The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (40 page)

Dr Singh responded with uncharacteristic firmness, ‘I don’t think I overstepped. I was responding to a public statement issued by the four Left parties and I don’t think I overstepped. I am quite conscious of my responsibilities and what I should say and what I should not say.’

However, fully aware of what Sonia had said before him, the PM parried questions on the nuclear deal, saying his government was not a ‘one-issue government’ and ‘one has to live with certain disappointments . . . If the deal does not come through, that is not the end of life.’

He returned home deeply disappointed. As I took leave of him he asked me, ‘Who are the wise men around whom I can turn to for advice?’

I said I knew only two wise men. One was my father, who happened to be in Delhi that day, and the other my guru, K. Subrahmanyam. He asked to see them both and met each of them separately. Both advised him to stand firm. He had done what he had done with full Cabinet approval. Backing off now under pressure from the communists would show India in a bad light. If the party was not prepared to back him, he should quit.

‘She has let me down,’ he said to both in the separate meetings he had with them, in a voice tinged more with sadness than anger.

The next day, Dr Singh flew on a state visit to Nigeria. As I settled down in my hotel room, my phone rang. Subbu was on the line. ‘PM wants to see you, can you come immediately to his room?’

I sensed a rare urgency in his tone and left my room as I was, without footwear, in shirtsleeves and trousers. When I entered the PM’s suite, I found Dr Singh seated in the middle, with Mrs Kaur on one side and Subbu on the other. Subbu got up and offered me his chair. Dr Singh looked grim.

‘What did you tell the US ambassador?’ Dr Singh asked.

I was surprised by the question and the tone. What did I tell the US ambassador? I could not recall talking to him. I asked what the context was.

‘I am told you made some remark to him on the nuclear deal. What did you say?’

It came back to me in a flash. Just as I was packing up to leave my office room in South Block the day before we left for Nigeria, I had a call from Ted Osius, a diplomat at the US embassy. He called to say that he had a copy of the PM’s speech at the Hindustan Times Summit but that copy did not contain the remarks that the PM had made on the fate of the nuclear deal. So where did he say what he was quoted in the press as saying?

I told the diplomat that those were extempore remarks made by the PM in response to questions posed by Vir Sanghvi and he would find the transcript on the PMO website. He then went on to say that the US ambassador David Mulford was keen on reading the PM’s statement to understand what exactly he had said. Could I explain to him the PM’s remarks?

I was in a hurry to wind up for the day and was not sure what else I could offer by way of explanation. Whatever the PM had said was out there. I had nothing more to add. The diplomat persisted, asking me what I thought the PM meant by what he said. I then offered an explanation. The PM was saying, ‘Que sera sera.’

As I recalled this, Dr Singh said, ‘Exactly. What is the meaning of que sera sera?’

I couldn’t help laughing out loudly. ‘Oh,’ I said to Dr Singh, ‘You mean someone reported to you that I may have spoken in some secret code?!’ I continued to laugh. Maybe those eavesdropping on my conversation could not decode the phrase for the PM. Mrs Kaur smiled. She knew what the words meant.

Que sera sera, I told Dr Singh, was Spanish for ‘whatever will be, will be’.

He had not seen Hitchcock’s movie,
The
Man
Who
Knew
Too
Much.
Mrs Kaur, who had seen it, said, ‘Yes, I remember that movie and that song.’

Doris Day sang it, I pointed out. Yes, agreed Mrs Kaur, it was Doris Day. As I hummed the tune, Subbu was amused. Dr Singh was not. He heard me with a sombre expression.

What else could I say, I asked him. It is not just the US ambassador, the entire media and many in government have been asking the same question. What exactly did the PM mean when he said his was not a ‘one-issue government’ and that ‘one has to live with certain disappointments . . . If the deal does not come through, that is not the end of life.’

Was the deal dead? I did not know, I explained to him, so I felt the best answer to give the US diplomat was: ‘Que sera sera!’

Finally, Dr Singh smiled. He said he had a call from Pranab Mukherjee who told him that Mulford had called on him and sought an explanation of both Sonia’s and the PM’s statements at the Hindustan Times Summit and wanted to know if the government had decided to shelve the negotiations and the deal. Pranab tried to offer an explanation. Mulford then told him that when his colleague asked the PMO for an explanation, he was told ‘Que sera sera’. What did he think the PMO guy meant, Mulford asked Pranab.

Several days later, back in Delhi, I found myself seated at the banquet table in Rashtrapati Bhavan at a dinner in honour of the visiting President of Switzerland. The President’s banquets usually have a live band playing music. The tunes being played that evening are listed on a card and placed in front of every guest along with the menu card. As I glanced through the card, my eyes caught the name of the second number, which was yet to be played. It was Doris Day’s
Que
sera
sera.

I circled the name of the tune on my card and passed it down the table to Dr Singh. He looked at the card and then looked at me. I pointed him in the direction of the band and made a gesture with my forefinger, as if it was a conductor’s wand. Dr Singh smiled. For the first time in his life, he was hearing that lovely tune from a fantastic Hitchcock movie.

It seemed that evening that as with so many other issues, he would take the fatalistic view that ‘whatever will be, will be’ on this signature initiative. At times I would be frustrated by this fatalism—even more so by some of his aides justifying it in the name of political survival. At other times I would step back and wonder if there was something to be learnt from his approach. On the nuclear deal, at least, he proved to be more a strategist than a fatalist. In the weeks that followed he began to reveal the cards he had held so close to his chest. Slowly but surely, he began to make his moves, before finally using the threat of resignation to get Sonia on his side.

‘It is very important for us to move forward to end this nuclear apartheid that the world has sought to impose on India.’

