Presidents and precedent

President Pratibha Patil ends her term in very much the foggy environment in which she began it. When she was chosen as the Congress nominee for Rashtrapati Bhavan in 2007, there were murmurs of dissent. Did this middle-ranking state politician, with a rather undistinguished career, deserve to be India’s President, let alone its first woman President? Stories of her family’s implication in local intrigues in Maharashtra and Jalgaon — Ms Patil’s native town — started to do the rounds. It all seemed very messy.

In the years that followed, some of the criticism of Ms Patil died down because sceptics of the individual did not want to be seen as belittling the office of the President of India. However, in the run-up to Ms Patil’s exit from the presidential palace, the disparagement has returned. The perception that Ms Patil was taking away military land in Pune — meant to house old soldiers — for her post-retirement mansion took root. A Right to Information (RTI) application revealed the excesses of Ms Patil’s official visits, within the country and abroad. Controversies related to her son were recalled.
As the government told an RTI activist, in the years 2009 and 2010 alone the President had taken family members (between two and eight) on 12 official visits. Three of these were foreign visits — encompassing Spain, Poland, Britain, Cyprus and China. Three of the domestic visits were to Maharashtra, the Patil clan’s home state and perhaps facilitated a broader family reunion.
Previous presidents have also taken family members on visits abroad. Shankar Dayal Sharma and K.R. Narayanan both did so. Indian VIPs have a history of seeking hospitality for the family. Prime ministers, judges and the odd comptroller and auditor general (CAG) are guilty on this score. In one egregious example, H.D. Deve Gowda, then Prime Minister, took a huge household contingent to Zimbabwe for the G15 Summit in 1996. Photographs of the group at the Victoria Falls were publicised in the media.
Given this history, why does Ms Patil stand out — and does she deserve such hostility? Consider two reasons. First, precedent is not justification and Indian citizens have a right to expect decent behaviour from their public officials, and certainly from the First Citizen. The President of India has a largely ceremonial role limited to taking few — but usually important — decisions. Presidential terms and legacies tend to be marked by what incumbents didn’t do — the controversies they didn’t cause, the war against elected government they didn’t wage, the indulgence they didn’t resort to, the violation of public trust they didn’t succumb to.
This is where Ms Patil has been less than perfect. Some years ago, her son accompanied her on a trip to Latin America. Midway through the visit, he left the official entourage to take a commercial flight to the United States, negotiate a business deal, and then come back. This was simply not on. Later Rashtrapati Bhavan lobbied for a Congress ticket for the First Son in the Maharashtra Assembly election, allowing the mother to overwhelm the President.
More recently, Ms Patil took her son-in-law along to China and invited non-immediate family and friends to be presidential guests on outstation visits. This month, she left on a nine-day trip to the Seychelles and South Africa, accompanied by a massive contingent and spoiling herself with the ultimate farewell holiday. Some of her predecessors may have behaved similarly, but in a time of 24x7 media scrutiny and rising expectations as to how public officials should conduct themselves, did she really expect nobody would notice?
Second, public images are not absolutes and created in a vacuum. They emerge by a process of comparison. President Patil’s five years have coincided with Manmohan Singh’s prime ministerial term. He has travelled abroad more than many previous prime ministers, a reflection of India’s growing role in world affairs and the importance to trade to its economy. Yet, nobody, not his worst enemy, has accused Dr Singh of overstaying and seeking out luxury. His visits have been remarkably compact and business-like, sometimes amounting to quick and gruelling 24 or 36-hour timelines between take-off and touchdown at the Palam air station. There have been no outsize family contingents, no retinues of grandchildren.
The President did not even try and match the spartan manner of her Prime Minister. It has not escaped attention.
When should heads of state or government take their family members along for a foreign visit and when should they not? There are no hard-and-fast rules. The spouse always travels, and generally has an official or semi-official role. Children and extended family (even the occasional mother-in-law) can be on the flight for particularly landmark visits or perhaps for that one “for the memories” trip in the final months of the public official’s term.
In 2000, President Bill Clinton came to India, the first American President to do so in 22 years. He brought with him his young daughter, Chelsea, and she celebrated Holi in Jodhpur, experiencing the colour, vibrancy and sheer exotica of India. As Mr Clinton explained, ever since his wife, Hillary, had travelled to New Delhi and Calcutta (now Kolkata) in 1997 for Mother Teresa’s funeral, the family had been fascinated by India. As such, he had brought his daughter — and in fact his mother-in-law as well. He wouldn’t have done this had he been visiting, say, Europe, with a more familiar culture.
Consider another, hypothetical case. Should Prime Minister Manmohan Singh go to Pakistan later this year and to Gah, the West Punjab village where he was born, it would be perfectly understandable if he took his grandchildren with him. This would be one of those once-in-a-lifetime visits, with emotional meaning, and nobody would object if the Prime Minister’s family went with him.
Such are the benchmarks the public, in India as elsewhere, expects its political and government leaders to adhere to. Somewhere in the past five years Ms Patil ended up giving the impression she couldn’t care less.

The writer can be contacted at malikashok@gmail.com