Read The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh Online
Authors: Sanjaya Baru
The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (2 page)
When I put this argument to Dr Singh, he accepted its logic, as Kennedy had done in his time, and gave me unrestricted access to himself, at work and at home. I would not, however, be allowed to sit in on Cabinet meetings or the weekly meeting of the Congress core group. Even so, I was undoubtedly privileged in the level of access I enjoyed to the prime minister.
Direct contact with Dr Singh helped me do my job efficiently since it enabled me to feed a hungry media something or the other all the time. It also gave me invaluable insight both into the PM’s thinking and into the kind of advice he was getting. On the flip side, free access to the PM also placed an enormous responsibility on me since I was often required to sift the information I got and decide what I would send out as statements to the media, what I would spin as stories for journalists, and what I had to keep to myself. I would consult colleagues, especially the prime minister’s private secretaries, who had a good idea of what should and should not be shared with the media.
While giving me the freedom to use my discretion in deciding what to tell the media, Dr Singh did, from time to time, tell me to keep some matters strictly confidential. Sometimes, he would explicitly instruct me to not share a piece of information with others, even in the PMO. On occasion, Dr Singh would also ask me to meet people on his behalf, and carry messages to them, or draft confidential letters for him, and, on each such occasion, instruct me to not mention this to anyone. I have respected that understanding to this day. This book does not contain any material that I promised Dr Singh I would not share with anyone else. Moreover, nothing mentioned here contravenes the provisions of the Official Secrets Act, since I have avoided any reference to official information that was made available to me in the discharge of my duties. For these reasons, the book will have some information gaps, especially in the chapters dealing with policy.
Finally, I have not shared the contents of this book with Dr Singh prior to its publication. Indeed, he may not approve of many of my observations in these pages and may even disapprove of my decision to write this book. That places on me even greater responsibility to ensure that this book is an honest account of my time with the PM, offering my view of what I saw and believed had happened. Never forgetting Sharada Prasad’s caution that those once in government and now retired ‘know that things did not always go right even in their heyday, but they want us to believe they would have, if only their counsel had been accepted by the political masters’, I have consciously tried to purge myself of pride or prejudice while telling a story that I believe needs to be told.
1
The Call from PMO
‘Call the doctor!’
Financial
Express
editorial19 May 2004
It was approaching midnight on an early May night in 2004. J.N. Dixit and I were in the studios of the BBC on the top floor of the AIFACS building on Rafi Marg in New Delhi, discussing how the result of the General Elections, now in its final stages, would impact Indian foreign and economic policy. The election campaign had come alive in its last stages, after having begun with the widespread assumption that the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, would be returned to office. Vajpayee had advanced the election dates by six months in the hope of riding a wave of optimism about India’s economic prospects captured by the ‘India Shining’ campaign mounted by his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the leading party in the alliance. However, reports of suicides by cotton farmers in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra had tarnished the NDA’s image and it now appeared that its battle with the principal Opposition party, the Indian National Congress, would be closely fought.
Dixit, known by the nickname Mani, was a former foreign secretary, and an outstanding one at that. After his retirement, he had joined the Congress party and guided party president Sonia Gandhi through the foreign policy debates of the early years of the new millennium. Until Mani Dixit joined her, Sonia Gandhi’s principal adviser on foreign policy had been K. Natwar Singh, a diplomat who had worked closely with Indira Gandhi and then joined the Congress party. Natwar was a quintessential Nehruvian and his thinking was shaped by the Cold War and India’s policy of non-alignment. Mani Dixit’s views, on the other hand, were shaped by the end of the Cold War and India’s increased engagement with developed economies. As foreign secretary during the Congress government headed by Narasimha Rao in the early 1990s, he had crafted India’s response to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of its ally, the Soviet Union, authoring radical departures such as Rao’s ‘Look East Policy’ and his openings to South Korea and Israel.
In 2003 Mani Dixit had been authorized by Sonia Gandhi to draft an alternative view on foreign and national security policy and had put together a discussion group that included, among others, Manmohan Singh, then leader of the Congress party in the Rajya Sabha, the Upper House of Parliament, N.N.Vohra, a retired defence secretary, K. Subrahmanyam, who was until his death in 2011 India’s leading thinker on strategic affairs, and myself. I was then chief editor of the
Financial
Express
(FE
). We would meet in the private dining room of the India International Centre, the club favoured by Delhi’s policy elite.
Since Mani had been given this new political task, I assumed he would play an important role if the Congress came to power in Delhi. I was therefore surprised to hear him ask the anchor at the BBC studio that night to wind up the discussion since he had to leave Delhi in the morning to spend the summer in the hills. The elections would soon be over and some expected the Congress party to form a government. Would you not prefer to remain in Delhi and see if they need you in the new government, I asked Mani curiously.
He laughed the question off. He pointed out that even if the Congress did come to power, Natwar Singh would be in the government, not him, and went on to ask, ‘You think we will win?’ I echoed the popular view around Delhi that the result would be narrow but Prime Minister Vajpayee was likely to return to office. He agreed with me.
As we walked out of the studio I said to him cheerily, ‘You go to the hills, I am off to DC.’
Neither of us could have imagined on that May night that within a month we would be colleagues in the PMO.
