The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (20 page)

Before his first interaction with the media in July in Bangkok, I had gone into the PM’s room to ask him if he would like to freshen up before facing the media. His instant reply, with a smile, was,
‘Kya
sher
kabhi
apne
dant
saaf
karta
hai?’
(Does a tiger ever brush its teeth?) I spun this as evidence of a new, confident Manmohan and many in the media lapped it up. But by the time Parliament met again, the Opposition was quick to resume its attack on the ‘weak PM’. Moreover, his decision to induct his own man, Montek, as deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, was countered by Sonia’s decision to create an NAC filled with critics not just of Montek but also the PM. This did nothing for his image.

What could Dr Singh do to show that he was the boss? Indeed, was he prepared to do anything at all? His shy and introverted personality was a barrier. His unwillingness to assert himself vis-a-vis senior Cabinet colleagues imposed limits on what a subordinate could do to project his image. There was also the additional problem of the Opposition painting him as an interloper because he was a member of the Rajya Sabha and not the Lok Sabha. After disrupting his opening address to Parliament, the BJP once again prevented Dr Singh from addressing Parliament when it reconvened in July.

Dr Singh’s own attitude to the situation he was placed in was puzzlingly ambiguous. On occasion he would get irritated by suggestions that he was not his own man, at other times he would opt for a low profile and shy away from asserting his authority. Sometimes he would deliberately say or do things to establish his independence. A trivial but telling example was his angry response, still in the early days of his first term, to my question on whether a particular proposal that he was approving had Sonia Gandhi’s approval, and whether we should have it checked through Pulok.

Dr Singh retorted, ‘I am the prime minister!’

Yet, on another occasion, in September 2004, when a front-page report in the Hindi newspaper
Punjab
Kesari
announced my imminent dismissal from the PMO
(‘Sanjay
Baru
ki
Chutti
Hogi’)
because, as it claimed, the Congress party leadership was unhappy with my style of functioning, Dr Singh said to me, ‘Why don’t you call on Sonia? They will stop bothering you.’ The reference was to those around Sonia who were seen to be planting stories in the media against me and the suggestion was that once I was seen having access to her all the sniping would end.

I first responded by saying, ‘If you want me to, I will.’ He said he would secure an appointment for me. But I had second thoughts and suggested he drop the idea. My meeting her when I was under attack would be interpreted as my seeking her blessings to remain in office. I told him I took the PMO job because he asked me to work for him and I would leave the day he wanted me to. Why should I now seek her protection and be beholden to her? He remained silent. The subject was never raised again and I never called on Sonia during my entire tenure at the PMO.

There was a trivial episode in the first few weeks after he assumed office that had me deeply worried because it not only drew attention to the PM’s excessively careful approach towards junior ministers known to be close to Sonia but also pointed to a willingness to look the other way when such ministers were accused of wrongdoing. The media reported that a junior minister of the Congress, Renuka Chowdhury, had written a letter to BJP leader Jaswant Singh seeking an appointment for an arms dealer when Jaswant was defence minister. There had been some criticism of this in the media. A reporter from a Telugu newspaper asked me whether the PM was aware of this and whether he had approved of her conduct. I saw no point in going to the PM for a reply. Moreover, I did not see how I could say the PM would approve of such conduct. So I offered a wishy-washy reply saying that while the PM was too busy and had not yet seen the news reports, he would of course never approve of any MP seeking an appointment for an arms dealer. Maybe I should have just kept my mouth shut, but these were early days in the job.

The next day, the Telugu media reported that the PM had disapproved of Renuka’s interest in arms deals. That evening she called me and asked me if I had made that statement with the approval of the PM. I said I had not spoken to the PM and had made a general statement that the PM would not approve of such things. She then claimed that she had not written any such letter and that this was all fictitious stuff aimed at maligning her. She wanted me to issue a clarification stating that the PM had not said anything against her.

I told her that I could not issue any such statement without the PM’s explicit instruction. She said she would meet the PM and ask him to instruct me. I waited anxiously for a summons from Dr Singh after her meeting with him. That did not happen. A few days later, Dr Singh asked me for my version of what had happened. After I offered it, he said with a smile, ‘Maybe you should go and make up. She is very angry.’

I was flabbergasted. Renuka was not a senior enough party leader for a PM to worry if one of his officials had offended her. I told him that if I apologized to her, Renuka would go to town and not just claim that the PM had not reprimanded her for lobbying for an arms dealer, but, much worse, that the PMO had said sorry to a junior minister. I felt this would damage the PM’s image. I told him that the media would be happy to see him disapprove of such conduct and it was best to let matters rest there. He did not press me. The next day, Nair asked me if I was going to see Renuka to clear the air. A bit irritated, I asked him why she was considered that important.

‘Because she is close to the party leadership,’ he replied.

These incidents captured the limits the PM was willing to impose on his authority. It was not as if the PM condoned what Renuka had been accused of, it was just that he did not want to make a point of admonishing her publicly because she was regarded as being close to Sonia. This, I realized early, would be the source of his image problem, given that his political USP was the image of being a man of integrity.

His personal integrity was, of course, never questioned. His driving his own Maruti 800 as the leader of the Rajya Sabha was a legend among Delhi’s journalists. Mrs Kaur serving tea herself to visitors to their home was another. He was probably the first prime minister in a long time who did not have a son or son-in-law in business or real estate. His daughters and sons-in-law were all salary-earning professionals. Which is probably why he felt no scandal would ever touch him even if he had not intervened to prevent it.

