Among the following who has been Speaker of Lok Sabha prior to his Election as President of India ?

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Correct — D, Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy. He is the only person in India's history to have occupied both the Chair of the Lok Sabha and Rashtrapati Bhavan, and he held the Speakership twice over. His first term as Speaker ran from 17 March 1967 to 19 July 1969, in the Fourth Lok Sabha. He returned to the Chair on 26 March 1977 at the start of the Sixth Lok Sabha, and that second term lasted only three months and seventeen days, ending on 13 July 1977 when he stepped down to contest the presidential election. He took office as the sixth President of India on 25 July 1977 and served the full five-year term to 25 July 1982. Two further facts make him the single most examinable of India's Presidents. He remains the only President of India to have been elected unopposed. And the 1977 election was not his first attempt: he had contested the presidency in 1969 as the Congress's official candidate and lost, which is precisely why the man who beat him then, V. V. Giri, is printed as option (a) here. His career before the Speakership was entirely in Andhra politics and the Union Cabinet — Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh from 1956 to 1960 and again from 1962 to 1964, President of the Congress from 1960 to 1962, and then Union Minister first for Steel and Mines and afterwards for Transport, Civil Aviation, Shipping and Tourism. Nothing in the other three careers comes anywhere near the Chair of the House.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) V. V. Giri — the fourth President of India, and a genuinely dangerous option because his path to the office crossed Reddy's directly: Giri defeated Reddy in the presidential election of 1969. His own career began in the trade-union movement, and he served as a Governor and then as Vice-President of India before becoming President. Vice-President is the office candidates most readily confuse with Speaker here, since both preside over a House, but the Vice-President chairs the Rajya Sabha ex officio and is not its elected Speaker. Giri never held the Lok Sabha Chair.  (b) Giani Zail Singh — the seventh President of India, whose route ran through state and Union executive office rather than through Parliament's presiding chair. He was Chief Minister of Punjab and afterwards Union Home Minister before being elected President in 1982, succeeding Reddy himself. Being the immediate successor is what puts him on this list; a candidate who remembers that the two names sit next to each other in the sequence of Presidents can attach the wrong biography to the right period.  (c) A. P. J. Abdul Kalam — the eleventh President of India, and the most widely recognised name among the four, which is exactly why it is here. He came to the office from science rather than from politics, having worked at the Defence Research and Development Organisation and served as Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government. He never contested an election to any legislature and never held any legislative office at all, so he could not have been Speaker of the Lok Sabha at any point.

Concept: The Speaker of the Lok Sabha and the President of India occupy very different constitutional positions, and the reason only one person has ever held both is that their career routes almost never overlap. Article 93 provides that the House of the People shall choose two of its own members to be Speaker and Deputy Speaker, so the Speaker must be a sitting member of the House — which is why Reddy had to leave the Chair in July 1977 before he could take the presidency. The President, by contrast, is not a member of any legislature at all; under Articles 54 and 55 the President is elected by an electoral college of the elected members of both Houses of Parliament and the elected members of the legislative assemblies of the States, to which the Seventieth Amendment, 1992 later added the elected members of the assemblies of Delhi and Puducherry, voting by proportional representation with a single transferable vote. Presidents have therefore been drawn from very varied backgrounds — a scholar in Radhakrishnan, a trade unionist in Giri, a scientist in Kalam, career politicians in most of the rest — and the Speakership, which requires a long parliamentary career and cross-party acceptability, has produced only one of them.

State PCS 2024 Q19 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q19 — Polity & Governance PYQ with Answer