It became clear, just a day later, that Sonia Gandhi had got enough seats to form a new coalition government led by the Congress party. Shortly before I flew to Washington DC to speak at a conference organized by the historian Sunil Khilnani, I typed out an editorial comment that appeared on 15 May with the title ‘Thoughts on a Government’. It was typical of the editorials that editors like to write, advising politicians what they should do. My advice to the victorious Congress President Sonia Gandhi was simple—’. . . invite Dr Manmohan Singh to take charge as the Prime Minister’ and make herself ‘the chairperson of the Congress and allies coordination committee that would oversee the functioning of the government’.
My suggestion that Dr Singh be made PM was not a new idea. I had floated it five years earlier, almost to the date, on 25 May 1999, in a column in the
Times
of
India.
This was shortly after Sonia Gandhi’s failed attempt to form a Congress-led coalition government after the fall of a BJP-led government. She had famously and, as it turned out, erroneously announced, ‘We have 272 (MPs), and we hope to get more.’ Provocatively titled ‘Perils of Sonia Gandhi as PM’, my column advised Sonia to resist the temptation of claiming the job and, instead, name Manmohan Singh as PM, were Congress to form a government.
Reading my 2004 editorial, journalist friends who had scoffed at me in 1999 for coming up with a wild idea were amused that I had not given up my ‘campaign’, as some saw it, to make Manmohan Singh prime minister. I was, however, looking at the issue from Sonia’s point of view. She needed to bury the controversy over her Italian birth and retain control of the Congress party till her son or daughter was old enough to take charge. She required, therefore, a reliable, trustworthy and capable head of government. A political leader would always nurse political ambitions and perhaps seek to marginalize the Gandhi family. Hadn’t Narasimha Rao, low profile though he was before he became PM, tried to strike out on his own once he assumed office? By this argument, senior Congress leaders and possible prime ministerial aspirants like Arjun Singh and Pranab Mukherjee were pretty much ruled out. Among the safer choices, few had the experience for the job. A.K. Antony, a Congress leader from Kerala whom Sonia Gandhi reportedly liked, did not, for example. So, I surmised, Dr Singh stood the best chance.
On the day I arrived in DC, 15 May, news reports suggested that Sonia Gandhi was in two minds on whether or not to head the government that was now likely to be formed. Sycophantic as ever, the rank and file of the party demanded that she become prime minister. On the other hand, BJP leader Sushma Swaraj, who had campaigned vociferously against an Italian-origin prime minister, was dramatically threatening to shave her head if Sonia did so.
Over the next two days, the subject of government formation in India dominated coffee- and lunch-break conversations at the conference I was attending. On 18 May, the last day of the conference, I shared the dais with Khilnani and Montek Singh Ahluwalia, an economist who had worked with Rajiv Gandhi and had been secretary in the finance ministry when Dr Singh was finance minister, and was now with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington DC.
Montek spoke first. Shortly after he began speaking, I received an SMS message on my mobile phone from my colleague Rohit Bansal, resident editor of the Delhi edition of the
Financial
Express.
It announced, ‘Sonia says she will not be PM!’ I thought to myself: Step one, she will not be PM. Step two, she will make Dr Singh the PM.
When my turn came, I gave my audience the breaking news. I then said mischievously that if Sonia named Manmohan Singh as PM, they may have just heard the future principal secretary to the Indian prime minister speak. I was referring, of course, to Montek. Not surprisingly, Montek was mobbed as soon as the session got over. Later that day, Sonia announced that Dr Singh would head a coalition government. The next day, I met Montek and his economist wife, Isher, for lunch at the IMF headquarters. They were excited about the news from Delhi. All we talked about over lunch was what a Manmohan Singh prime ministership would mean for the country.
While Isher had been Dr Singh’s student at the Delhi School of Economics, Montek’s association with Dr Singh dated back to the late 1970s when he returned to India after a stint at the World Bank to join the ministry of finance as an economic adviser. Dr Singh was at the time a secretary in the ministry of finance and had encouraged Montek to join the government. The two worked together again in 1992-96 when Dr Singh, by then finance minister in the Rao government, re-inducted Montek into the ministry. None of us spoke about what role Montek expected to play—it was too early to engage in that kind of speculation. I did ask, though, if he had spoken to Dr Singh and he said he had called and wished him.
As we ordered dessert, I asked Montek if he would quit his IMF job and move to India. ‘Of course!’ Isher replied for him, instantly.
I returned home just in time for the new government’s swearing-in ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan. It was the first I had witnessed. Dr Singh appeared nervous and hesitant as he took his oath of office. There was a celebratory air about the place with Congress party leaders present in strength, happy as they were returning to power after six years. Few had, in fact, expected to win the elections and many had been sceptical about the Congress’s ability to stitch together a coalition. Dr Singh’s family, including his daughters and grandchildren, were present but kept a low profile. As soon as the ceremony ended, I tried to walk up to Dr Singh and congratulate him but, unsurprisingly, he was surrounded by an eager throng of Congress party leaders, among them ministers clearly seeking good portfolios (they had not yet been allocated), and journalists. I managed to make eye contact and greet him with folded hands. He smiled.