. ‘We tear India down when our generals fly down there [Islamabad] and encourage the ISI (Pakistan’s military intelligence service]. We need to create [a relationship] based on trade and development, and not based on arms trade,’ he said.
India is in lockstep reality, hence its purchases of American military equipment, to some extent, is calculated to keep Washington onside.
In a media interview, Pressler likened the US military industrial complex to a ‘octopus with its tentacles all over.’ The Secretary of Defense was more system than an individual. The ‘Pentagon is for arming everybody’, he explained.
The present CIIA Director’s claim that Russian interference in US presidential elections goes way back to the 1970s strains of credulity. So Moscow helped elect Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. What next? How ironical that ‘regime change,’ - for long a feature of American statecraft – is now at the recipient of the same medicine. Reading Larry Pressler’s book would be an encouraging return to sanity.
Continuing Indian paradox
The Indian as difficult to explain as the Indian rope trick, what with pro-cow vigilantes on the prowl and kindred lunacies are also much in evidence. The uplifting news of an Indian discovery of a supercluster of galaxies – named Saraswati, after the lost, ancient river - estimated to be 4 billion light years away buoys hope that all is not lost for the country.
The Eureka moment was announced by astronomers of the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics and Indian Institutes of Science and Science Education and Research in Pune, NIT, Jamshedpur and Newman College, Thodupuzha in Kerala.
Professor Somak Raychaudhury, along with Dr Joydeep Bagchi, the lead authors of the paper, published in the latest issue of The Astrophysical Journal, studied this galactic reality for the past 15 years. Their Bengali compatriots, meanwhile, on the earth below in Kolkata, led by the Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, were tom-toming incomprehensible tantrums in yet another monster demonstration to plague a tormented city.. Another paradox to contemplate.