 

Manmohan Singh to IFS probationers
11 June 2008

 

After Sonia Gandhi’s rebuff at the Hindustan Times Summit in September 2007, Dr Singh went silent on the nuclear deal. The Congress party and the Left kept up a show of continuing to discuss the deal in a fifteen-member UPA-Left committee. Senior Congress ministers, including Pranab Mukherjee, Kapil Sibal and Prithviraj Chavan would sit with Karat,Yechury, A.B. Bardhan, D. Raja and others and come out of these meetings with inane statements about how the government was clarifying the doubts raised by the Left.

Even after six meetings during September-November 2007, Left spokespersons would continue to claim that they were only offering the government an ‘honourable exit route’ and that the Left did not want the deal ‘operationalized’ till the scheduled General Elections in 2009, and certainly not as long as George Bush remained US President.

Despite the Left’s rigid stance, the government managed to get the Left’s permission to proceed to the IAEA to negotiate an ‘India-specific safeguards agreement’, adding the proviso that the Left would have to approve of such an agreement before the government took the next step, which would be to sign on to the 123 Agreement, so that the US President could secure Congressional approval for the deal with India.

In his first public reference to the nuclear deal after the Hindustan Times Summit, Dr Singh told the AICC on 17 November 2007, referring to the problem of power shortage at home and the need to increase power generation capacity:

We are in the process of finalizing a historic agreement with the United States which will enhance our prospects of increasing the production of nuclear power. There are doubts and misgivings in many minds about this agreement. . . . The Civil Nuclear Agreement is an effort to open closed doors so that we can obtain nuclear fuel and technology from other countries, such as USA, Russia and France . . .

 

Having explained it thus for the nth time from a written text, he then chose to add extempore:

The agreement concerns only the civil side of the nuclear energy programme and will have no bearing on our strategic programme. It remains intact without international interference and won’t affect our sense of judgement on foreign policy. You need to understand this reality and explain it to our people.

 

Coming after him, Sonia too referred in positive terms to the nuclear deal and added, ‘Working in a coalition does not mean that the Congress should lose its political space forever.’ This enthused the votaries of the deal. Journalists following the issue would ask me if the deal was ‘not yet dead’. Some would even sit in my room and take bets on the topic. But, at the time I was still not sure if what Sonia had said signalled a change in her own position, or whether this was her way of not letting the PM down in public, even while pressing him to give up in private. That Dr Singh went once again into prolonged silence on the issue suggested to me that it might be the latter.

It was only four months later, in his reply to the debate on the motion of thanks to the President for her address to Parliament, on 5 March 2008, that he made a reference to the deal. This time, however, I knew he was once again serious about moving forward because we had just crossed an important turning point in the interminable discussions on the deal.

On 20 February 2008, John Kerry, a US senator and chairman, at the time, of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, landed in New Delhi along with his Congressional colleagues Joseph Biden (later to become the US vice president) and Chuck Hagel. They were in India to discuss the situation in Afghanistan but the conversation quickly moved on to the fate of the nuclear deal. Dr Singh briefed them on the state of play and said he was still trying to evolve a domestic political consensus that would enable him to complete the negotiations with the US. The three offered some candid advice.

They stressed that it was imperative that India complete all necessary steps to conclude the nuclear deal by end-July to ensure that the US Congress approved it before the presidential election. ‘Otherwise,’ warned Kerry, ‘it will be very difficult for Congress to ratify it. If it is not ratified by Congress by July-end, there is no prospect.’ In order to be able to have time for the agreement to be passed in the senate, said Kerry, it should be brought to it by end-May. ‘So I think,’ he added, ‘somewhere in the next few weeks the decision has got to happen.’

Kerry advised that the agreement process should be completed in the US Congress with a Republican President still in office and a Republican majority in the senate. The forthcoming US elections, he predicted, would bring the Democratic party to power and the Democrats, all three agreed, would find it very difficult to support the nuclear deal. Interestingly, Kerry and Biden were Democrats and Hagel was then a Republican. In late February 2008, it was still not clear whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would get the Democratic party nomination. They were still competing in the primaries. The US media had been reporting that if Barack Obama won the candidacy, Biden would be his secretary of state and if Clinton came out on top then Kerry would be her secretary of state. Of course, in the end, Biden became Obama’s vice president, Kerry succeeded Clinton as Obama’s secretary of state and Hagel became secretary of defence in Obama’s second term.

While all three focused on the requirements of the US legislative timetable, Kerry went a step further and drew Dr Singh’s attention to the enormous influence exerted within the Democratic party by non-proliferationists (K. Subrahmanyam had famously dubbed them ‘the Ayatollahs of nuclear non-proliferation’). Kerry warned Dr Singh that a future Democratic President would not be able to do for India what President George Bush was clearly willing and ready to do. He made it clear that neither Obama nor Hillary Clinton would challenge the anti-deal non-proliferation lobby and its rigid anti-India stance in their party. In the event, neither Obama nor Clinton voted in favour of the 123 Agreement in the senate.

The three senior American leaders were only confirming what Dr Singh always knew, that if there was any chance of India getting the nuclear deal, it was only because President Bush wanted to do this for India. It was not because Bush had any special love for India. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US the spectre of jihadi terrorism had come to haunt the US, and led American leaders to understand what their Indian counterparts had been telling them about the need to fight this threat. Moreover, the inexorable rise of China was beginning to alter not just the Asian balance of power but also the global balance of power. Helping a democracy like India become stronger would enable it to deal both with the threat of Islamic radicalism and the rise of China. The US had a stake in this outcome. And, critically, Bush was willing to ignore the non-proliferationists’ objections. Other US leaders were not as willing.