The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (32 page)

With the visit scheduled for a little more than a month away in mid- April, Dr Singh moved quickly to take the next steps. On 4 April he announced the setting up of a high-level task force to prepare a plan for the development of Jammu and Kashmir under the chairmanship of Dr C. Rangarajan, chairman of the PM’s Economic Advisory Council. The task force members included Kashmiri economist Haseeb Drabhu, business leaders Sunil Mittal, Sunil Munjal and Analjit Singh, public sector CEOs Moosa Raza and T.N. Thakur, and Duvvuri Subbarao.

He then scheduled for 7 April 2005 the launch of a cross-LoC Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service. On 6 April, terrorists attacked the state tourism office in Srinagar, the place from where the new bus service was to be launched. By the end of the day, the national security and intelligence agencies were advising the PM to cancel his visit the next morning to Srinagar. While two terrorists had been killed by security forces, two had escaped. Home Minister Shivraj Patil, Narayanan, IB chief E.S.L. Narasimhan and others advised the PM to cancel his trip. Sonia Gandhi was to accompany the PM. She told him that she would go along with him, whatever his decision.

It was a tiring day. The final review meeting ended at 9 p.m., with the PM being advised to cancel his visit. Almost everyone had left the room. Dr Singh sat pensively, with anger and concern writ large on his face. Suddenly he came alive and said, ‘I will go!’

Officers on their way out of 7 RCR were called back in. The PM called Sonia and informed her that he had decided to travel to Srinagar. She endorsed his decision and said she too would travel with him. Next morning the two flew to Srinagar, amid tight security, and flagged the first bus off.

‘This is the first step,’ Dr Singh told the crowd that had gathered in the heart of Srinagar, ‘on the long road of peace.’

This act of political courage gave Dr Singh a huge boost both within the Valley and across the country. It set the stage for Musharraf’s visit the following week.

A major concern for the officials handling the visit was that Musharraf’s Delhi visit should not become a repeat of the disastrous Agra Summit of July 2001. The general view was that Musharraf had had the last laugh and staged a PR coup, leaving the Indian side embarrassed by the outcome. It was too early in Dr Singh’s prime ministerial tenure for such a foreign policy disaster, officials pointed out. While our diplomats did their bit to ensure a positive outcome, I was instructed by the PM to manage the media and prevent an Agra- style PR disaster. My biggest concern was that our side should speak in one voice and that our internal differences should not come out in the open, as those between Vajpayee and Advani did at Agra.

I convened and chaired a press briefing at South Block. Every important journalist and writer on foreign affairs and on India-Pakistan relations was invited. From the government side we had Narayanan, Nair, Shyam Saran and Shivshankar Menon, India’s high commissioner in Pakistan. It was the first time in the PMO that the media adviser had chaired a press briefing and spoken for the PM with all senior officials present. It was a high-risk strategy. If my efforts to ensure supportive media coverage failed and Musharraf got away with yet another media coup, I knew all the senior officials at the table would not just blame me but also hang me. As I offered the media the PM’s perspective on the Musharraf visit, everyone, including Narayanan, made supportive statements.

As it happened, I need not have worried. Dr Singh came out of that April 2005 Musharraf visit both politically and diplomatically stronger. It had the added benefit of making him more confident and assertive.

 

 

After watching the cricket match at Delhi’s Ferozeshah Kotla grounds, Dr Singh and Musharraf went to Hyderabad House for a formal conversation. Musharraf was in a great mood because Pakistan had got off to a good start. In fact, the President, who had apparently been informed by his staff that Pakistan was set to win (which it did in the end), began the conversation saying, ‘Doctor Saheb, if you and I decide, we can resolve all our disputes before lunch and then go back to watch the match.’

‘General Saheb, you are a soldier and much younger,’ replied Dr Singh to Musharraf, ‘but you must allow for my age. I can only walk step by step.’

While Dr Singh was socially awkward and shy he always seemed to relax in the company of gregarious and outgoing personalities. They would do most of the talking and fill Dr Singh’s silences with remarks that would make the PM laugh and unwind. Musharraf was certainly more talkative than Dr Singh, as were Hamid Karzai, George Bush, Tony Blair and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. He was never too comfortable with those as reserved as he was, like Gordon Brown and Hu Jintao.

The septuagenarian economist and the sixty-one-year-old general walked their talk. Over the next two years, they outlined a roadmap for the resolution of the Kashmir issue based on Dr Singh’s famous formulation that ‘borders cannot be changed, but they can be made irrelevant’. Much of this conceptualization was done secretly through a diplomatic ‘back channel’. On the Pakistani side Musharraf’s trusted envoy was Tariq Aziz, a former income tax officer who was a personal friend of Musharraf. Musharraf had appointed him secretary to the NSC.

Aziz was the liaison between Musharraf and Vajpayee, keeping in touch with Brajesh Mishra through a mutual friend, the late R.K. Mishra of the Observer Research Foundation. During the Kargil war, R.K. Mishra and Aziz would meet secretly, exchanging messages between Musharraf and Vajpayee. Mishra also doubled up as Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) chairman Dhirubhai Ambani’s aide, seeking assurances from the Pakistanis that they would not bomb RIL’s Jamnagar plant.

On the Indian side, Dr Singh’s back channel was former Indian ambassador to Islamabad, Satinder Lambah. Lambah was a highly skilled diplomat who knew how to keep his mouth shut and function below the radar. His meetings at 7 RCR with Dr Singh were always secret. Any appointment scheduled on the daily programme sheet risked becoming public knowledge. Only fourteen marked copies were printed and circulated to key PMO officials, the security and intelligence staff. If the PM wished to keep a meeting secret from any one of these fourteen, then the meetings would never be listed. A further danger was that enterprising journalists would often manage to find out the PM’s programme. Therefore, Lambah’s meetings with the PM were rarely, if ever, listed.

