The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

by Sanjaya Baru

  At work, he spoke even less than at home. His public silences, for which the media would often chastise him, were only an extension of his private ones. In formal meetings with visiting heads of government, he had a prepared brief that he often memorized like a good student and followed. In Cabinet and official meetings, he became notorious for his silences. He would mostly listen and then say a few words, if he wished to offer a view. Mostly, however, his style was to allow everyone to have their say and then take a decision on file, rather than stating his own views explicitly. He was happy if he could provoke his interlocutors into talking so that he could himself sit back and listen. But he would ask questions, and those questions sometimes revealed his mind.

  Over time, as he became bolder as PM, he devised a new strategy. If he agreed with the views of a person in a meeting, he would give that person more time to speak, while cutting short those whose views he did not share. Sometimes, he would ask a person to speak, knowing full well what his views were and that these were not shared by many around the table. That was a signal to others to fall in line. While he adopted all these strategies, he himself rarely spoke in an assertive manner. Over time, his silences and his overt shyness seemed to be more strategy than the habits they had probably been, to begin with.

  When I entered the PMO, I was aware of Manmohan Singh’s shyness and knew that in order to be a successful media adviser communicating on his behalf to the media, I would have to improvise. It would be easy to be his ‘eyes and ears’, which is what he wanted me to be when I joined the PMO. The tough part would be to be his ‘voice’.

  3

  Manmohan’s PMO

  ‘I want you to be my eyes and ears.

  Tell me what you think I should know,

  without fear or favour.’

  Manmohan Singh, 30 May 2004

  I went to meet Dr Singh on Monday at the prime minister’s sprawling official residence, 7 Race Course Road—7 RCR as it is popularly called—at the edge of Lutyens’ Delhi and bordering diplomatic enclave. After Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, the security around the PM’s official residence has become so elaborate that entering it is quite an ordeal. The Special Protection Group (SPG), an elite security unit protecting the PM, which was created in 1985 after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, allows in only such visitors whose names have been provided to them by the personal secretary to the PM. After driving through the first gate of the outer compound, visitors alight near the second gate. Only ministers, authorized officials and foreign dignitaries are allowed to drive through the second gate, and get into SPG vehicles that will take them a couple of hundred yards down the road to the PMO. Those less privileged must first walk into a visitors’ room, deposit their mobile phones and be screened by security. Only then are they ferried by the SPG in its fleet of Maruti cars to the Prime Minister’s Office.

  Having done the ride, I was ushered straight in to meet Dr Singh. He was in the chair on the right side of the room on which PMs usually sit when they meet visitors, and welcomed me with a smile. I walked up and sat on a chair placed to his left.

  ‘I was not prepared for this role,’ he confessed. ‘This is a new experience and it will not be easy. We are a minority government. The Left has only agreed to support us from the outside. The Congress party has never run a coalition government. I will have to make a success of it. I need a press secretary. I know you, so I would be happy if you agreed to work here. I know it will mean a financial loss for you, but you will have to view this as an opportunity to serve the nation.’

  I told him Vohra had already briefed me about his impending offer and, without further ado, accepted his invitation to work for him. Our conversation turned to matters of rank and nomenclature. I pointed out that two persons had handled the media in the PMO of the previous prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and both were called ‘officer on special duty’—OSD in bureaucratic parlance. However, when other editors had taken up the same assignment in the past, they had been called information advisers to the PM. I would prefer to be called media adviser, I said, explaining that with the advent of news television the word ‘media’ had replaced ‘press’, and ‘information’ sounded archaic. He agreed.

  Finally I asked him what he expected of me. He reflected for a moment, then said, ‘Sitting here, I know I will be isolated from the outside world. I want you to be my eyes and ears. Tell me what you think I should know, without fear or favour.’

  Those words remained embedded in my mind and every time I hesitated to convey an inconvenient truth or an embarrassing tale over those four years with him, I would recall them and feel emboldened. Even after leaving the PMO, I used the privilege bestowed on me by those words to tell him, impartially, what I felt he ought to know.

  I told Dr Singh that Sharada Prasad, Indira Gandhi’s widely respected information adviser, was a family friend and that I would meet him and seek his guidance. He agreed. ‘Yes, Sharada is a good man. You should keep in touch with him and take his advice.’

  Anxious to get his team in place quickly, he insisted I join immediately since the new Parliament was scheduled to convene that week. I agreed to begin work two days later.

  Strangely, on a day when my life took a new turn, Rama was in distant Canada and Tanvika in Hyderabad. I had no one at home to go to. So I first called my parents to give them the news, and then Shekhar Gupta, CEO of the Express group, to which the Financial Express belonged. Shekhar was attending a conference in Istanbul and was understandably dismayed at the prospect of my immediate exit. Yet he graciously said he would keep my chair at FE vacant since it was unlikely this new coalition experiment with the Left would work.

  ‘It is a thankless job, boss!’ he warned me. ‘This government will not last its term. You will be unemployed in a year’s time.’

  Shekhar stuck to his promise of keeping the editor’s chair warm for me for nearly six months, before deciding that the Manmohan Singh government would last longer than many had imagined and that he needed a full-time editor to run the paper.

  By Monday evening, the orders were issued and the news was splashed across TV screens. My life changed instantly and my mobile phone never ceased to ring.

  A day after joining the PMO, I called on H.Y. Sharada Prasad to seek his blessings and advice. A compact, personable man, Sharada Prasad exuded sagacity. His tiny apartment was filled with books and memorabilia from his years in public life. Rare photographs of Gandhiji and Nehru adorned the walls. He spoke softly, choosing his words with deliberation and care.

  ‘So what room have they given you?’ he asked keenly, as any veteran of the PMO would, knowing how much perceptions about an official’s proximity to the PM, and hence his power and influence, were shaped by what room he had been given.

  I said I would be sitting in the very room that he had sat in, when I met him for the first time in 1981. However, since that room was being refurbished, I would temporarily occupy the corner room next to the Cabinet room, near the prime minister’s office on the first floor.

  ‘Ah!’ he exclaimed. ‘That is a historic room. The first office room of the first prime minister of free India!’

  Jawaharlal Nehru spent his first few days in office sitting in that small room adjacent to the Cabinet room because the room that he was to occupy as PM was being used by Sir Girija Shankar Bajpai, secretary general of the ministry of external affairs (MEA). It took a few days for Bajpai to move to a new room and for the room to be refurbished for India’s first prime minister.

  ‘In my time I met the editors of the major dailies regularly,’ Sharada Prasad said to me. ‘But in those days there were only five editors who mattered. The editors of the Statesman, the Times of India, The Hindu, the Indian Express and Hindustan Times. These days you have too many newspapers, and television too. But try and keep in touch with those who matter. Make sure the PM meets them informally once in a while. Make sure the PM compliments an editor and a columnist whenever something worth complimenting is written. Reach out
to the Indian- language media. Every morning give the PM a list of major headlines. Make sure you have some role in speech-writing. The civil servants will not like it. But as an editor you have writing skills that the PM would benefit from. Use them.’

  I asked him if the PM should address a press conference.

  ‘Of course, but not right now,’ he said. ‘In the next month, let him meet editors and publishers in small groups. These should be off-the-record conversations. They should get to know him, he should get to know them. After a couple of months, organize a press conference. Make sure you conduct it. And make sure you have thought of the headlines you want the next day. Never organize a media interaction without deciding what headline you want to come out of it!’

  In the following weeks, I faithfully followed each of these instructions. I arranged a series of breakfast meetings with important editors, publishers and TV anchors. As an early riser, Dr Singh would schedule his breakfast meetings for half past eight. Being late to bed and late to rise, editors and TV anchors would protest, but turn up on time. When I invited a group of publishers, the only ones to arrive late were Shobhana Bhartia of Hindustan Times because, as she told me, she took a long time drying her hair, and Indu Jain, chairperson of the Times of India, because she had to finish her morning puja.

  Whenever the PM visited a state capital, I would arrange an interaction with the local media. This became an important institution of communication for the PM. It helped break the monopoly of the largely English-language Delhi media over access to him. Editors and correspondents from the Indian-language media got an opportunity to interact with Dr Singh and make their own assessment of a man few of them had ever known. Between 2004 and 2008, Dr Singh addressed a press conference, open to all media, in every single state capital he visited, including Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. This investment of time in befriending regional media, including the Urdu-language media, proved invaluable during the national debate on the India-US civil nuclear agreement, and whenever the PM came under attack from Delhi’s media. I did incur the wrath of New Delhi’s prima donnas every now and then for adopting this inclusive policy, especially if I opted to give the editor of a regional media group exclusive time with Dr Singh on board the PM’s aircraft on one of his foreign trips, ignoring the requests of a New Delhi editor.

  As I entered into my new role, my last courtesy call was to the home of P.V Narasimha Rao. During his tenure as PM, there were only two Hyderabadi editors in Delhi, A.M. Khusro at the Financial Express and myself, and he knew us both. I had kept in touch with Rao even after he had retired from active politics. On this latest visit, I found him all alone and reading a book, when his long-serving assistant, Khandekar, ushered me in. Over tea and biscuits, I gave Rao an account of the call from the PMO and my meeting with Dr Singh, and the words of advice from Sharada Prasad.

  Rao found it significant that Dr Singh had not opted for a political journalist or a government official as his media adviser but had chosen an economic journalist like myself. ‘Of course, he knows Vithal,’ he added, referring to my father, and suggested Dr Singh’s choice may have also been shaped by that fact.

  ‘Good,’ he said, as he sipped his tea. ‘Manmohan needs your help.’

  Dr Singh’s three key aides in the PMO happened to be, by mere happenstance, Malayalees and all Nairs to boot: J.N. ‘Mani’ Dixit, the new national security adviser (NSA), T.K.A. Nair, the prime minister’s principal secretary, and M.K. Narayanan, the special adviser for internal security.

  The power and importance of the principal secretary to the PM has always been dependent on the latter’s political clout, apart from the officer’s own standing within the civil service. As the bureaucratic link between the PM and senior ministers and secretaries to government, the principal secretary commands authority and influences policy. Most principal secretaries have been extremely capable men, well regarded by their peers and respected by their subordinates, like P.N. Haksar in Indira Gandhi’s PMO, P.C. Alexander in Rajiv’s, A.N. Varma in Narasimha Rao’s, Satish Chandran in Gowda’s, N.N. Vohra in Gujral’s and Brajesh Mishra in Vajpayee’s. However, every now and then, a nondescript official of limited talent has also adorned that job.

  The national security adviser is an institution created during Vajpayee’s first term, after India declared herself a nuclear weapons power and a National Security Council (NSC) was established. The NSA is the executive head of the council and, within the PMO, typically deals with the ministries of defence and external affairs, the service chiefs and intelligence agencies and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE). Since Manmohan Singh’s PMO also included a special adviser, a novelty created to accommodate Narayanan, part of the NSA’s turf, namely the area of internal security, was hived off to him.

  Mani Dixit was, without doubt, the dominant personality among the three. His stature ensured that T.K.A. Nair was not quite the ‘principal’ secretary that many of his predecessors had been. Of course, Nair’s immediate predecessor, the larger-than-life Brajesh Mishra, was more than just a principal secretary. I once jokingly remarked to Dr Singh that in Vajpayee’s time the principal secretary functioned as if he were the PM, while in his case, it was being said that the PM functioned like a principal secretary. This was a comment on Dr Singh’s attention to detail, his involvement in the nitty-gritty of administration, his chairing of long and tedious meetings with officials, which Vajpayee rarely did. He ignored the remark, knowing well that it was also a taunt, drawing attention to the fact that Sonia was the political boss.

