Vice Presidency: A Tarnished Throne

HE vice presidency, once the republic's quiet conscience, is now its loudest cockpit.

- PRABHU CHAWLA

From a sanctified sanctum of sobriety and sagacity it has degenerated into a dramaturgical amphitheatre of ideological antagonism, caste cartography, and regional recalibration.

What was formerly the perch of philosopher-statesmen and constitutional custodians has metastasized into a platform for partisan praetorians, electoral emissaries, and ideological incendiaries. The chair that once epitomized equipoise has been transfigured into a stage of confrontation. The 2025 vice-presidential contest is not a procedural prosaic—it is a pupa of political metamorphosis.

This year's confrontation, like its predecessors, dramatizes the dialectic of two Indias. NDA, with deliberate dramaturgy, has unfurled C P Radhakrishnan: an inveterate RSS swayamsevak of impeccable integrity from Tamil Nadu. His candidature is no ceremonial cipher; it is a strategic subterfuge designed to destabilize Dravidian dogma and insinuate the ideology of centralized nationalism into the southern terrain.

In contrast, the INDIA bloc has Justice B Sudershan Reddy, a juristic luminary, an upper caste by birth but liberal by leaning whose bench-burnished reputation evokes civil liberty, constitutional morality, and jurisprudential conscience. To his proponents, he is the face of Nehruvian rationalism and a protector of the Naxal movement. To the Sangh, he is the quintessence of 'judicial adventurism', an avatar of 'activist overreach', a juridical Jacobin who imperiled security in the name of sophistic legality. Thus the duel is more a battle of archetypes, a confrontation of cultural cosmogonies: one privileging homogenized nationalism, the other heralding pluralist liberalism.