The presidential system (Bombay, February 1968) J.R.D. TATA (1904–1993)

The presidential system (Bombay, February 1968)
J.R.D. TATA (1904–1993)

is speech was delivered at the annual general meeting of the Indian
Merchants’ Chamber. What is significant is that it took India’s leading
industrialists to voice the first doubts about the merits of imposing the
Westminster parliamentary model on India. e reasons J.R.D. Tata gave
for why the presidential system was more appropriate for India are relevant
even today, four decades on.

MAIN SPEECH

While I have always advocated, and still do, that businessmen should not

mix business with politics, this does not mean that in their capacity of

educated and responsible citizens, they should not take interest in political

matters and form rational views on them. In fact, in our tightly planned,

regulated and controlled economy, no intelligent analysis of economic issues

is possible without taking into account the dominating influences of

politics.

In the last fifteen years and more, our Five-Year Plans have been formulated

by the government and passed by Parliament, our economic activity

controlled by a spate of legislation and executive decisions. All economic

power has been centered in ministers and members of central and state

legislatures and in the bureaucracy. Today also, more than ever before, every

problem is considered and every decision made on the basis of political

consideration.

Unless the political system in force functions effectively, unless there is

political stability and the rule of law prevails, all efforts to improve the

economic climate must be frustrated. On the basis of this criterion and in

h l h f h B l d h l l

the light of the recent outrageous events in Bengal and our other legislative

assemblies, the proliferation of parties and groups within parties, the

scramble for power or for the retention of power, the disintegration of law

and order in many parts of the country, the increasing weakness of the

Central Government, is there not justification for the view I hold that the

political system of government we have adopted is in the process of failing?

On that assumption, the thesis I put before you today is that the British

parliamentary system of government, which we have enshrined in our

Constitution is unsuited to the conditions in our country, to the

temperament of our people and to our historical background. Take a look at

the broad geographical sweep south of Europe, from the Atlantic in the

West to the Pacific in the East, from Morocco up to Japan and you will find

no country except India, Ceylon and Malaysia where this system

successfully prevails. It is worth noting also that only in countries of

considerably greater political maturity and with a much smaller population

than ours, has the system worked, or is still working, usually in a modified

form.

It may be argued that other countries like France, for instance, have in the

past been politically unstable for decades and yet survived and progressed,

that the present political instability in our country is a passing phase—the

growing pains of an infant democracy—that India will survive intact as it

has survived thousands of years of even more severe political instability. I

fear this is dangerous wishful thinking, which ignores the tremendous

changes—political, economic and technological—that are taking place here

and in the rest of the world, quite apart from the tremendous impact of our

population explosion.

I venture to suggest that India is one of the twentieth century’s major

political anachronisms. e parliamentary system, which was evolved over a

thousand years of trial and error for the government of a small, occidental

island, and is predicted on the existence and smooth working of a

sophisticated two-party system through a single Parliament is sought to be

adapted to administering an Asian subcontinent through the machinery of

what is developing into a multi-multi-party system clashing in Parliament

and in a number of state legislatures.

e British system has been worked by generations of trained professional

and highly skilled politicians and administrators. In contrast, most of India’s

l d d h l f

politicians are untrained and inexpert in the complex management of a

modern society, while the main responsibility for administering the country

is borne by an overworked cadre of senior civil servants whose number is

grossly inadequate to cater effectively to the needs of over half a billion

people.

In addition, the machine has been burdened with the most ambitious

economic planning and development programme ever attempted outside

Soviet Russia and with immensely difficult problems of defence, external

affairs and finance. Up to the early 1960s, the strain on the machine was

hidden by the dominating personality of a great leader, while a benevolent

one-party autocracy maintained a facade of political stability and democracy

in action. With Nehru gone, the facade has begun to crack and the machine

is showing increasing signs of breaking down.

e process is being accelerated by the disillusionment of the Indian people,

who after twenty years of planning and controls and the expenditure of

enormous amounts of money, find themselves little better off than when

they started on their great adventure. e search for new leadership and

new political ideas is further fragmenting a multiplicity of parties, most of

which seem to be so bankrupt in ideas that they continue to use slogans and

clichés of nineteenth century socialism. Frustration and loss of faith are

rapidly eroding our nationhood and encouraging a tendency for India to

withdraw again into mutually antagonistic regional divisions.

To come back to our thesis that the parliamentary form of government we

have adopted is in the process of failing, the next question is whether this is

due to inherent defects in the system itself or to the failings of the

politicians charged with operating it? I think it is due to both.