Lambah would meet Aziz in Pakistan, in India and in third places, like Dubai. He was assisted by the PM’s second personal secretary, Jaideep Sarkar, who was his note taker. Whenever Jaideep took leave, reporting sick or leaving word that he was helping his son prepare for exams, I knew he was away with Lambah. The Lambah-Aziz back channel helped prepare the groundwork for summit meetings and develop the framework agreement that Dr Singh hoped to sign with Musharraf.

The first step, they both agreed, would be to make the LoC just ‘a line on a map’. Towards this end it was decided that cross-LoC travel and trade would be freed up. This would mean that for the people of Kashmir, now living on either side of the LoC, life would return to the pre-Partition era when they could travel to each other’s villages with ease, and normal life would go on as if there was no border.

The second step would be to strengthen local self-government on both sides of the LoC, so that the people of Kashmir elected their own government, if necessary under international supervision.

The third step would be the trickiest. It would entail the creation of ‘joint’ or ‘cooperative’ institutions under the charge of Kashmiri leaders to coordinate policies on matters of common interest. Everything except foreign policy and defence would be locally and jointly administered and these two would be handled by New Delhi and Islamabad respectively. If all this worked and peace was restored, then the fourth and final element of the peace formula would be the ‘agreed withdrawal’ of troops on both sides.

Dr Singh followed up this meeting with a visit to the Siachen Glacier in June 2005 where he declared that Siachen would be a ‘symbol of peace’ rather than conflict. It was an optimistic thing to say amid the snowy wastes where India and Pakistan, both laying claim to the same territory, have fought intermittently since 1984.

Reassuring the listening men in uniform, he added that there was ‘no question of redrawing borders. In search of peace, existing boundaries cannot be changed because these are for our protection and are related to our honour.’

While there has been some criticism of Dr Singh’s Siachen proposal in India, the fact is that he pursued this idea only after consulting every retired army general who had actually commanded the troops at Siachen. Each one of them had been witness to the tragic deaths of soldiers and the huge expense of the operation. All of them supported Dr Singh’s decision to find a final solution to the problem of Kashmir and Siachen.

Dr Singh wanted President Musharraf to own and propagate the Kashmir ‘peace formula’. He was quite willing to sell this as a ‘Musharraf formula’ rather than a Manmohan-Musharraf formula. And that is how it has come to be known. He believed at the time that it would be tougher for Musharraf to sell the peace formula in Pakistan than for him to get majority opinion in India on his side. While the peace formula would give a special status to Kashmir, it would not alter the ‘ground reality’, with the Kashmir on this side of the LoC being a part of India and the region on the other side remaining a part of Pakistan.

In Pakistan, Musharraf would have to deal with political parties, religious groups and the army. Dr Singh felt that in India there would be a wider constituency of support, including large sections of the Congress, several regional parties and the Left. He thought the only real opposition would come from the BJP.

This was not the way it turned out. What Dr Singh perhaps underestimated was the likely resistance from within his own party. Pranab and Antony, as successive defence ministers in UPA-1, were reportedly not enthusiastic about a deal on Siachen, though Sonia had blessed the peace formula. The armed forces were ambivalent, with retired generals who had served in Siachen favouring a deal to end the agony of the troops serving in that inhospitable terrain, but serving generals not willing to trust Pakistan on a deal.

A warm and friendly person, Antony played straight but was a tough customer to handle. I had a good personal equation with him because he knew I had been a student of that distinguished Keralite, Professor K.N. Raj. In fact, being aware that I had got married in Thiruvananthapuram, he would always refer to me as a ‘son-in-law of Kerala’. But, when it came to policy, personal warmth mattered little. Antony was politically conservative and risk averse and depended excessively on the advice of IAS officers inexperienced in strategic policy and defence. His stewardship of the defence ministry has been widely criticized for this reason.

To add to this, Dr Singh had to also contend with a declining quality of defence services leadership, which has since become all too visible. For me, the first sign of this decline was evident in the manner in which army chief General J.J. Singh dealt with the Siachen issue. In closed-door briefings, the general would say that a deal with Pakistan was doable, but in public he would back Antony when the defence minister chose not to back the PM. Even in Narasimha Rao’s Cabinet Antony was a critic of that government’s economic policies. With his left-of-centre background, from his time in Kerala politics, Antony was an old-style Congressman critical of both the economic and foreign policy initiatives of the Rao government and now of Dr Singh’s. While he, and indeed Sonia, supported Dr Singh’s initiative to normalize relations with Pakistan, Antony was sceptical about Dr Singh’s Siachen initiative.

I was never sure whether Antony’s hawkish stance was because he genuinely disagreed with the Siachen initiative or whether he was merely toeing a Nehru-Gandhi family line that would not allow Dr Singh to be the one finally normalizing relations with Pakistan. After all the Kashmir problem had its roots in Nehru’s policies. Both Indira and Rajiv tried to solve it and failed. Would Sonia, who backed the peace initiative with Pakistan, finally allow Dr Singh to in fact resolve this legacy of history and enter the history books? I remained a sceptic. I felt she would want to wait till Rahul became PM so that he could claim credit. My scepticism did not, however, blunt Dr Singh’s enthusiasm to keep trying for a breakthrough. Events on the ground did.