Perhaps there is a third aspect too. Arguably, Laloo Prasad Yadav and his gang who are not widely viewed as eminent paragons of democracy have suddenly found a sneaking sympathy. Even a street crook inspires a degree of public sympathy when he is bashed up very badly for an imagined mischief.

President Narayanan is a good man. More, he is a lucky man. A good man must be lucky too to be able to show that he is really good. Uttar Pradesh provided him such an opportunity some time ago. When a government engulfed by defections and counter-defections was sought to be removed in a clumsy fashion, Narayanan revolted in moral indignation.

All right-thinking people cheered him. All those who believe that the Bharatiya Janata Partyalso has an inalienable right to engineer defections on a selective basis saw in him a neo-saviour of democracy. President Narayanan, good and lucky, was happy too.

He should be doubly happy now. If what he did then turned out to be a favour to the BJP, reinstating its government which was not an entirely legitimate body but one crafted quite cleverly, President Narayanan's present move is somewhat of a blow to that party. What it apparently wanted done in Bihar has been thwarted. And Narayanan gets a chance to show that he is inclined to do a good turn to any given party.

Whosoever nursed a secret grudge that he has a soft corner for the BJP is simply wrong. President Narayanan is a just man. What could make a president happier than to be told that he is a just man?

While it is all very good for president Narayanan as a person, while it is good fun too in so far as his act has spared it a political outrage in Patna as well as Lucknow, it is perhaps not good for a whole people to be wholly andexclusively dependent on one man's sense of virtue.

Democracy is essentially a collective expression of a community's urge for fairness, not a good man's personal articulation of a moral agenda imposed on a community. If it comes to a situation where good is believed to come only from one man, president Narayanan, it is an awfully bad situation. There can be only one situation worse: when no good can come from him either.

The president's role is advisory. He is the head of state and the supreme commander and all conceivable things rolled into one, but he can at best advise the prime minister to do a thing or not to do a thing. Textually, it is the prime minister who advises the president to do anything, but the president has no option but to act on the advice given to him. He may ask for a reconsideration, which is ideally done without fanfare.

Fanfare promotes only one-upmanship and can be proof for a growing conflict between the president and the prime minister. When the president is required tocorrect the prime minister far too frequently, two bad things happen. The president tends to play more than his assigned role. All others look like jokers.

In the present instance, that is what has happened to the prime minister and company. They have indeed done a good thing. They have avoided an open confrontation with the president. Given their self-righteous background, and their political compulsions, they must have found it had to yield to president Narayanan when he took a contrary view of the battle in/for Bihar. When Narayanan sent back the bundle of Bihar papers to the union council of ministers, with an uncharacteristically sharp note, prime minister Vajpayee's more petulant gang was apt to be piqued. More so when they wanted Laloo and wife and their cronies out right away.

Vajpayee's vituperative experts could have engaged themselves in exertions that could embarrass or enrage Narayanan and even provoke him to take extreme steps. For some reason, they let him look a good man who has his wayeven though they suffered a loss of face.

The only other conceivable scenario is that they would have wanted it that way: they recommend Laloo's ouster, president Narayanan demurs, they sleep over it. And later, when Jayalalitha renews her periodical demand for Karunanidhi's dismissal, they can hark back to what president Narayanan did in the case of Bihar. The president has his uses too.

That is all very well. That is, being clever, being clever by half, one may suspect. The fact of the matter is they wanted Laloo or his wife's ministry out, they built up a campaign for it, they had a report duly sent up governor Bhandari, they decided that it was time to invoke article 356 to safeguard law and order, which is any government's primary function.

That is a fact and that is a perception that cannot change just because one man, president Narayanan, sees it differently. A view taken by a government after a prolonged campaign and a little less long deliberation, duly based on a governor's report, cannotchange just because president Narayanan sees it differently. But it changed, perhaps because neither was it a view nor a fact. It was only a saffron vision.

No one knows whether Vajpayee's view of whatever is happening in Patna has suddenly changed. If it has changed, he can be accused of having no view of his own. If a government is willing to do or undo things against its grain, what comes into open question is not only its conviction but its legitimacy.

Vajpayee would remember what Morarji Desai planned to do when vice-president BD Jatti seemed to sit on a recommendation of the union cabinet. President Narayanan knows only too well that Vajpayee is not Desai. He may also know that two Bhandaris, no matter how different in background and outlook, can think alike.