AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

        In these columns about a fortnight ago, I had written about the quasi-criminal and not so civil antecedents and shameful track record of the Sonia-UPA Coalition's nominee Smt Pratibha Patil for the highest Constitutional Office of the President of India. Tomorrow we are going to have the most disgraceful election in the dark and lamentable history of criminal mankind. Everything is over bar the shouting. And yet as a free lance journalist, I derive my daily inspiration from Sir Winston Churchill whose voice was the lone voice-the only voice-against the tyranny of Adolf Hitler and his Nazidom from 1933 to 1939. Sir Winston Churchill said: “I have a tendency against which I should, perhaps be on my guard, to swim against the stream. At all times, according to my lights and throughout the changing scenes through which we are all hurried, I have always faithfully served two public causes which, I think, stand supreme—the maintenance of the enduring greatness of Great Britain and the historical continuity of our Island life....To be so entirely convinced and vindicated in a matter of life and death to one's country, and not to be able to make Parliament and the nation heed the warning, or bow to the proof by taking action was an experience most painful”. Sir Winston Churchill was totally vindicated when Hitler attacked Poland and the II World War began on 3 September, 1939.

        I also derive my daily inspiration from a beautiful poem of Duff Cooper, 1st Viscount Norwich. He had been a Cabinet Minister in Churchill's War Cabinet. When Sir Winston Churchill passed away on 25 January, 1965, Duff Cooper paid this poetical tribute to him:

        When ears were deaf and tongues were mute,

        You told of doom to come.

        When others fingered on the lute,

        You thundered on the drum.

        This is how each and every Constitutional, Law Abiding and impotent citizen of India feels today about the unconstitutional manner in which the Electoral College for the Office of the President of India is being manipulated and twisted out of shape to achieve the private agenda of a handful of political criminals and their families. When I think of the background of most of the members of the Electoral College, I cannot help describing them in the explosive words of the poet of American Democracy, Walt Whitman (1819-1892):

        “While the members who composed it [any Democratic Party National Convention prior to the Civil War] were, seven-eighths of them, the meanest kind of bawling and blowing officeholders, office-seekers, pimps, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men', custom-house clerks, contractors, kept-editors, spaniels well-trained to carry and fetch, jobbers, infidels, disunionists, terrorists, mail catchers, pushers of slavery, creatures of the President , creatures of would-be Presidents, spies, bribers, compromisers, lobbyers, sponges, ruined sports, expelled gamblers, policy-backers, monte-dealers, duellists, carriers of concealed weapons, deaf men, pimpled men, scarred with vile disease, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combinings and born freedom-sellers of the earth”

        The brash decision of the political parties forming part of the newly created Third (III) Front to abstain from voting is an unconstitutional act, indeed a very dangerous symbol of monstrous and unrestrained autocracy.

        A delegation led by leader of Opposition L K Advani and NDA convener George Fernandes submitted a memorandum to the Election Commission (EC) on 16 July 2007. The NDA delegation consisted of BJP leaders Arun Jaitley, Murli Manohar Joshi, Vijay Kumar Malhotra, SS Ahluwalia and Sushma Swaraj and Digvijay Singh of the JD (U). They said that 'compulsive abstention' had no place in presidential elections. After submitting a memorandum to Election Commissioner Navin Chawla, L K Advani told media persons 'If abstention from voting is allowed, it will deny representation to a large section of the electorate, which will be contrary to Parliamentary democracy and the principle of representation of citizens through elected members,'

        The NDA leaders had sought the EC's intervention under Article 324 of the Constitution and asked it to direct the political parties that their decision was against the spirit of the Constitution. The NDA leaders pointed out that a political party is registered under Section 29A of the Representation of the People Act 1951 which requires a party to bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution. In its memorandum, the NDA leaders said that the EC was required to clarify that MPs or MLAs were “entitled” to ignore decisions or directions from their parties to abstain in presidential election. Finally in their memorandum to the EC, they requested “The Election Commission may, therefore, consider passing appropriate order(s), under Article 324 of the Constitution restraining political parties from issuing any direction to their MPs/MLAs to abstain from voting in the forthcoming presidential elections. Any such direction deserved to be ordered as unconstitutional. No political party should be allowed to act against its MPs or MLAs for voting in violation of its abstention call”.

