Chanakya's New Manifesto: To Resolve the Crisis Within India by Pavan K. Varma

be balanced by his commitment, under the Constitution and his oath of office, to abide by the collective will of the cabinet. There cannot be a situation whereby chiefs of individual parties instruct their cabinet nominees to follow an agenda which is different to or opposed to the collective decisions of the cabinet. Individual ministers can, of course, present their views to the cabinet in accordance with the thinking of their parties, but once a decision is taken by the cabinet as a whole, party chiefs cannot ask for their nominees to be removed merely because the cabinet decision was at variance with what they wanted, or because the minister has fallen out of favour.
    1.42  Party chiefs, after they have volitionally entered into a coalition partnership at the Centre, must understand that their demands on ministers whom they have nominated have to be counterbalanced by the constitutional imperatives of the functioning of the Cabinet system. The absence of such restraint is a prescription for constitutional anarchy. In any case, the ability of the PM to resist such blackmail should be ensured once the lock-in period of three years is adopted. The problem will further be mitigated if a fleshed out Governance Agenda is agreed to between coalition partners prior to the elections.
    1.43  Even after the three-year lock-in period, the functional sanctity of the Cabinet system must be protected by the president of India. Article 75(1) of the Constitution states: ‘The prime minister shall be appointed by the president and the other ministers shall be approved by the president on the advice of the prime minister’. Article 75(2) states: ‘The ministers shall hold office during the pleasure of the president’. If a situation arises where there is a conflict between the wishes of the party chief in a coalition and the constitutional duty of that minister in the Cabinet system, the president, as the custodian of the Constitution, must move beyond a merely ceremonial role and intervene decisively to breach any deadlock since all ministers hold office during his ‘pleasure’. 11 This again underlines the need to amend Article 42 of the Constitution, whose simplistic interpretation reduces the elected head of state to an ineffectual post office that does little more than rubber-stamp the decisions of the PM. In the new challenges of a coalition form of government, the president must play, within the restraint of a constitutional presidency, a more proactive role.
    1.44  Fresh consideration must also be given to the size of the Cabinet. For example, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s huge UPA Cabinet with seventy-seven ministers and ministers of state gave new meaning to the word elephantine. Such an outsized political executive leads to inter-ministerial battles of turf, poor coordination, and delayed decision making. It is clear that, more often than not, the size and incumbency of the Cabinet is decided on the basis of intra-coalition compulsions. It is instructive to remember that President Obama, the leader of the world’s most powerful country, has a Cabinet comprising only fifteen members. Parliamentary democracy does impose its own compulsions, but no Cabinet should exceed forty members which is slightly less than 10 per cent of the total strength of the Lok Sabha.
    1.45  Good governance also requires talent at the political level to dynamically implement the governance agenda. Normally, the democratic process should itself throw up good people with an ability to govern effectively. However, in addition to this possibility (which has been greatly belied in recent times), the Rajya Sabha must serve as a talent pool from which those with proven administrative and technological skills can be recruited to the Cabinet. People of such calibre should also be in the Opposition, thereby constructively enriching parliamentary debate. The makers of the Constitution intended the Rajya Sabha to be filled with tremendously talented