This was the image that worked. Through UPA-1 that image sustained. Vidya Subrahmaniam of
The
Hindu
reported from a village in Uttar Pradesh during the 2009 election campaign that when she asked several poor villagers whom they would vote for, they would say,
‘Congress
ko.
Sardarji
ko,’
and that, she reported, was because the PM was seen by these simple folk as a
‘neyk
aadmi’
(good and honest man). The ‘good man’ image had to be converted into a political asset and he had to be shown to be his own boss. That, I saw as my task as media adviser.

Sharada Prasad agreed with me. ‘Tell the prime minister,’ he advised, ‘that he should be politically active, and do what he can and must as PM, without necessarily challenging her authority as party president.’ He suggested that the PM should meet chief ministers and write letters to them on matters of national importance. ‘Maybe you should arrange a press conference where he takes political questions and gives his personal views. The nation should know that the PM has a mind of his own.’

The next day, I conveyed the gist of this conversation to Dr Singh. Without my having to persuade him too much, he agreed to address a press conference. I viewed the press conference as part of a larger strategy to build a credible Manmohan Singh brand. Unless people across the country had an intimate understanding of who this man was, it would never be possible to convince them that he was his own boss.

There was no doubt in my mind that the PM needed to build his own personal credibility to be able to ensure the credibility of his government and of the country. I did not view the task of building his image as a personal favour to him; I saw it as a national duty. As Pranab Mukherjee put it to me emphatically years later, the country’s credibility depended on the PM’s credibility. What would the world think of India if it saw its PM as a political puppet?

A short while later, during the budget session of Parliament in August 2004, an ill-considered initiative by L.K. Advani and George Fernandes offered a welcome opportunity to project the PM as a tough guy with a mind of his own. Advani and Fernandes led an NDA delegation to the PM suggesting changes to the finance bill. An irritated Dr Singh did not even invite his visitors to sit down, leave alone offering them a cup of tea. Dr Singh was not inclined to be kind to an Opposition that had ruined his first day in Parliament. He received them standing in his room and continued to stand so that they, too, had to present their letter standing. He accepted their file, but threw it down on the table without even reading it. Nonplussed, the delegation left the room.

The NDA leaders went to the TV cameras outside the Parliament building and lodged a complaint that they had been ‘insulted’ by the PM. I was in South Block at the time. Subbu called me from the PM’s office in Parliament to explain what exactly had happened, in case the media asked me for a comment. He explained that the PM had not in fact ‘thrown’ the file down, as being alleged on TV, but that he had only ‘dropped’ it, since he was standing and the table was at a lower height. I grabbed the opportunity. I suggested to Subbu that we need not be defensive. Why explain that the PM meant no disrespect to the leaders of the Opposition, and that he had not ‘thrown’ the file down? Let us confirm what is being alleged and claim the PM was angry, irritated and tired of the Opposition’s disruptive ways.

The media loved the story and interpreted it as evidence of a new ‘enough-is-enough, no-nonsense’ Manmohan Singh.
Outlook
magazine commented: ‘For Manmohan’s media managers, long despairing of changing their shy, workaholic and stiff boss into a more popular prime ministerial mould, this was the one opportunity they had been waiting for over three months. And far from glossing over the incident as his party colleagues were so desperately trying to do, they were convinced that this could be the making of a brand new image: a confident, relaxed, assertive Manmohan—under no one’s shadow but his own man at last. . . . A flash of temper was just what his spin doctors had been waiting for.’

There were other positive developments in the run-up to the press conference. Dr Singh accepted Sharada Prasad’s suggestion that he should write letters to chief ministers on important issues of the day. The practice of prime ministerial letters to chief ministers was an institution created by Nehru, but other PMs had not followed it regularly. Two considerations went into the decision to reintroduce the practice. First, since many of the chief ministers belonged to either regional parties or the BJP, it would enable the PM to directly communicate with leaders of other political parties. Secondly, the move would emphasize his stature as a leader of the nation and not just of the Congress party. Finally, since all Indian-language newspapers would translate and publicize the PM’s letter to chief ministers, this would be one more avenue for communicating with people across the country.

On 18 July 2004, the prime minister wrote his first letter to CMs on the theme of the delivery of public services. The letter got good play in the media, with many newspapers pointing out that Dr Singh had revived a practice first started by Nehru and noting that his letter was ‘non-partisan’. Building Dr Singh’s image as a ‘non-partisan’ PM had been one of my objectives. After all, Sonia, party president and UPA chairperson, was asserting her political leadership of the party and Dr Singh could not compete with her for that role. Rather, he had to assert his leadership as PM by dealing directly with chief ministers. It was a popular saying that in India’s power structure only three institutions mattered—the PM, the CM and the DM (district magistrate or collector). Many CMs consolidated their power in state capitals by dealing with DMs directly, and not through the administrative chain of command. I saw the PM’s direct communication with CMs as a similar exercise.

Unfortunately, while Dr Singh was happy to write letters, he was not enthusiastic about the second leg of this strategy, namely having quiet one-on-one meetings, preferably informal ones over breakfast or a meal, with chief ministers. He did have private dinner meetings with West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, with whom he felt comfortable, on a couple of occasions, but was not keen to repeat this with any other chief minister.

While generally non-partisan, once in a while Dr Singh would adopt a more partisan stance, getting tough with state governments run by political opponents. On one such occasion, when Orissa chief minister Naveen Patnaik, then an ally of the BJP, called on him and sought a financial package for Orissa on the same lines as what was given to Bihar, a state ruled at the time by a UPA ally, Dr Singh delivered an uncharacteristic snub, saying, ‘Does money grow on trees?’ I was happy to share this with the media to show that if he so wanted, the mild-mannered PM could get rough.