The person should have the qualities of the first three presidents of India, or should be adept at land–grabbing. The writer takes a light-hearted look at the probable front-runners

Who is to be the next President of India? Difficult question and the answers I will try to give are from the common man’s point of view; nothing political about them.

What qualities should a President of India possess? Not a difficult question. The person should have the qualities of Dr Rajendra Prasad, the first President of India, Dr S Radhakrishnan, the second president of India or Dr Zakir Hussain, the third President. Or the new president should be adept at land-grabbing.

The difficult part is finding people of the calibre of these three gems who were the first three presidents of India. So, let’s forget about quality.

And if we were to consider the qualities of the last president (the current incumbent), we will be flooded with eligible candidates. It will impossible to choose, even using Nandan Nilekani’s UIDAI computers, with some help thrown in by Visa and MasterCard.

There is one big (physically small) speed-breaker: Mamata Banerjee alias Didi alias Shrek …sorry…Shriek. Anyone we choose must not dissatisfy her. Mamata will appreciate the double negative; she believes in shouting ‘No’ as the first response to any proposal and since she is firm that she will have the last word, she will end out debate with a louder shriek of ‘No’ which Jayalalithaa can hear in Fort St George in Chennai, without a telephone.

Where Mamata is involved, India is a ‘democrazy’, as one newspaper put it. Her view is equal to a hundred Electoral College votes. By her diktats (as I imagine them) we cannot have anyone west of West Bengal; it would be an insult to the Bengali bhadraloks and, worse, proof of a CPM conspiracy. And we can have Pranab because that would again be a CPM plot.

Mamata however has backed Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar for president. Meira has one strong qualification. The Times of India carried a story today that in the four years since she became Speaker she has gone abroad once in 37 days. The Times was quoting a reply to an RTI query which showed that most of time she went to Switzerland and other countries like the Bahamas which have salubrious climates.

The President of India has to make many official trips abroad. Meira should be fine with that arduous duty since she has a lot of experience.

Pranab Mukherjee is the front-runner for the Congress. The question is: Will he be more useful in Rashtrapati Bhavan as president or in North Block as finance minister? To the Congress, Rashtrapati Bhavan is a better place for Pranab, considering what is going to happen in the 2014 general elections.

There is bound to be a hung Parliament and it is always better for the referee to be your man.

Jayalalithaa and Naveen Patnaik are rooting for PA Sangma. I think the BJP too is in favour of the former Speaker of the Lok Sabha; naturally it would be since it cannot support Pranab Mukherjee.

Sangma had a good run as a Speaker, guiding the Lok Sabha well during the rule of the ‘kichdi’ coalitions at the end of the 20th century. He also has a good sense of humour. With his qualities, he may be able to steal people’s hearts rather than their land.

(R Vijayaraghavan has been a professional journalist for more than four decades, specialising in finance, business and politics. He conceived and helped to launch the Business Line, the financial daily of The Hindu group. He can be contacted at [email protected].)