2014: The Election That Changed India (17 page)

The accident changed all of Jagan’s business plans. Now, he wanted to be chief minister. Only Sonia would not agree. At best, the party was ready to make him a minister of state at the Centre. A defiant Jagan decided to raise the stakes—he set off on an Odarpu
(consolation) Yatra to grieve with the families of those who had self-immolated after his father’s death. The yatra was his muscle-flexing moment, designed to convince the party high command that he was now Andhra’s most popular leader.

Sonia, by all accounts, doesn’t like being bullied. Jagan, she felt, was doing precisely that. At a meeting at 10, Janpath, with Jagan and his mother, Sonia drew a line—the Odarpu Yatra must be called off and no attempt must be made to destabilize the new chief minister of the state, the ageing K. Rosaiah.

The meeting went far worse than expected. When Sonia refused to meet Jagan’s demands, his mother is reported to have hit back with, ‘Would you have said the same thing if it was your son Rahul in Jagan’s place? Why is my son being treated differently?’ The duo were asked to leave at once. ‘My mother and I were left feeling humiliated after all my father had done for the party,’ Jagan later told me. Jagan decided there and then that he would form his own party, YSR Congress, taking with him a large chunk of Congress MLAs.

That wasn’t the only Andhra blunder. More bizarrely, home minister Chidambaram made a sudden midnight announcement on a freezing winter day in December 2009 that ‘the process of forming the state of Telangana was being initiated’, an impulsive decision that would eventually mark the beginning of the end for the Congress in Andhra Pradesh.

Among the various theories mooted for the Telangana midnight announcement, two were particularly amusing—first, that some party loyalists wanted to give Sonia Gandhi, who had committed to Telangana in the election campaign, a ‘birthday gift’ (her birthday is on 9 December); second, that Rahul Gandhi had a fetish for small states and had drawn up a map of India which mirrored the United States with fifty states! The truth is that an Intelligence Bureau (IB) report claimed that there would be a possible ‘bloodbath’ in Hyderabad if Telangana was not announced. Pro-Telangana protestors, the IB report stated, had been infiltrated by Maoists who planned to march to the secretariat the next morning. The Centre, quite simply, panicked.

With that one midnight decision, the Congress lost control of
the political situation in a critical state. Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy had held the Congress together; without him at the helm, the party was falling apart and the Telangana decision mirrored a mind in turmoil. Andhra was lost, perhaps for good.

Some observers have attributed Sonia’s relatively less dominating role in UPA-II to her health problems—she had to travel abroad frequently for a health condition that no one would confirm (we once put out a news flash that Mrs Gandhi had gone for treatment to Sloane Kettering, the world’s oldest and largest private care cancer centre, only to be warned by Patel that we would be sued for putting out false information).

Others suggest that Sonia, like a doting Italian (or rather Indian) mother, was desperately keen to step aside so that Rahul could play a greater role and take control of the Congress party. The Congress was, after all, in her world view, a dynastical party whose past, present and future were tied to her family. Her critics say she was always a ‘lucky’ leader with limited political skills, and that her luck was always bound to run out one day.

The more logical explanation is that with the UPA government being buffeted by multiple crises, a sense of drift, fatigue and eventually, defeatism set in, and Sonia, like other members of the UPA, became a victim of it. As one core group member told me, ‘We lost our desire to fight.’

By the time the summer of 2012 arrived, it was becoming obvious that the UPA-II government was a patient heading towards the intensive care unit with a lame-duck prime minister. Dr Singh always had two calling cards—his image as an honest politician and his track record as an economist. Now, both were coming under assault. In March that year, another CAG report, this time on coal block allocations, suggested a loss of Rs 1.86 lakh crore to the treasury. The opposition had fresh ammunition—but this time, it was directed at the prime minister personally.

Between 2006 and 2009, the prime minister was the coal minister. The CAG report claimed that as many as 134 coal blocks were given away in this period in an opaque manner without competitive bidding. Many of the beneficiaries had links to prominent politicians, especially of the ruling party. The government argued that the blocks were given out to enhance coal production at a time when the country was facing an energy crisis. The argument did not stick—a Supreme Court-supervised CBI probe was ordered. The Opposition had smelt blood. ‘I had gently warned the prime minister that handling the coal portfolio was a bad idea. I don’t think he realized what he was getting into,’ recalls a former aide.

There was more bad news for the prime minister. The economy appeared to be on an irreversible downturn. Growth had slowed down, manufacturing was struggling, jobs had plateaued, the rupee was weakening, fiscal deficit was out of control, inflation was on the rise. Worried about an activist judiciary, ministers and bureaucrats had stopped taking decisions. Business confidence in particular was at a low ebb—a retrospective tax in the 2012 Union budget had infuriated industry. Several big-ticket projects had been stalled because of environmental concerns. The Eurozone crisis had already taken a heavy toll. In the second week of June, the global ratings agency Standard and Poor warned that India’s investment grade rating could be downgraded to ‘junk’ status. A senior Cabinet minister would later admit to me that the period between 2009 and 2012 were the economy’s ‘lost years’. ‘We had an economist prime minister but the government had lost control of the economy,’ says the minister.