If the majority of the professional politicians of India, elected to the central

and state legislatures, were as mature, as civic minded, as well-informed and

as responsible as their counterparts in more politically advanced countries,

we would at least have a measure of political stability, a better informed and

intellectually higher level of debate and a greater respect for law and order.

We would still suffer, however, from what I suggest is the major failure of

the system under our conditions, namely, the constitutional requirement

that cabinets at the Centre and in the states can be formed only from

Members of Parliament and the respective legislatures and are made directly

bl h h d d d f h ’ h

responsible to them in their day to day conduct of the country’s or the

states’ affairs.

e problems to be tackled by the Executive and the Legislative branches of

the government are nowhere in the world as numerous, varied and complex

as in India. e great majority of them are certainly not political problems.

Is it not obvious, therefore, that they should be tackled mainly by experts,

technicians, scientists, economists, industrial managers and other

professionally trained men and women? Can we blame our politicians,

untrained and uninformed in any of the specialized disciplines involved in

the management of a vast country such as ours, if they fail to understand, let

alone to solve, the problems they face and to adapt themselves to the rapidly

changing conditions of today? If, except for a few outstandingly able and

dedicated men and women to whom we must extend our profound respect

and gratitude, they have in this new game of parliamentary politics been

mainly concerned with maintaining their own political position and status?

Can we blame them for succumbing to the lust for power and for the many

privileges attached to political power?

Between now and the next General Elections in 1972, so overwhelming

may be the disillusion of our voters that they may turn their faces totally

away from the procedures and practices of parliamentary democracy. Even

if this does not happen, is it not likely that the trend which emerged in the

last elections (1967) may be even more pronounced in 1972? If so, we may

be faced, both at the Centre and in most of the states, with a dangerously

fluid situation in which a host of parties will constantly manoeuvre for

power in a series of ever changing coalitions, defections and floor-crossings,

where the authority of the government and Parliament will be so debased

that the nation may sink into anarchy, be captured and ruled by a

dictatorship, or cease to exist as a united India.

Can we afford such a risk and what will be the fate of our hundreds of

millions of hungry, and by then angry people, if we do and the gamble fails?

What then is the alternative? Might it not be a Presidential System of

Federal Government in which a Chief Executive at the Centre and elected

Executive Governors in the states are elected for a term of years, during

which they are irremovable and free to govern through cabinets of experts

appointed by them and who may, but need not, include professional

politicians?

 b f h f l

ere can be many variations of such a system, many ways of electing a

President and governors, but its main characteristics, however, are stability

on the one hand and expert management of affairs on the other. e

executives of such a government will not, as in the British system, be

directly responsible to Parliament in their day to day management of a

country’s affairs and constantly vulnerable to political skulduggery, but

would be subject to constant and vigilant scrutiny by Parliament, which, of

course, must remain the only body entrusted with law making.

I am well aware that this alternative was considered by the Constituent

Assembly before our Constitution was enacted and that the British system

was preferred to it, but since then, we have had a full twenty years of

experience in its working and the conditions visualized in 1947 are certainly

not those which we find in existence today. We have, in these twenty years,

already amended the Constitution almost as many times, and four of the

amendments have been major ones. Need we be afraid of a further

amendment intended to provide the country with a more stable and more

expert government than we have today?

What, in practice, should we do? I suggest that the first step should be the

appointment by Parliament of a high powered commission to undertake a

comprehensive study of the problem and to recommend such revision of our

Constitution as would ensure the attainment of the desired objective. e

commission should consist of outstanding experts in the fields of politics,

law, education, science and other professions.

is will, I know, require an act of great courage but on it will depend the

future of one-seventh of the human race as well as of the whole experiment

of welding our people together permanently into a single united nation.

Meanwhile, we cannot even afford to wait till courage comes. We have to

find the intermediate ways and means of restoring a degree of stability to

our politics and more than a degree of safety to our citizens. Whatever be

the politics of the parties or coalitions of parties in individual states,

communication links must be kept going and at least selected strategic

industries must be kept free from intimidation and sabotage.

Although such action obviously lies in the realm of the government, we

businessmen, particularly those of us whose activities spread beyond a single

state, can do much by our example and by word and action to help to break

h h h h l b f d d l h h b

through the parochial barriers of creed and language, which we see being

put up throughout the country.

In addition to the many tasks and duties of a purely economic trading and

managerial nature to which we must dedicate ourselves in the coming years,

let us also play our part in maintaining the integrity of our country and the

survival of our democratic way of life.