The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (46 page)

‘Some problems have come up regarding your appointment, can you delay your return?’ Dr Singh asked me. I explained my constraints.

‘Okay, you come back in August. I will sort this out by then.’

After that brief exchange, the conversation moved on to the agenda for the new term. He wanted ideas on moving forward with Pakistan, since he was shortly to meet his new Pakistani counterpart SyedYousaf Raza Gilani in Sharm el-Sheikh.We also talked about his priorities for the economy and the relationship with the US, under a new President. Barack Obama had not voted in favour of the nuclear deal. I also warned him that the BJP would be even more critical of the government in its second term, since the party would be fighting for survival, having performed even worse in 2009 than in 2004. The conversation went in various directions, and then it was time for me to leave.

I returned to Delhi on Saturday, 1 August and sought an appointment with the PM for the 3rd. When I did not hear from the PMO for the next four days I knew something had gone seriously wrong. Finally, I was asked to see Dr Singh on Saturday, 8 August at 5 p.m. in the evening at 3 RCR. This was exactly one year, to the day, since I had quit the PMO.

When I arrived Nair was with him and I was asked to wait in an anteroom. I could hear their voices and then there was silence. The door opened and Murali invited me in. Nair had left, walking out of a side door, and Dr Singh was alone, seated on a sofa and looking pale and anxious. The last time I had seen him like this was on the night of the terror attack in Srinagar, when he had to make up his mind whether he should go to Kashmir the next day against the advice of his officials and launch the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service.

I sat down and waited for him to speak. I avoided the usual pleasantries and the pointless ‘how are you’. He remained motionless. Even the peacocks had gone quiet. He finally broke that deafening silence.

‘I cannot take you back into the PMO. Why don’t you become a member of the Planning Commission for now? I will see later how to bring you back here.’

I had expected to hear something like this. I did not want to embarrass him by asking what had gone wrong. I guessed this was part of the party’s effort to limit his degree of freedom. One more blow. Or, it might have been the work of the people around him, who had perhaps been happy to see me go and were not keen on my return. After all, I had been seen as the PM’s troubleshooter and troublemaker in UPA-1. I had been unwilling to kowtow to the party High Command or yield space to my senior colleagues. I had encouraged the PM to stand his ground on the nuclear deal, I had projected the PM rather than Sonia or Rahul, and so on. I then said what I had come prepared to say.

‘Sir, I joined you in 2004 because you wanted me to. I worked for you, not for the government. I have never fancied a government job. If you are having problems now, I will find something for myself outside government.’

I then told him I already had an offer from T.N. Ninan to succeed him as the editor of
Business
Standard.
I would take that up. Dr Singh sat back and relaxed.

‘Oh good. That is even better than the Planning Commission.’ I took his permission to leave and stepped out, walking all the way, a good half kilometre, to the car park.

 

 

Several weeks later, after I joined
Business
Standard,
I was invited for a function at 7 RCR. As he circulated among the guests Dr Singh walked up to me and asked why I had not come to see him for a long time. The next day, I sought an appointment and called on him. We talked about many things. Finally, he turned to the subject weighing on both our minds.

He said, ‘I am sorry about what happened. You see, you must understand one thing. I have come to terms with this. There cannot be two centres of power. That creates confusion. I have to accept that the party president
is
the centre of power. The government is answerable to the party.’

I saw no point in disagreeing with him or contesting his thesis. But, of course, I did disagree with it. The prime minister was answerable to the Parliament and the government was governed by the Constitution. The party president was only the leader of her party. The prime minister was the leader of the country as a whole and the head of government. One could go on and on, discussing these things threadbare. But this was neither the time, nor the place. Each one of us finds our own rationale for what we do and do not do. He had found his.

‘Am I in trouble?’

 

Manmohan Singh
October 2010

 

I have an indelible image in my mind of the way Dr Singh sat, on that summer morning of 2 June 2009, shortly after he had declared to me, in a moment of rare emotion, that he would have sacrificed his life ‘for the victory’. His normal posture was restrained and formal: he sat straight, with his hands resting on the arm of a chair or on his lap, much as he might do in a conversation with a visiting dignitary. But now, as we spoke of the election result, and much else, he was supremely at ease, reclining with his right leg on his outstretched left, the right ankle resting on the knee of the left. It was a posture that exuded confidence, and suggested that he felt, at this moment, the master of all he surveyed. The one other time I recall seeing him sit like that was after the 123 Agreement was done in 2007.

The nuclear deal was the crowning glory of Manmohan Singh’s first term. As Narasimha Rao’s finance minister, he had made history by opening up the economy. Now, he had made history once again, by giving India a new status as a world power. Having conceded the greater part of the prime minister’s turf to Sonia and his senior colleagues, foreign policy was one area where he jealously guarded the space he had secured for himself. True, he retained his influence over economic policy through Chidambaram and Montek. But foreign affairs was his sole preserve and he made sure it stayed that way in UPA-1. It was the area where he could articulate his vision for India in a changing world, and project his personality, without coming into conflict with the priorities and the profile of the Congress president.

Had there been no opposition to the nuclear deal, it would have neither gained the prime minister notoriety among his critics, nor would it have imparted a statesman-like sheen to his image, at home and abroad. Had the BJP claimed credit for starting it all, or the Left claimed credit for shaping the final outcome, as some of its ‘moderates’ would have liked to do, the deal would have had many fathers. Had Sonia fully backed Dr Singh, the Congress would have claimed credit, reminding the country that it was Nehru who began India’s nuclear programme, Indira who first tested a bomb and Rajiv who authorized weaponization.