  Nair was not Dr Singh’s first choice for the all-important post of principal secretary. He had hoped to induct N.N. Vohra, who had given me the news of my job. Not only was he a fellow refugee from west Punjab, now Pakistan, but both had taught in Punjab University and Vohra also went to Oxford, though some years after Dr Singh. Vohra even cancelled a scheduled visit to London to be able to join the PMO. Sonia Gandhi had another retired IAS officer, a Tamilian whose name I am not at liberty to disclose, in mind for the job. He had worked with Rajiv Gandhi and was regarded as a capable and honest official. However, he declined Sonia’s invitation to rejoin government on a matter of principle—he had promised his father that he would never seek a government job after retirement.

  With these two distinguished officers ruled out, Dr Singh turned to Nair, a retired IAS officer who had worked briefly as secretary to the PM in Gujral’s PMO and had also served as Punjab’s chief secretary, the top bureaucrat in the state. Nair’s name was strongly backed by a friend of Dr Singh’s family, Rashpal Malhotra, chairman of the Chandigarh-based Centre for Research on Rural and Industrial Development (CRRID). Dr Singh himself was the chairman of the CRRID and Nair a member of its governing board. Apart from his stint in the Gujral PMO, Nair had neither held the rank of secretary in any of the powerful ministries on Raisina Hill—home, finance and defence—nor in any key economic ministry. He had only done so in the less powerful ministries of rural development and environment and forests. In short, he was a bureaucratic lightweight.

  Always impeccably attired, Nair, small-built and short, lacked the presence of a Brajesh Mishra, whose striking demeanour commanded attention. He rarely gave expression to a clear or bold opinion on file, always signing off with a ‘please discuss’ and preferring to give oral instructions to junior officials such as joint secretaries and deputy secretaries. They would then be required to put those instructions on file as their own advice. It was classic bureaucratic risk aversion aimed at never getting into any controversy or trouble. Nair depended a great deal on Pulok Chatterjee, a joint secretary who had worked with both Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia, for advice on important policy decisions.

  Pulok, like Nair, suffered from the handicap that his own service had never regarded him as one of its bright sparks. A serving IAS officer, he had never worked in any important ministry. He was inducted into Rajiv’s PMO as a deputy secretary after having served as a district official in Amethi, his cons
tituency in Uttar Pradesh, where he had caught Rajiv’s eye. After Rajiv’s death, he chose to work for the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation where he did some worthwhile social development work. But this meant that he was not just outside government but completely identified with the Gandhi family. When Pulok returned to government, it was to work on the personal staff of Sonia Gandhi when she was leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha.

  Pulok, who was inducted into the Manmohan Singh PMO at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, had regular, almost daily, meetings with Sonia at which he was said to brief her on the key policy issues of the day and seek her instructions on important files to be cleared by the PM. Indeed, Pulok was the single most important point of regular contact between the PM and Sonia. He was also the PMO’s main point of contact with the National Advisory Council (NAC), a high-profile advisory body chaired by Sonia Gandhi, with social activists as members. It was sometimes dubbed the Shadow Cabinet.

  When not at these meetings, the affable, pipe-smoking, and understated Pulok remained mostly confined to his room in South Block, rarely travelling outside Delhi. During my time in the PMO, the only occasion on which I found him keen on accompanying the PM was when Dr Singh went to Cuba. With leftist leanings, Pulok was never too enthusiastic about Dr Singh’s focus on improving relations with the US. Whenever Dr Singh and Sonia had to speak from the same platform, Pulok and I would exchange their draft speeches so that they remained in step in their public utterances. While I always wrote these speeches for the PM, Pulok was largely a messenger carrying Sonia’s speeches to me, since her speeches were mostly written by Congress party politicians or her close associates. Pulok was in charge of monitoring the implementation of the UPA’s National Common Minimum Programme (NCMP)—the joint key objectives of the coalition government. This enabled him to seek regular information from all ministries on what they were doing. Pulok would duly produce elaborate charts that listed the promises—more than a hundred— enshrined in the NCMP, assign responsibility for their implementation to various ministries and report back to the PMO on the status of their implementation.