विभूतिमूर्ति

The swearing in of

Dr Rajendra Prasad

The first President of the Indian Republic

[ The 1952 General Elections had created a Sovereign Democratic Republic of India, and Dr Rajendra Prasad, already functioning as Interim President, had been elected by a popular mandate, the first full-term (1952-’57) President of the Republic. Here is a brief extract from my forthcoming biography of Dr Prasad ‘THE HOUSE OF TRUTH’ recounting that historic moment of the swearing in of our first President. A look-back into history on the occasion of the swearing in of our 14^th President Shri Ramnath Kovind would be of some interest even as the event unfolds today in our Parliament. – Dr BSM Murty.]

  

Prasad had been elected, in accordance with the provisions in the new Constitution, as the first full-term President with an overwhelming majority of votes.  The total votes polled were nearly 6.45 lakhs of which approximately 84 per cent had gone in favour of Dr Prasad. ‘Today at 11 a.m. in the Parliament house’, he notes in his diary on 6 May, ‘Shri M.N. Kaul started the counting of votes in the Presidential election. At 3 p.m. the counting was over and I was declared duly elected President.’ The swearing in ceremony was slated to take place a week later and the venue this time once again was to be in the Central Hall of the erstwhile Legislative Assembly, where the new Parliament was to have its inaugural three days later. The event would be reminiscent of the ceremonial transfer of power on 15 August, 1947 which had taken place in that same Hall. The interim presidency was thus a halfway house arrangement between the outgoing dominion status and a new emergent full sovereign position. Fittingly, therefore, unlike the interim presidency, the full-term president was to be sworn in in the proper people’s forum, the Parliament’s Central Hall. From the dawn of independence to the proclamation of full sovereignty, things seemed to have come full circle by this rotation of the venue.

Prasad, however, with quite a few others, wanted the oath ceremony to have a more democratic, more indigenous format; preferably ‘held in the open’ with ‘the common people… allowed to have a sense of participation in it’. He further  expatiates in that diary entry upon the idea in some minute detail with the swearing in preceded by a mass prayer, planting of a sapling, spinning for a few minutes, and so forth.  Prasad discussed these ideas with some friends, including Nehru, but the existing colonial conventions proved too strong to be overridden. The entire show had to conform to the pre-existing protocol.

Dr Prasad gives a detailed account of the event as it unfolded on the day. He first went to Rajghat for a prayer where extracts from Ishopanishad were recited, along with some bhajans. Next, he went to the Lakshmi Narayan temple for a darshan and returned to the Rashtrapati Bhawan from where he had to proceed in a ceremonial procession to the Parliament House for the swearing in.

Started at 8.15 [he writes] on the horse-drawn carriage with mounted guards in procession for the parliament house where the presidential swearing in was to take place in the same Hall of the erstwhile Constituent Assembly where, on 15 August, 1947, Lord Mountbatten, on behalf of the British government, had formally effected the transfer of power to me as the President of the Constituent Assembly. The seating capacity there being limited to about 950, only members of both houses of parliament, foreign ambassadors, selected government officials, and some few non-government personnel were present.

After the swearing in it took me about 10 minutes in making a brief speech, first in Hindi and then in English. Dr Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan was then sworn in by me as the Vice President. I myself had been sworn in by the Chief Justic of the Supremr Court. This was followed by a 31-gun salute. And finally the procession returned to the Rashtrapati Bhawan by the same route. En route near the main crossing, all three wings of the Armed Forcs presented a guard of honour to me. There were large crowds lining both sides of the route of procession.

Subsequently, after a while, the Prime Minister came to tender the resignations of his outgoing Cabinet. He then sat near me to discuss names for his new Cabinet…Around 1.30 p.m. he came again with the list of names in his new Cabinet who were to be sworn in formally at 6 p.m…A large party followed at 7 p.m. in the Mughal Gardens in which around 3,000 persons were invited. Then I met the foreign Ambassadors in the Yellow Room, where people also came to felicitate me formally….

It must have been a busy, hectic day for him but he was one who firmly believed that ‘his exalted office is an opportunity and an occasion for service’, and ‘that only service to the nation entitles one to be President’. For him work alone was real worship, and the motherland was supreme over one’s self. These ideals formed the core of his personal faith, innate to his nature, and had only been augmented and nurtured over the past decades of the freedom movement by his mentor, Gandhi. Prasad was a deeply religious man, but his religion was that of a ‘karmayogi’. All virtue in all his actions lay in the action (means) itself, without any attachment to their fruits (end). Both Bhagwad Geeta and Ramcharit Manas were parts of his daily reading. And true to their message, in whichever capacity he was asked to serve, service to humanity and to the nation were central to his fundamental faith. Unlike Nehru’s, his was not an agnostic secularism, but a kind of secularism that cohered with the universality of all religions.

