The way Sonia Congress nominee has been exposed to public scrutiny over her half-backed ideas on Indian history, even though she is being touted as a highly qualified and learned personage, there are serious doubt if her suitability as President of India, where she is supposed to be a complete a living model of Indian Constitution, can be cleared at all levels of public opinion. Her comments on Purdah, having been adopted by non-Muslim women as a defence against Mughal’s designs on local women, are the lowest level of ingrained communal hate that any educated person could adopt, in projecting a view, that is not only against historical facts, but is bound to be treated as unwise and inappropriate for the high office of President of a nation that is and should be rightly proud of its pluralist and multiple ethnic mix of its society but which is increasingly being rocked to its foundations due to the extremely exclusivist attitude of its ruling classes that treat the minorities that form the real majority in India, as lowliest cattle and without any sense of history or direction that the India of the future should choose.
The dirty politics that Sonia Congress is playing in the selection of the next President of India, is directly conditioned by its desperate need to have a pliable President who could now on by used and exploited by Congress to topple state governments, one after the other, as has been its deplorable record in the past. Now that it has suffered increasing erosion of its political clout in different states to new regional political groupings, it is desperate to manage the Presidency in such a way, as to destabilize the whole country, one state after another. Sonia Congress strategy is a grave danger to Indian democracy. We have come long way, from the times, when Congress was at times criminally involved in toppling duly elected governments in states. If Sonia Congress has any plans on these lines, by electing a careerist politician from its own stable, it should beware of the strong forces now arraigned against its unholy designs on the Presidency of India.
As for the people at large, though there seems to be scant reference to their preferences on the matter in media coverage, or in political caucuses, as if the people of India just do not count, there is increasing consensus that an apolitical President like Abdul Kalam, would be more assuring of continuity and stability and save the nation from the kind of communal outbursts and other partisan exploitation that seems to be the definite result of this orgy of political manipulations and horse-trading that is rocking the whole nation and in fact degrading the office of the President of India. In summation, on all counts, Pratibha Patil is not fit to be the next President of India.
Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai