The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (34 page)

In September 2007, Dr Singh chose not to go to New York to attend the UN General Assembly. India waited to see what would happen to President Musharraf before reviving the dialogue process, while keeping in touch with Benazir Bhutto, who had indicated her support for the Manmohan-Musharraf formula. By the end of 2007, Benazir Bhutto had been killed by an assassin’s bullet. The news of Benazir’s assassination reached Dr Singh at the Raj Bhavan in Goa. He was crestfallen. Benazir was privy to his consultations with Musharraf and he was confident she would back their effort and extend the required popular support to their plans. He spent the entire evening watching television reportage on the assassination.

By the end of 2008, Musharraf’s rule had ended and a new regime was elected to office. The Manmohan-Musharraf formula went out of play and has been waiting since then to be resurrected. Over the years Dr Singh has repeatedly articulated his vision of a subcontinent of peace. When he welcomed Musharraf at a banquet in his honour in April 2005, it was with an eloquent dinner speech delivered with rare emotion:

We cannot rewrite the past, but we can build a more secure future. A future that generates people’s trust and confidence in the political leadership in South Asia. We must find practical ways and means to resolve all outstanding issues between us in a reasonable, pragmatic manner, cognizant of the ground realities. Our people and our common destiny urge us to make an earnest attempt to find a lasting solution to all issues.

 

In a globalizing and increasingly integrated world, borders have lost meaning for much of the world. The journey of peace must be based on a step-by-step approach, but the road must be travelled. As an ancient saying goes, a road is made by walking.

 

Dr Singh was convinced that destiny was on India’s side and India’s rise as the world’s largest democracy and an economic power would only be slowed down by an unsettled neighbourhood. The subcontinent had to rise together, he felt. He wanted India’s rise to be viewed as a win-win game rather than a zero-sum game by its neighbours. He felt they too should benefit from it, recognizing that they might be able to slow India down with their tactics, but would never be able to stop India’s resurgence.

That is why he persisted with his efforts against all odds and sought to pick up the threads with Musharraf’s successors, President Asif Zardari and Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani, in the face of the gravest of provocations India had faced—the terror attacks in Mumbai in November 2008.

After his impressive victory in the 2009 elections Dr Singh assumed he had the political space to take forward his dialogue with Pakistan and wrap up the deal he was on the verge of striking with Musharraf with the general’s democratically elected successors. After all, he had got Benazir’s support before her death, and now her husband was President. His meeting with Zardari in June 2009, on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) meeting in Yekaterinburg, Russia, was a non-starter, since this was the first meeting with a Pakistani leader after the November 2008 terror attack in Mumbai. He was, however, better prepared for his dialogue a month later with Prime Minister Gilani at Sharm el-Sheikh, on the sidelines of a summit meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement.

I met Dr Singh two days before he was due to fly to Sharm el-Sheikh. After we discussed my plans to return to India from Singapore, where I was then living, he asked me what I thought he should say to Prime Minister Gilani. I felt he ought not to have started his second term with a focus on Pakistan. Let the Zardari-Gilani team settle down I suggested, feeling he should focus on the economy at least for the first six months. The global economy was still in choppy waters. While the G-20 initiatives had calmed the markets and restored some stability, the outlook was still negative. I felt he should use his impressive victory to push for reforms at home while bringing the fiscal deficit down. But he seemed keen on taking the dialogue with Pakistan forward. With the nuclear deal done, normalizing relations with Pakistan remained his second major policy preoccupation. Speculation about a change of leadership midway through the second term, with Rahul taking charge, may have also lent some urgency to this agenda. Who knew how long he would remain PM.

In the event, that keenness seemed to have been responsible for his agreeing to refer to Baluchistan, in an apparent concession to Pakistan, in the joint statement he hurriedly issued with Gilani. The Congress party quickly rubbished the controversial statement, even though Dr Singh defended it twice in Parliament during the course of the month. Despite criticism from his own party, he never gave up hope of using the Thimphu SAARC Summit, in April 2010, to impart momentum to the dialogue process. Within months he was enveloped by political problems at home and never recovered from them to be able to return to the historic agenda he had so eagerly set for himself and so passionately pursued. He could not even manage to visit his birthplace at Gah.

Not completing the process he began will surely remain his greatest regret. However, whenever the two countries do find a lasting solution to their disputes, I have little doubt it will be along the lines that Dr Singh had envisioned with Musharraf.

‘I am aware of the risks that I do incur. Mr T.T. Krishnamachari once told me that there are tigers on the prowl on the streets of Delhi. I am aware of the risks, but for India’s sake, I am willing to take those risks.’

 

Manmohan Singh in the Rajya Sabha
17 August 2006

 

In January 2004, it was Atal Bihari Vajpayee who had initiated a new round of dialogue with President Musharraf, aimed at resolving the Kashmir dispute, but it fell to Dr Singh to take that initiative forward. In the same month, Vajpayee also initiated a new strategic dialogue with the United States, dubbed the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership, aimed at ending what many in India believed was a nuclear ‘apartheid’ that discriminated against India. That process too was destined to be taken forward by Dr Singh.

After the Pokhran nuclear test of 1974, and for refusing to sign the NPT, India had been subjected to US restrictions on the export of ‘dual-use’ and ‘high’ technology, that is technology that could be used for both civilian and military, and strategic purposes. India’s grouse was that China managed to become a nuclear power under the terms of the NPT only because it tested before the treaty was signed while India missed the bus by a few years. The NPT thus, from the Indian perspective, divided the world into nuclear ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ and India, along with Israel, North Korea and Pakistan, was a ‘have-not’.

The 1998 ‘Shakti tests’ at Pokhran had invited a fresh round of sanctions. By 2004, India had managed to secure a whittling down of the post-1998 sanctions, but the post-1974 restrictions (which prohibited US nuclear trade with India) were still in place. Removing these restrictions required amendments to US law.

President George Bush was the first US President to recognize, publicly at least, that this was unfair discrimination against India. He appreciated the fact that it was incongruous for the US to be doing more business in high-technology areas with communist China than democratic India. China managed to avert restrictions because it was an NPT signatory as a ‘weapons power’.

As the world entered the twenty-first century, several factors encouraged the US to seek closer relations with India. First, India’s own improved economic performance and the opening up of the economy to foreign capital and trade in the 1990s. Second, India’s proven capability in the new information and knowledge economy as demonstrated in its ability to help the US manage the Y2K problem, also known as the Millennium Bug. Third, growing US concern about the rise of China and Islamic radicalism, and the US view that India could be a partner in tackling these challenges because India too was concerned about these developments. Finally, the favourable impression made in the US by the Indian American community, which had emerged as a prosperous, vocal and cooperative interest group capable of influencing US lawmakers.

All this was reflected in Condoleezza Rice’s influential essay on ‘Promoting the National Interest’
(Foreign
Affairs,
January-February 2000) in which she urged the US to ‘pay closer attention to India’s role in the regional balance’ in Asia, ‘de-hyphenating’ India from Pakistan (the US tendency to couple the two countries had long infuriated India) and, instead, thinking of ‘India as an element in China’s calculation’. India, suggested Condoleezza, who was already an influential adviser to President Bush and was to later become his national security adviser and secretary of state, ‘is not a great power yet, but it has the potential to emerge as one’. The US, she suggested, must help India so emerge.

It was against this backdrop that the first Bush administration launched the NSSP, to enable cooperation in civilian nuclear activities, civilian space programmes and high-technology trade. While India had addressed US nuclear proliferation concerns, the US had addressed some export-control issues, easing trade in dual-use technologies required by India’s space programme and civil nuclear programme. But enough progress had not been made by the time the government changed in New Delhi.

Dr Singh decided to pursue this dialogue. In his very first address to the nation on 24 June 2004 he specifically said that he would ‘welcome the expansion of cooperation between the two governments to include new and mutually beneficial areas, particularly high technology’. High technology was the euphemism for nuclear technology, but also referred to space, defence and advanced computer technology. These words reflected a conversation that had already been initiated by Mani Dixit on the NSSP with the Bush administration during the visit to New Delhi of Ken Juster, the US co-chair of the US—India High Technology Cooperation Group, and Richard Armitage, then US assistant secretary of defence. Dixit instructed S. Jaishankar, who took charge as the joint secretary dealing with the US, to end the impasse on the NSSP and bring the process to fruition. Jaishankar travelled to Washington DC and between him and India’s ambassador, Ronen Sen, they were able to get an agreement on the NSSP by mid-September. This paved the way for the official announcement of a Bush-PM meeting later that month in New York on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.

The meeting in New York between Dr Singh and President Bush went off better than expected. The two were able to have a one-on- one conversation with Mani Dixit discreetly holding Foreign Minister Natwar Singh back in the anteroom. At the time I thought it was Mani’s way of keeping Natwar out of that conversation for political, perhaps ideological, reasons, assuming Natwar would not be enthusiastic about improving relations with the US. Only later did I come to understand the intense nature of the ‘turf war’ between the two and their battle to be the real architects of the UPA’s foreign policy. After Mani’s death, and before Narayanan became more familiar with the US account, Natwar in fact played a constructive role, as it became clear by the time the PM went to Washington DC in July 2005. Bush was extremely deferential towards the older Singh, repeatedly calling him ‘Sir’, and the two seemed relaxed in each other’s company.

On 29 September 2004, days after Dr Singh’s meeting with President Bush, the US government announced further movement on the NSSP. Dubbing this ‘Phase One of the NSSP’, the 29 September announcement said the US and India would work towards closer cooperation in these areas in phase two of the NSSP. The visit to India in December 2004 of US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld was the next milestone. It showed that a key Bush aide had joined the President in wanting to pursue closer strategic relations with India, overruling the traditional India sceptics in the State Department. Close on the heels of Rumsfeld’s visit, the tsunami that hit the Indian coast on Christmas Eve offered an unexpected early opportunity for cooperation between the two navies.

Mani Dixit’s death in January 2005 briefly disrupted the process because Narayanan was relatively new to the nitty-gritty issues relating to India’s nuclear programme. Among senior officials, the person best informed was Ronen Sen, at the time India’s ambassador to the US. He had served as secretary to the Atomic Energy Commission and was
au
fait
with nuclear policy. But given that the Indian bureaucracy functions in silos, and given the PMO’s obsession about remaining in command, the ambassador in a distant capital was not easily drawn into the dialogue process. Moreover, there was considerable resistance to working with the US, leave alone trusting the US, within India’s diplomatic and scientific establishment, dating back to the dark days of the Cold War.