NEW DELHI, India, July 12, Reuter: Aging Vice-president Ramaswamy Venkataraman looks sure to win tomorrow’s vote by legislators for India’s eighth President since independence.

Venkataraman, a 76yearold lawyer, politician and Sanskrit scholar, is the candidate of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s Congress (1) Party which has a huge majority in the Electoral College.

The college comprises the 776 members of both Houses of Parliament in New Delhi and the 3,919 legislators of India’s 25 state Assemblies who will vote in their state capitals. The count will be held in New Delhi on Thursday after all the ballot boxes reach the capital.

The victor will succeed India’s first Sikh President, Zail Singh, in the nonexecutive post. Singh’s

Five-year term expires on July 24 after a flurry of disputes with the Prime Minister during the past four months.

Only unexpected massive defections by Congress legislators, some of whom are known to be dissatisfied with Gandhi’s leadership, could threaten Venkataraman’s progress to the red stone Rashtrapati Bhawan (Presidential Palace) in New Delhi that until 1947 was the residence of British viceroys.

Venkatraman, one of the last of a generation of Indian independence fighters still active in politics, was jailed ‘by the British from 194244 during Mahatma Gandhi’s quit India campaign.

The bespectacled, white-haired Vice-president was Finance Home (Interior) and Defense Minister under former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in the early 1980s. He has been Speaker (Chairman) of the Rajya Sabha (Upper House of Parliament) in New Delhi for the past five years.

The two candidates challenging Venkatraman barely pretend they have a chance.

Opposition candidate V.R. Krishna Iyer, a 71yearold leftist lawyer and former Supreme Court Justice, has failed even to rally all the outgunned and divided opposition parties to his flag.

He is remembered as the Judge who, in 1975, stayed a court decision that had convicted Indira Gandhi for electoral malpractice and invalidated her election to Parliament. Tyer’s ruling freed her to declare a national state of emerge.

Article extracted from this publication >>  July 17, 1987