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

by Sanjaya Baru

  Apart from teaming up with Pulok, Nair also sought to make himself politically relevant to the PM by projecting himself as the PM’s link with the Left. He had been a member of the CPI(M)’s Students Federation of India (SFI) during his college days in Kerala. He revived these ties by becoming close to the senior CPI(M) leader Harkishan Singh Surjeet, who hailed from Punjab, Nair’s parent state in the IAS. Proximity to Surjeet served Nair well, earning him a place in Gujral’s PMO. Apart from being fellow Punjabis, Gujral and Surjeet were close friends. During his second stint in the PMO, Nair was able to use his association with Surjeet and with CPI(M) leaders from Kerala, especially S.R. Pillai, a member of the CPI(M) politburo, to help Dr Singh manage the Left.

  Even with its combined strength, I felt that the Nair-Pulok duo was not a patch on the magisterial Brajesh Mishra who ran Vajpayee’s PMO with great aplomb. Even though he was a diplomat by training, Mishra, the son of a former Congress chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, had politics in his genes and knew exactly what stratagems to adopt to strengthen the authority of the PM in a coalition government. His other great qualification, one that both Nair and Pulok lacked, was that he was a risk-taker. On critical occasions, Mishra was willing to push the envelope and take things forward on behalf of the PM. He established that reputation by taking the decision, along with Vajpayee, to conduct nuclear tests in May 1998 and declare India a nuclear weapons state. Mishra’s stature consolidated and expanded Vajpayee’s clout within the government. Though he had belonged to the Indian Foreign Service (IFS), he was widely respected by the rival IAS. In the Manmohan PMO, on the other hand, Nair’s risk-averse personality only compounded Dr Singh’s careful approach and contributed to a further dilution of the PM’s authority.

  The third Malayalee, M.K. Narayanan, claimed that he was offered the post of national security adviser by Sonia Gandhi, but had instead proposed Mani Dixit’s name for the job because he had to tend to his ailing mother, who lived in Chennai. He claimed it was he who drove to Mani’s home in Gurgaon to tell him he was being offered the job, and to urge him to take it. Mani, on the other hand, believed Sonia may have pushed for Narayanan but Dr Singh wanted him in the job and that Narayanan was inducted as a special adviser as a compromise.

  I tended to believe Mani’s version. It was clear to me that Dr Singh shared a bond with him that was never there between him and Narayanan. It seemed plausible that the latter had been inducted as the third leg of PMO leadership as a concession to Sonia. MK, or Mike, as his contemporaries called him, was the intelligence czar who had headed the Intelligence Bureau (IB), India’s internal intelligence agency, under both Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao. He earned his spurs by playing a role in the unseating of the first-ever democratically elected communist party government in the world, E.M.S. Namboodiripad’s ministry in Kerala, way back in 1957. He was director, IB, when Rajiv was assassinated. Narayanan’s favourite line was, ‘I have a file on you.’ He used it, humorously, with ministers, officials, journalists and others he met, leaving them, however, with the uneasy feeling that he wasn’t really joking. Indeed, Narayanan himself gave currency to the tales that circulated about his proclivity to snoop on everyone. He seemed to derive great pleasure in letting me know that he kept a tab on the credit-card spending of influential editors. On long flights in the PM’s aircraft, he would regale us with stories about how various prime ministers had summoned him for information on their colleagues.

  If those stories were true, Dr Singh was clearly the exception to that rule. He not only resisted this temptation to spy on his colleagues, but gave up even the opportunity to be offered such information by declining to take a daily briefing from the intelligence chiefs. He was the first prime minister not to do so. The chiefs of both the IB and the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) were told to report to the NSA instead. I didn’t think the intelligence chiefs would deliver their best if they reported to an intermediary instead of the prime minister himself, and repeatedly implored him to take a direct daily briefing from them. Every now and then he would, but the NSA became their effective boss in the UPA PMO.

  Narayanan, when he succeeded Dixit as NSA, used this power to its limits, and not without controversy—he was accused by R&AW officers of being partial to the IB. But his control over the system also derived from his professional competence and the respect he commanded even from junior officers for his non-hierarchical style of functioning. He would deal directly with them, not bothering about rank and protocol and focusing on getting the job done. My nickname for him, while talking to friends, was ‘Ed’, for J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful boss of the FBI of whom even US presidents were wary. Dr Singh too was wary of Narayanan’s reputation and would, on occasion, warn me to be cautious while carrying out sensitive assignments for him that he did not want anyone to know about.

  Mani Dixit entered the NSA’s office as if he were destined for the job. Of the three seniormost officers in the PMO, he was clearly the PM’s favourite. The two shared a common worldview, acquired during their respective stints in Narasimha Rao’s government. More recently, as fellow members of the Congress party, Dr Singh and he had worked together to draft a foreign policy paper for the party for the new ‘post-Cold War world’. Mani was both an ‘ideas man’ and a boss who expected delivery from subordinates. During the Kargil war, Brajesh Mishra constituted a multidisciplinary advisory group from among the members of the NSAB that was tasked to offer ‘big picture’ strategic advice to a government preoccupied with managing the daily tactics of winning a war. As a member of that group, along with K. Subrahmanyam, N.N. Vohra and a couple of others, I saw Mani’s strategic brilliance at first hand.