        Advani, who spoke at length about the constitution of the presidential Electoral College, insisted that no party has the right to stop its lawmakers from voting in the election for the highest constitutional office of the country.

        The NDA said in its memorandum. 'There cannot be a greater betrayal of the electorate than a willful and deliberate refusal by an elected legislator to represent his constituents/ voters in their right to elect the President of India through him. It is a failure by an elected representative to discharge his constitutional function in electing a head of State.'

        The response of the Election Commission has been on expected lines. The helpless people of India have now come to the definite view that two (2) of the Election Commissioners cannot but function as direct political agents of the Sonia Congress Party (10 Janpath!!) which is heading the UPA Coalition. The Election Commission has mischievously clarified that the electors in the Presidential Election 2007 (MPs and MLAs) are free to vote as they wish or to abstain and that such action would not invite disqualification under the 10th Schedule of the Indian Constitution. Like closing a stable after all the horses have bolted from it, the Election Commission has said that political parties could not issue a whip to their members to vote or not to vote. The whole of India knows that all the political parties have already issued a whip to all their members in a dictatorial manner.

        Sonia's unofficial UPA Constitution has triumphed over the official Indian Constitution. Smt Pratibha Patil is the specially chosen beneficiary of the unofficial UPA Constitution. Shri Bhairon Singh Shekawat has become the specially targeted and hunted victim of the official Indian Constitution. Thus the sordid drama of violent, arbitrary and authoritarian 'unconstitutionalism' relating to the Presidential Election 2007 has been taken to its logical conclusion by the committed combination of the Election Commission of India and the Supreme Court of India.

        In America they have a system of election of their President through an Electoral College, apart from popular vote. In an article titled 'America's Worst College: LET'S CHOOSE OUR PRESIDENT BY POPULAR VOTE'. Timothy Noah wrote in 2004: “The best possible outcome for the 2004 presidential election would be for John Kerry to lose the popular vote but win in the Electoral College. Obviously it would satisfy a primitive hunger for payback to thwart Republicans in the most significant way that Democrats were thwarted in 2000. But there's a high-minded reason, too: It would give both parties a common interest in abolishing the Electoral College and establishing the popular vote as the means by which presidents are chosen”.

        In a similar way the common people of India must organise themselves and launch a struggle for bringing about a system of direct Presidential Election by popular vote, making it impossible for pimps and touts and paid agents from different political parties (as painted by Walt Whitman above!!) to function as final arbiters of our national destiny. These grisly gangs of political criminals should no longer be allowed to treat more than one hundred billion people of India as disposable unused condoms.

        Amidst bizarre scenes of exultation, we are condemned to have a woman with shady antecedents as President of India next month. To conclude in the words of Vayu Putra:

        “The nomination of an acutely tainted person is unprecedented; The opposition approaching the EC against the nomination is unprecedented; The media being extremely critical on a Presidential nominee is unprecedented; The Presidential nominee taking part in political rallies is unprecedented; PILs being filed against the nomination of a Presidential candidate is unprecedented; Supreme Court dismissing PILs of such great importance is unprecedented; A website being opened on the tainted nominee as an awareness campaign is unprecedented; A political alliance's chairperson issuing a diktat to its members not to vote for a second choice is unprecedented; Another political alliance deciding to abstain from voting in a presidential election and issuing a whip to its members also to abstain is unprecedented; The opposition alliance approaching the Election Commission against the concerned abstention is unprecedented; Tainted persons lodged in jails being allowed to vote for a tainted nominee is unprecedented. Ultimately, in this unprecedented Presidential election, the tainted candidate is going to triumph, which again is unprecedented. In the backdrop of so many unprecedented happenings, even though we have a bad precedent of an 'Emergency Declaration 1975' in the past, we may be in for yet another such precedent of an 'undeclared emergency'. A fair analysis of the entire presidential electoral process, right from the time of nominations to the time of the day of election, involving all the political parties and their leaders, clearly points to such an eventuality in the near future. May God save this Great Nation!!”