Three days later, the inaugural of the newly elected Parliament took place, in the same Central Hall. Addressing a joint session of the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha members, President Prasad delivered a formal speech emphasizing the great responsibility shared by the members to work hard ‘for the rapid economic advancement’ of a resurgent nation and a realization of ‘the noble ideals of equality and social and economic justice’. He touched upon the various issues and challenges facing the new republic in its ‘onward march’ to progress, including the grave food crisis that still remained unresolved, and a host of new legislation that had urgently to be debated and passed. Of these the most important was the pending Hindu Code Bill ‘which could not be passed…and [had] lapsed’ in the provisional Parliment. ‘It is proposed’, he said, ‘to divide up the Bill into certain parts and to place each part separately before Parliament, so as to facilitate its discussion and passage’. He also devoted a substantial part of his speech to the international political scene, to the ongoing crises in Korea, Tunisia and other African and Asian countries. He expressed his disappointment over the regrettable ineffectuality of the UNO. ‘[It] came into existence [he said] to fulfil a deeply felt want of humanity. If it fails to fulfil that want and becomes an ineffective organ for the maintenance of peace and the advancement of freedom, that, indeed, will be a tragedy.’

At one point in his speech President Prasad also referred to Mahatma Gandhi’s core principle of ‘right ends…perceived and achieved only through right methods’. Emphasizing the importance of the Gandhian way, he said: ‘To [Gandhiji] political freedom was a vital step, but only a step to the larger freedom of the human spirit. He taught us the way of peace and non-violence, but not the peace of the grave or the non-violence of the timid.’

As Prasad saw it, Gandhi’s non-violent struggle for political freedom was only the right means to the ultimate right goal of ‘the larger freedom of the human spirit’. For him freedom for the masses of India lay not in the ‘transfer of power’ or change of government: true freedom for him lay in the freedom from poverty, hunger, exploitation, oppression and denial of social justice. With the coming of independence only half the battle had been won. A far toilsome and arduous battle lay ahead in an endeavour to rebuild a ravaged nation. Gandhi’s message of Truth and Non-violence, nurtured by his life-long practice of the teachings of the Geeta, was meant to be a call not only for freedom for India from an imperial yoke, but freedom for humanity as a whole from all oppressive subjugation and the horrific devastations of war across nations. In accordance with the moral teachings of the Geeta, Prasad, too, believed in and rigorously practised virtuous action as the right means to achieve the right goals without attachment to the fruits of the action. Exemplifying the words from the Geeta, Prasad always lived like one who ‘remained unmoved by good or evil fortune’. Like the sthitpragya purush in Bhagwad Geeta, he always lived in a state of equanimity, whether in adversity or in prosperity.....

[This extract is a slightly edited version. Reference Notes are given in the original book ‘THE HOUSE OF TRUTH : A Biography of Dr Rajendra Prasad’ by Dr BSM Murty, which is now under publication.]

© Dr BSM Murty

All photos: courtesy Google & Rashtrapati Bhawan Photo Archives

 No part of this extract can be used in any way so as to infringe pre-publication rights.

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Other extracts from the book which are available on this Blog (Scroll by year and date)

2011: May 28 : The Indigo Story; July 8: The Butcher of Amritsar; July 17: A Planter’s Murder

2014: Sep 14 : The Seven Martyrs; Dec 3 : Early childhood in Jeeradei

2015: Jun 30: Congress in disarray; Aug 27: Clash of Convictions; Oct 8: Presidential Itineraries;             

             Dec 20: Congress at crossroads

2016:  Mar 15: Election for Second Term; May 13: Visit to Soviet Union; Aug 25: Limits of Presidency
             Aug  28 : The Last Phase
2017:  Apr 15: Champaran Saga (The Indigo Story: Repeat of 28 May 2011); 13 July: Dr Rajendra Prasad: On Kashmir Problem; 25 July: The Swearing in of Dr Rajendra Prasad

Other Important blogs

Sahitya Samagra : 5 Oct 2010 / On Premchand: 26 May 2011 / Has Hindi been defeated by Shivpujan Sahay : 7 Dec 2011 / Memoirs on Prasad and Nirala : 25-26 Oct 2012 / Shivpujan Sahay Smriti Samaroh: 27 Jan 2014 / On Amrit Lal Nagar: 18 Aug 2014 / On Bachchan : 27 Nov 2014 / On Renu: 3 Mar 2015 / On Trilochan: 1 Apr 2015 /Odes of Keats + Shantiniketan: 25 May 2015 / Premchand Patron Men: 3 Aug 2015/  Suhagraat: Dwivediji's poem: 13 Nov 2015/ Dehati Duniya: 8 Aug 2016/ Three stories of JP: 6 Jul 2016/ On Neelabh Ashk: 24 Jul 2016/ Dec 25 2016: Anupam Mishra: Paani ki Kahaani : 2017:  July 10: Doctornama: memoirs of Shivpujan Sahay
Sep 2 : Has Hindi been Defeated by English
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