  Mani was, without doubt, one of India’s finest diplomats and strategists. Subrahmanyam, India’s pre-eminent strategic affairs guru, once said to me that he was probably the best foreign secretary in post-Nehruvian India. He made his mark early, and was chosen by Indira Gandhi for the challenging assignment of setting up the Indian mission in a newly liberated Bangladesh when he was just thirty-five years old. As Dr Singh’s NSA, Mani swiftly picked up every issue that Mishra had been dealing with and sought to take it forward—dialogue with the US, dubbed the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership (NSSP), with Pervez Musharraf on Pakistan and the border talks with China.

  By the time Dr Singh went to NewYork in September 2004, Mani’s progress on several foreign policy fronts enabled Dr Singh to have very good meetings with President George Bush and President Musharraf as well as a series of bilateral meetings with Blair, Koizumi, Mbeki, Lula and others. But Mani’s assertive personality meant that, while he was admired and feared by his younger colleagues in the foreign service, he often rubbed both the new foreign minister, K. Natwar Singh, and Narayanan the wrong way.

  The tension between the NSA and the foreign minister was inherent in the arrangement. Even in the United States, ego and policy clashes between the NSA and the secretary of state are part of the national capital’s folklore. In India, prime ministers have always sought to remain in charge of foreign policy but foreign ministers have had greater control over day-to-day management of policy. The institutional powers of the NSA, and the fact that both Mishra and Dixit were from the foreign service and knew its ins and outs, meant that the PMO had begun to chip away at even day-to-day management, including postings. The tension this generated between Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra was well known and I began to see it rising between Natwar and Dixit. The ego clash was greater for the fact that Natwar had been Mani’s senior in the foreign service.

  Between Narayanan and Mani, there was both a clash of personalities and sharp differences of opinion. Mani was a pragmatist and a realist, Narayanan a hawk whose aggression was both a product of his years in intelligence and a means, it appeared to me, of asserting his authority over the foreign service. In India’s bureaucratic pecking order, officers of the Indian Police Service (IPS), are regarded as lesser mortals by the high-flyers of the foreign service, the IFS, and the real wielders of pow
er, the IAS.

  Mani and Narayanan, just two years apart in age, would often explode into angry arguments in the presence of the PM. On one occasion, Narayanan shouted at Mani: ‘You are a diplomat who knows a lot about the world but knows nothing about India.’ Mani countered by asking Narayanan what he thought he knew about the country, considering he had never done ‘a good police officer’s job’. This was a reference to the fact that Narayanan, while belonging to the IPS, had spent most of his career in the IB and had never done any important ‘field’ job. These outbursts were partly a reflection of a turf war between the two, with Narayanan seeking greater control over the intelligence agencies than Mani wanted him to have.

  Dr Singh would sit through such altercations with a worried look. But on one occasion, it got a bit too much for even a man as patient as him. While Mani and Narayanan were arguing vociferously in his presence, each accusing the other of overstepping his bounds, Dr Singh at first kept quiet, then got up abruptly, looking visibly irritated. That was a signal that the meeting was over and we could all leave. Nair, Mani and MK trooped out, while I walked with the PM to the antechamber where he read his files and letters.

  He seemed disturbed by this sharp exchange in his presence, so I tried to cheer him up. I pointed out that it was good that different points of view were being aired. This would allow the PM to decide which view to take. I also reminded Dr Singh that when there were such differences between Montek and Deepak Nayyar in the ministry of finance, Dr Singh had chosen to ease Deepak out on the grounds that there was no time for intellectual arguments in the ministry in the midst of a balance of payments crisis. But there was no crisis at hand now and a new team was taking charge, so let ‘a thousand ideas bloom and a hundred views contend’, I suggested, paraphrasing Mao Zedong.

  I also reminded him that even Indira Gandhi and Nehru had around them officials and colleagues who disagreed bitterly with one another. After hearing me out, he smiled and said, ‘I am not sure they all shouted at each other!’

  I had a lesson in the PMO’s internal dynamics on day one in the new job. The first piece of paper that landed in the in-tray on my desk was a newspaper clipping marked for my attention by Nair, with his handwritten comment, ‘Quite interesting indeed!!!’ It was a report in a local tabloid with the headline ‘Musical Chambers at PMO’, and referred to the battle for rooms in South Block.

