LET US NOT DEVALUE OUR CONSTITUTIONAL OFFICES

The Indian democracy has endured for six turbulent decades and there is a general agreement that no other political system can hold together a country as complex and as diverse as India. Democracy is the Indian nation's only option, its only hope. We all have a stake in nurturing its institutions and in evolving conventions that strengthen them and raise their status in the eyes of the public. After sixty years of experience of a functional democracy, we are expected to have acquired the maturity and discernment to identify the conventions that have served to sustain our democratic institutions and to segregate the practices that may undermine and corrode them.

Against this backdrop, we need to review the system of appointments to high constitutional offices. The process of appointment must be merit-based and transparent, so that it has legitimacy in the public mind. There should be no room for arbitrariness, patronage, nepotism, cronyism and quid pro quo. It is unfortunate that appointments to high constitutional offices have so far been made by the executive behind an iron curtain. No attempt has been made to lay down the qualifications for various constitutional offices and to place the options available for a given selection in the public domain. The executive abhors exposure, because it fears that its actions might not stand a public scrutiny.

The appointment to the office of the Comptroller & Auditor General of India is a case in point. During the last three decades, six appointments have been made to this key constitutional position. It is no coincidence that all the appointees were IAS officers in the rank of Secretary to the Government of India, who were on the verge of retirement. None of them had any special knowledge or experience of audit and accounts. COMMON CAUSE has been campaigning since 1996 to put an end to such arbitrary exercise of executive discretion.

As the term of Mr. Somayya was approaching its end in March 1996, COMMON CAUSE filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court, praying that the Government should be directed to

evolve policy guidelines for appointment to the post of the Comptroller & Auditor General and prescribe the qualifications and experience required for the post. The petition was dismissed. Six years later, COMMON CAUSE approached the President with the same prayer, but in vain. The matter has once again crossed the threshold of the Supreme Court, this time through a PIL filed by the Public Cause Research Foundation, a civil society organization. Let us hope that the outcome of this initiative will strengthen the institution of Comptroller & Auditor General of India and set the standards to be followed in appointments to all constitutional offices.

In addition to exercising the utmost diligence in selections for constitutional offices, we need to evolve a code of ethics to be followed by their incumbents. Some of the provisions of the code should remain in force even after an incumbent demits office. A constitutional authority, who is called upon to discipline political parties and to play the role of a neutral umpire during electoral battles, should refrain from identifying himself with any political party, even after he has demitted his office; lest an impression be created that his decisions while in office were influenced by his future political aspirations. Significantly, a former Comptroller & Auditor General of India is expressly barred by Article 148 (4) of the Constitution from accepting any office under the Union Government or State Government. The same reasoning should apply to the post-retirement activities, including employment, of all holders of high constitutional offices.

The recent appointment of Dr. M. S. Gill as Minister of State for Youth Affairs & Sports has reopened the public debate on this issue, which is of vital importance to the preservation of the dignity of our constitutional offices. The fact that Dr. Gill is an able administrator is of no consequence. It is irrelevant that he was already in active politics, having been inducted into the Rajya Sabha as a Congress member. Equally immaterial is the fact that some of his predecessors in Nirvachan Sadan had also received favours from various political formations and governments and that there is nothing in his record as Chief Election Commissioner to suggest that he had ever acted in a partisan manner. The only question that we need to ponder over is whether his induction in the Council of Ministers has enhanced the public image of the august institution of the Election Commission of India?

It is true that by excluding certain post-retirement career options for holders of constitutional offices, we would be asking them to make a considerable personal sacrifice. This can partly be compensated by enhancing their post-retirement benefits suitably. But there can be no greater compensation than the satisfaction that by consenting to this sacrifice, they would be ensuring that the high offices, which constitute the underpinnings of our democratic polity, retain their pristine value.

- Kamal Kant Jaswal