He was right. When Manmohan Singh became prime minister in 2004, his USP was his image as an honest man and his reputation as a politician who would manage the economy well. 2G and Coalgate cast a shadow on his integrity quotient. But it was the mistakes on the economic front that really shrank his stature. He won a reelection in 2009 because the economy was growing at a healthy 8 per cent over the five-year period. The 2008 global financial crisis forced the government to relax monetary policy and introduce a
fiscal stimulus to boost domestic demand. But once the fiscal deficit began to balloon from 2009 and food inflation began to rise, Dr Singh was always on the back foot. P. Chidambaram offered me an interesting, and rather candid insight: ‘If we’d got the economy on the right track, nothing else would have mattered in 2014. It wasn’t corruption or scams, it was the economy which destroyed us in the general elections.’

Those who met the prime minister in that difficult period in the summer of 2012 said he was looking frail and troubled. ‘He was clearly a worried man, very worried. He never spoke much in Cabinet meetings in any case, now he was almost totally silent,’ confessed a Cabinet minister. Another minister told me, ‘He just wanted to quit, but Sonia wouldn’t let him.’

Whenever two ministers would disagree on an issue, the prime minister’s reflex action would be to appoint a Group of Ministers to try and evolve a consensus. At one point, these ministerial groups had swelled to as many as sixty, many of them headed by Mukherjee. ‘Pranabda was now the alternative centre of power in the government. Whenever we had an issue, we turned to him for advice,’ confessed a minister to me. When Mukherjee, a product of the licence-permit raj, decided to announce the much-criticized retrospective tax in the 2012 budget, the prime minister disagreed but chose not to argue (see chapter 6). The path of least resistance was now a survival ticket.

The elections for a new President were held in the July of 2012. There was a buzz in Lutyens’ Delhi that the Congress might consider Dr Singh for the post. The speculation was only partly true. No, Dr Singh was not being identified for a move to Rashtrapati Bhavan, but yes, it was an option that he himself was privately not ruling out. In fact, multiple sources have since confirmed to me that Dr Singh was very keen on being President. After all, he was now approaching his eightieth birthday—he had been prime minister for eight years. Only Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi had enjoyed such an extended tenure. He had achieved everything possible in public life—Rashtrapati Bhavan would be a nice sinecure.

This is where the Congress made another big mistake. Moving Dr Singh to Rashtrapati Bhavan and having a new prime minister would have been just the tonic a party in crisis needed. But Sonia Gandhi is notoriously risk-averse. Her aides claim she was faced with the TINA (there is no alternative) factor. Rahul Gandhi had shown no keenness, A.K. Antony was seen as too weak and P. Chidambaram as unsuited to coalition politics. Yes, there was Pranabda, a veteran Congressman, and an able crisis manager with a wide network of friends across parties. But the fact is, Sonia Gandhi never trusted Mukherjee as someone who would protect the family legacy.

It was an old story dating back to the mid-1980s when Mukherjee fell out with Rajiv Gandhi over reports that he had tried to usurp the prime ministership after Indira Gandhi’s assassination. Once over lunch, Mukherjee told us how he had been a victim of circumstances. ‘It was all a big misunderstanding of what actually happened. I had chosen to chair a Cabinet meeting after the assassination as the seniormost minister. I wasn’t aiming to be the prime minister myself, but people around Rajiv convinced him that I was plotting to get the top job,’ he said ruefully.

Sonia, though, has a long memory, neatly dividing the world into those with the Gandhis and those against the family. Somehow, Mukherjee, who could well have proven to be an able prime minister, never quite made the cut. Though he would never accept it publicly, the fact is Mukherjee had also never fully reconciled to Dr Singh as his leader. ‘He wanted to be prime minister but knew Sonia would never make him one,’ a Union minister told me. Being pushed to Rashtrapati Bhavan as a near-consensus candidate was scant compensation.

That move also ended any chance Dr Singh may have had of easing himself out into a more comfortable environment. In any case, he had always been a great survivor. For the last two years of his political career, that’s all he was—a survivor. In those two years, there was more dirt, more scandal, and more of his ministers had to resign. One of them, law minister Ashwani Kumar, had to resign amidst allegations that he had tried to ‘protect’ the prime minister
by making changes in the status report of the CBI on the coal block allocations. Kumar was seen as a ‘Manmohan man’ and later insisted to me that he was made a scapegoat. Dr Singh’s office was even accused of allowing crucial coal files to go missing. Through it all, Dr Singh hung on to the chair. But as one Opposition MP pointed out, ‘Yes, the patient is breathing, but
yeh bhi koi jeena hai
[is this any way to live]!’

On 3 January 2014, just months before the general elections, Dr Singh announced at a press conference before the national media that he was ‘retiring’ from politics after the elections and he would not be in the race for prime minister. It was an unprecedented move—no Indian prime minister had publicly ‘retired’ before an election. Just months earlier, Rahul Gandhi had publicly snubbed the prime minister by rejecting the Cabinet’s ordinance on criminal MPs. There were reports that Dr Singh had contemplated stepping down in protest and his family had suggested that he just walk away. When I later asked him about it, his response was, ‘But the ordinance was a collective decision of the government, not just mine alone.’ So was he angry with Rahul and had he ever thought of resigning at the time? He stayed silent and then urged me to have my coffee. We were alone in his room. The loneliness of a defeated man filled the air.

In fact, I have confirmed with a source close to Dr Singh that he did, indeed, once again offer to resign after Rahul tore up the government ordinance. Dr Singh told Sonia he’d had enough. ‘Let me go now, madam. I don’t think I can do this any longer—even my health is not good,’ he pleaded. For one final time, Sonia chose to ignore his request to quit.