When Ajit Pawar and Eknath Shinde were sworn in as ‘deputy chief ministers’ of Maharashtra, they were being sworn into positions that had no mention in the constitution. They were, as courts, Supreme and High, have held that they are ministers like any other in the council of ministers. The ‘deputy’ was only an ‘appellation’ or a ‘descriptive.’ Neither posts have any different perks or power.
The substantive part is the ‘minister’, as the late Soli Sohrabji had successfully argued when objections were raised by a petition after Devi Lal was made a deputy prime minister in the V P Singh team. Though the constitution did not mention any post other than a prime minister and a council of ministers, no deputy prime minister has a mention. This 1991 view has held good since then. It applies to the states too.
A deputy chief minister is only a ‘significant’ political office but not a constitutional post. For comparison, think of the Vice President as a constitutional post, just as a deputy speaker of a legislative body is. The question I would like to raise is, shouldn’t the governor have sworn in the pair as ministers and the chief minister designated them as deputies? It would have been a matter of nicety.
This issue has come up in courts time and again and all courts have refused to interfere in this practice. It is an old practice since Independence though there was a deputy chief minister a decade prior to that in what is now Bihar. The country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru had Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel as his deputy. Since that time, the country has seen seven deputy prime ministers, the last on the list being Lal Krishna Advani. None had a full term in office.
Political shenanigans
The political shenanigans in the weeks since November 23 showed how headlines were written if and whether Eknath Shinde would accept to be a deputy chief minister that the Bharatiya Janata Party proposed and Ajit Pawar was keen knowing that his ambition of being a chief minister was still some elections away. Once Shinde nodded his consent, things fell into place.
As many as 15 states and one union territory have deputy chief ministers out of the 25 states and three union territories and nine of them, including Maharashtra, have two each. These posts with the ‘descriptive’ or tag of a ‘deputy’ have a political purpose. It is to balance rival factions within a ruling party as in Karnataka or assign a respectable status to coalition partners, as in Maharashtra.
Accommodation is a primary instrument in politics to ward off rivalry, as in DK Shivakumar’s case in Karnataka, or power sharing where the coalition partner gets respect, as in Pawan Kalyan’s case had joined hands with Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh. This applies to any coalition or single-party governments.
Unwritten rule
That also keeps them in good humour and gets precedence, as an unwritten rule, in the protocol. It adds a bit to the swagger too. Neither are they equal to the chief minister–or prime minister–nor superior to the others in the council of ministers. It does raise a person’s perception though a deputy is anyhow the head of a party’s legislative wing.
If the deputy chief minister is from another party, naturally with a lower numerical strength than the ruling party’s, the inter-party coordination on issues, including contentious, becomes easier. The need for an inter-party coordination committee becomes less significant unless it is a multi-party coalition. Ease of business between partners becomes easier.
The first person to be a deputy chief minister was Anugraha Narayan Sinha in 1937 in Bihar, as mentioned earlier, and any list of persons to be ministers with the appellation of a ‘deputy’ would be longer than one’s arm. Since the trigger is the latest swearing-in of the duo in Maharashtra, one could mention Nashikrao Tirupude as deputy to Vasantdada Patil whose government was sabotaged by Sharad Pawar in the late 1970s.
While there were the quieter ones like Ramrao Adik, a lawyer-politician, there were flamboyant ones like Gopinath Munde onwards in Maharashtra. Munde, of the BJP, with Manohar Joshi of the Shiv Sena were together seen in most public government events and I do not recall covering a single press conference when they were not together. It was quite a comical sight, sometimes the two trying to walk in lockstep, and this tradition was followed by each successor thereafter. It was as if the deputy was trying to show that being partners, they were equals.
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