Covid-19 has begun infecting the Westminster Constitutional System now, with the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson coming down with it, leaving him incapacitated and confined to St. Thomas' Hospital's ICU on 7th April. Since he had tested positive for the virus back on 26th March, he had considerable time on his hands to set in place his interim succession, with Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab notified as next in line, and Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak to follow him. There's no immediate worry about who's in charge, therefore. What has interrupted The Dormant Lawyer's lockdown reverie though is, who would be India's stand-in in the event of a similar occurrence? TDL's concern, as ever, is not about who the person(s) would be, but about what the system in place is.
We have, thanks to the unique Donald Trump, discussed in these pages the interim/temporary succession of the US President, if he's incapacitated due to an illness or is undergoing surgery or has been too Trumpy to tolerate. The equivalent of the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution however does not exist in Westminster Constitutions. Or rather, one should say, does not need to exist.
Since the Head of the Government in a Parliamentary system is merely the leader of the cabinet - the first among equals - the functioning of the government continues unabated through this highest decision-making executive body, and through the permanent civil service, when the doctors of said primus inter pares get too worried. Since collective decision-making by the cabinet is how policy is formulated anyway, there is no requirement to formally recognise a primus inter residual pares, for the short duration of the PM's temporary absence. Consequently, there never arose an occasion to nominate a stand-in to the Prime Minister of India. That is, until we became a declared nuclear power.
Assuring the global community that the nuclear arsenal is in the hands of not the military but the civilian establishment achieved paramount importance after Pokhran-II. It should be remembered that the lack of "peace of mind" regarding the nuclear arsenal of North Korea, or the alleged WMDs possessed by Iraq, was due to the fact that those nations are not functioning democracies, and any decision to employ the nuclear weapons would not be considered the will of the people of those countries. The citizenry, in fact, would be completely bypassed in any such cataclysmic decision. As a self-proclaimed responsible nuclear state, India needed to demonstrate that she could be seen as a responsible nuclear power.
Accordingly, in January 2003, India published the structure of her nuclear command-and-control ("C2") setup, announcing that it will be comprised of the Strategic Forces Command (responsible for managing the nuclear weapons stockpile, headed by an Air Marshall or equivalent) and the Nuclear Command Authority. The SFC is the military wing of the command structure, and is not the concern of our constitutional discussions, so we'll stick with the NCA; it is composed of two arms: the Political Council (headed by the Prime Minister) and the Executive Council (headed by the National Security Advisor). The Political Council in turn (probably) consists of the Cabinet Committee on Security (viz. the PM, the Home Minister, the Defence Minister, the External Affairs Minister and the Finance Minister), while the Executive Council is made up of several top bureaucrats alongside the NSA. In the event of a proposed nuclear strike (retaliatory, assuming continuance of our No First-Use doctrine), the Executive Council would provide inputs to the Political Council for decision-making. The Political Council is the sole body that can authorise the use of India's nuclear weapons, and its ultimate executive decision would be made by its chair: the Prime Minister. Said decision will then be operationalised by the SFC in association with the Executive Council. The purpose of this sophisticated structure is to reassure the world that India's nuclear command is headed by a civilian, democratically accountable authority, and precludes the possibility of unauthorised/accidental use of nuclear weapons.
As is clear, the Prime Minister is not merely a primus inter pares in this setup, but is instead the sine qua non. Recognising this several years before the formalisation of the NCA, a key part of the PMO had been moved to Mumbai when Prime Minister Vajpayee underwent a knee-replacement surgery at the city's Breach Candy Hospital in October 2000. However, as far as is publicly known, this first "opportunity" for setting a precedent in these matters was not utilised to the fullest: Prime Minister Vajpayee did not officially designate one of his cabinet colleagues to take his place at the helm of the country's nuclear retaliatory apparatus, though Deputy Prime Minister Advani would have probably done the job if called upon. (It should be noted here that the post of "Deputy" PM is not a constitutional creation, and does not by default assume the responsibilities of the PM).
The next occasion for setting a precedent of appointing a stand-in chair of the Political Council of the Nuclear Command Authority came 6 years after the formal creation of the NCA, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh went under the knife for a coronary bypass in January 2009. On that occasion too, the interim chair was not disclosed. Now, TDL should make it clear that this does not mean that a line of succession was not defined, all we know for sure is that it wasn't disclosed. The narration of the two occasions in these last two paragraphs should not be seen as a criticism of those two Prime Ministers, especially, since it came post-NCA, of the second one (unlike this opinion from the archives). It must be discerned that disclosing the line of succession would endanger the very working of our nuclear deterrent: a motivated enemy would know which successor to incapacitate, along with the PM, in order to leave the NCA headless. This would cause untold anxiety in the rest of the world regarding the transparency of our C2, apart from the utter breakdown of our deterrent, and that anxiety would invite the intervention by other world powers in India's nuclear command and control structure.
However, us paranoid system-worshippers need some hint as to the second-in-command, in case our Prime Minister has to contemplate some downtime for medical reasons. And TDL submits that the secundus inter pares, as it were, would be the first minister to be sworn in after the Prime Minister when the government was formed after the last elections. That would make the successor not Home Minister Amit Shah, as many would assume, but Defence Minister Rajnath Singh. In fact, come to think of it, there doesn't seem to be much else to discern from the order in which the Cabinet Ministers were sworn in. That oath-taking sequence points to the order of succession. TDL can now go back to lockdown mode peacefully!
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