1998, 2019, 2024: How 3 speeches framed mandate, Constitution and coalition

President Droupadi Murmu’s address to Parliament Thursday was a strong assertion of continuity that the next five years would build on the previous ten. Without referring to allies, the speech flagged the “clear majority” to the Government for a third term on the back of a “decisive mandate” and invoked the “unstable” (read coalition) governments of the past.

Compared to President Ram Nath Kovind’s inaugural speech in 2019 and President K R Narayanan’s in 1998, when Atal Behari Vajpayee came at the head of a coalition government, Thursday’s speech had telling messages.

In President Murmu’s address, the coalition phase has been referred to as a phase of “unstable governments” that lasted “several decades,” when “many governments, even if willing, were neither able to bring reforms nor take critical decisions.” Mandate 2024, she said, was a “decisive” one and one of trust in “policy, intention, dedication and decisions.”

Cut to 2019. The first address of Kovind to MPs also used the expression “clear mandate” and made no mention of the NDA or coalition. The BJP has fallen short of a majority by 32 seats this time, while it was 31 seats above the majority mark in 2019. When Atal Bihari Vajpayee had come to power in 1998 with a large NDA and a BJP with just above 180 seats, the tone of the Presidential address delivered by KR Narayanan was conciliatory.

Narayanan had said that there was a need to rise above “notions of majority and minority in the House,” and work in a spirit of “cooperation, conciliation and consensus…dialogue, debate and discussion will replace the narrow antagonisms of the past.”

The text of 2019 speech used the expression New India 21 times. This time, there is no mention of “New India” in Murmu’s speech. Her