Whether Manmohan Singh comes from Assam or Punjab, which is his home state, is not relevant. My point is that the Rajya Sabha does not legitimise his position. It is a House which comprises members who have been elected indirectly. State assembly members are the ones who face the electorate directly in their respective constituencies. A Prime Minister, who represents the whole country, is too important to ride on their backs as Manmohan Singh would be doing in the Assam assembly.

The question is a larger one: whether the Prime Minister should be a member of the Lok Sabha, the directly elected house, or of the Rajya Sabha, the indirectly elected house. The choice is obvious. The Prime Minister has to win at the polls on the popular level. That means the Lok Sabha.

While contesting for the lower house, Manmohan Singh would have come into contact with people at the grass roots. Dust and din of electioneering might have given him an insight of politics which may be dirty, but is nevertheless real. Sitting in the ivory tower that the Raja Sabha is, the Prime Minister has missed the information he would have gathered from the ground on how India's heart ticks. It is rather odd that the Prime Minister has no vote in the house which decides on the motion of confidence in the government he leads.

Our constitution-makers may not have spelt out that the Prime Minister should be from the lower house. But, in their scheme of things, the Lok Sabha had the pre-eminent position. The Lok Sabha is the real house around which parliamentary activities revolve. This is the house which decides the fate of political parties and their allies. Even one vote less than the majority will be too short to sustain a government in power. This happened in the case of the Atal Behari Vajpayee government a few years ago. It lost by a solitary vote.

True, our constitution has no provision which enjoins upon the Prime Minister to be a member of the lower house. But Pakistan has it. Even where there is no constitutional hitch, they follow the practice of the parliamentary system all over the world. Great Britain, which in a way is a mother to all parliaments, has not had a Prime Minister from their upper house, the House of Lords, for generations and it would be ridiculous to imagine that Lord so and so could ever be a future Prime Minister of that country. I am afraid if the importance of direct election is not underlined, even members of the legislative council, the second house, and would like to make it to the office of the chief minister. At present, not all the states have the legislative councils. More than that, there is a precedent for the legislative assembly member to be the chief minister. Once, before the constitution was introduced, Congress leader C Rajagoplachari became chief minister in the then state of Madras. But, rightly, he quit after a few months. Since then the chief minister has been from the legislative assembly.

I can understand Manmohan Singh's diffidence over contesting for the Lok Sabha because some of the Congress bosses were responsible for his defeat when he did so from South Delhi, a Lok Sabha constituency of highly-educated voters, a few years ago. Maybe, he is afraid to fight lest he should meet the same fate again, especially when some Congress leaders would want to see the Prime Minister out. Yet it is far better to face them through the election than to live under the illusion that he is their real choice. Many states will be willing to offer him the Lok Sabha seat if he so decides. I am sure Punjab would want him from the state because he is a brilliant son of the soil. He has only to indicate his desire. One sitting MP from Punjab has told me that he is willing to vacate his seat for Manmohan Singh. This member does not belong to the Congress party.

I concede that after the perverse judgment by the former Chief Justice Y K Sabharwal's bench, Manmohan Singh does not have to bother whether he is "ordinarily resident" of Assam. The Supreme Court did away with the domicile qualification for a Rajya Sabha member. However, Manmohan Singh has won the point in an earlier petition where he was declared qualified to contest from Assam on the basis of his ration card, the electricity bill and the rent receipts of the house he had occupied at Guwahati. The judgment says that a Rajya Sabha member does not have to be a resident of the state whose assembly returns him or her.

I do not want to open the case of eligibility, nor do I propose to discuss Chief Justice Sabhawal's judgment. I have no doubt that some day a larger bench will quash it because the judgment defeats the very purpose of the Rajya Sabha, the council of states. My point is a limited one. The Prime Minister has to be a member of the Lok Sabha because this is the House of the people and this is where the sovereignty rests.

Kuldip Nayar is an eminent Indian columnist.