But none of this happened. Dr Singh was left to his own devices and he made sure he had his way. He cajoled the nuclear establishment into falling in line. He pushed Narayanan to seal the deal. He ignored the doubters in the external affairs ministry and empowered the believers. He convinced President Bush that backing the deal, at home and abroad, was in America’s interest too. He went to Trombay and addressed scientists. He went to Washington DC and addressed Congress. He reached out to China and Pakistan, softening their resistance. He spoke repeatedly in Parliament, at length and emphatically, and courted public opinion.

In standing firm in the face of Sonia’s wavering commitment to the deal, Dr Singh underscored his own political relevance. Faced with the threat of his resignation, Sonia chose to support him rather than change the prime minister, as his critics in the party and the Left Front assumed she would. There was no one else in the party who had his qualities of competence and compliance. She was certainly not prepared to name Pranab Mukherjee as prime minister or even as deputy prime minister.

Finally, Manmohan Singh exhibited political skills that no one thought he had. He befriended the likes of Amar Singh and Mulayam Singh Yadav to bolster the UPA government after the Left withdrew support. His act of self-assertion against an ideologically motivated cabal dictating foreign policy to the government paid off. His reputation soared. The urban middle class that had deserted the Congress and voted for Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1999 and 2004 returned to its fold in 2009.

With that electoral victory, he had now made a different kind of history, becoming the first prime minister after Jawaharlal Nehru to have returned to office after a full five-year term and with an improved majority to boot. Nehru managed that only in 1957, not in 1962. Dr Singh did not contest Lok Sabha elections in 2009 but became the indisputable candidate to head the new government. No one, not even Sonia, could deny him the prime ministership. In democratic politics, electoral victory is the ultimate test of performance and the prize every politician cherishes. Dr Singh believed he had delivered on that score in the summer of 2009 and that is why he exuded the confidence he did, on that day. But then, he made the cardinal mistake of imagining the victory was his.

Reflecting later on the conversation during which he asked me to return from Singapore and rejoin the PMO as his adviser, I felt that rather than thinking of me as his P.N. Dhar, he had been imagining himself to be the victorious Indira of 1971. This time round, he may have convinced himself, his performance and destiny had made him PM. Not Sonia.

Bit by bit, in the space of a few weeks, he was defanged. He thought he could induct the ministers he wanted into his team. Sonia nipped that hope in the bud by offering the finance portfolio to Pranab, without even consulting him. The PM had been toying with the idea of appointing his principal economic adviser C. Rangarajan, the comrade with whom he had battled the balance of payments crisis of 1991-92. He tried to put his foot down on the induction of A. Raja of the DMK (though the 2G scam became public knowledge only in 2010, he may well have known of Raja’s role in it ), but after asserting himself for a full twenty-four hours, caved in to pressure from both his own party and the DMK.

Then Sharm el-Sheikh happened. The BJP, nursing electoral wounds, used the opportunity provided by a controversial joint statement by the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers to tear into Dr Singh. That was to be expected. But surprisingly, even shockingly, the Congress criticized its own head of government, refusing to back him even after he had defended himself in Parliament.

Dismayed, he chose to surrender. When he told me he could not take me back into the PMO because he had come to accept that there could not be two centres of power, the subtext was that my return would signal his desire to project himself as PM. He chose to yield space. This was not the Manmohan Singh of the nuclear deal or the victorious PM of the summer of 2009. I was struck later by how much the monsoon months had dampened his spirit.

Dr Singh never really recovered from that initial deflation of his authority and it came to affect multiple areas of governance. Even though the economy performed well in the early part of UPA-2, by 2011 it was showing signs of a slowdown combined with inflation and rising deficits. Having yielded space to Pranab in North Block, Dr Singh had little control over fiscal policy. His chosen domain, foreign policy, had little joy to offer him in UPA-2. With Barack Obama in Washington DC, the bonhomie of the Bush years was gone. Not only was Obama preoccupied with his own domestic economic problems, but America’s dependence on China to help it deal with the global economic crisis increased Beijing’s leverage and reduced New Delhi’s salience. Moreover, Obama and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton had not voted in favour of the nuclear deal. Obama’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan increased Pakistan’s importance for the Pentagon and, thus, negatively impacted the US approach to India and South Asia.

Matters were made worse by UPA-2’s incompetent handling of the civil nuclear liability bill. In its original draft, the bill would have enabled India to resume nuclear energy commerce with supplier nations and help Indian nuclear power companies enter the global market. However, inept political handling resulted in the BJP joining hands with the Left to demand changes to the government draft. These changes did not satisfy international suppliers, nor indeed India’s own companies. Dr Singh’s crowning achievement of UPA-1, the nuclear deal, lay in tatters. Yet he soldiered on as a loyal member of his party.

Waning India-US relations inevitably affected the postures of regional players. China became assertive, risking a border confrontation with India after years. The military regime in Pakistan disowned the Musharraf-Manmohan formula on Kashmir and the prime minister never managed to travel to Pakistan, even to visit his place of birth at Gah. The only silver lining to this dark cloud was the new relationship with Japan.

Things were even worse on the home front. When charges of corruption were levelled against his Cabinet colleagues, Dr Singh could not put up a convincing defence of his own role in decision-making. In UPA-1, the Opposition had tried to sully his reputation for integrity, but with no success. In UPA-2, it managed to make a dent and stabbed away until there was a bleeding wound.