  The principal secretary’s room was located at the other end of the corridor from the PM’s room. Brajesh Mishra, the room’s occupant during Vajpayee’s term, had doubled up as principal secretary to the PM and India’s first NSA. The Manmohan Singh PMO had a problem. Now that the two posts had been separated, where would Nair, as the new principal secretary, sit and where would Mani Dixit, the new NSA, have his office? To add to the complications, a new special adviser (SA), Narayanan, had also to be accommodated. A third room of equal importance had to be identified for him.

  The news report suggested that Nair, Mani and the new minister of state in the PMO, Prithviraj Chavan, were all eyeing the corner room and that Nair had won the first round. He was now the proud occupant of Brajesh Mishra’s room. I found it amusing that Nair should choose to mark that news item to me with his comment and the three exclamation marks. As it happened, he did inherit Mishra’s room, with Mani seated in what used to be the room of the secretary in the PMO and Narayanan given a room of similar size down the corridor.

  This was not, of course, the kind of problem that some had anticipated when they criticized Dr Singh’s decision to give the jobs of principal secretary and NSA to two different people, and not vest them in a single individual, as Vajpayee had done. Dr Singh had taken this decision on the advice of K. Subrahmanyam, who had championed the creation of the office of the NSA. The process of appointing an NSA had begun immediately after the nuclear tests in 1998, when a committee set up by Vajpayee on revamping India’s national security management to meet the needs of the times, had recommended a National Security Council with a dedicated secretariat, a Strategic Policy Group and an NSAB. The NSC Secretariat (NSCS) would be headed by an NSA.

  Subrahmanyam, who had been consulted by this committee before it wrote its report, imagined that the NSC would be something like the Planning Commission, a group of experts heading various sections, and that the NSA would be a full-time functionary, like the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission. Since the Planning Commission sits at a distance from the PMO, in Yojana Bhavan, he imagined the NSA and the NSCS would similarly be located outside the PMO.

  However, while accepting the substance of the committee’s report, Vajpayee chose to name his principal secretary, Brajesh Mishra, as NSA. The NSCS was placed in the charge of a deputy NSA whose office was located outside the PMO, in the nearby Sardar Patel Bhavan. Subrahmanyam did not like the idea of Brajesh Mishra keeping both positions. He felt that since the principal secretary, to the PM would be under 24x7 pressure to address day-to-day challenges, the urgent task of improving India’s national security management would end up being neglected.

  Many years later, after watching the experience of UPA-1, Subrahmanyam apparently developed second thoughts about the wisdom of separating the two positions. At a private dinner after the First K. Subrahmanyam Memorial Lecture, in January 2012, Mishra told a few friends, including the current NSA, Shivshankar Menon, and myself, that Subrahmanyam had told him that he erred in recommending the separation of the offices of the NSA and principal secretary to the PM, because he realized the PM could not take a holistic and politically informed view of national security with his two key aides functioning in non-intersecting silos.

  In June 2004, however, Dr Singh not just accepted Subrahmanyam’s advice to separate the posts of principal secretary and the NSA, but went a step further, by dividing up the NSA’s beat, with foreign affairs, defence and nuclear strategy allotted to Mani Dixit and internal security to Narayanan. However, instead of then asking the NSA and SA to sit in Sardar Patel Bhavan, home of the NSCS, he chose to locate them within the premises of the PMO.

  For the first few weeks of its existence, the Manmohan Singh PMO just did not get along. The NSA wanted all files relating to the external affairs, home and defence ministries to go through him to the PM. This would, for the first time, seriously abridge the principal secretary’s role in decision-making and, more vitally, appointments pertaining to these ministries. Narayanan, even though he lived in Chennai and flew down to Delhi for a few days every week, then got into the act and demanded that he should be looking at files pertaining to the home ministry and the internal security agencies.

  The media got wind of this internal turf war, with a senior journalist being briefed by Brajesh Mishra, who in turn had heard of it from his subordinates who were still in the PMO and were in touch with him. It was then decided that an office order would be issued clarifying the individual responsibilities of Nair, Dixit and Narayanan. This was then made public.

  Matters did not rest there. Over the next few weeks, media reports appeared suggesting there was a problem of turf between the PM’s advisers and his senior Cabinet ministers, the ministers for external affairs and home, Natwar Singh and Shivraj Patil. They had sought a clarification from the PM about what role Mani and Narayanan would play and whether they would interfere in the work of the home and external affairs ministries.

  One day, Natwar Singh, the foreign minister, called me to his room in South Block and unburdened himself of his grievances against Mani Dixit. As he narrated his long list of complaints, he grew angrier and angrier. Natwar’s major complaint was that Mani was interfering far too much in the affairs of the foreign affairs ministry. Natwar and Mani were both retired diplomats, but with very different views. They were, understandably, in competition with each other to influence foreign policy. Indeed, Mani was an effective buffer between a reform-minded PM and the MEA’s conservative establishment, just as Brajesh Mishra had been similarly used by Vajpayee.

  Even as the PM attempted to sort out this conflic
t, newspaper reports appeared, drawing attention to the developing conflict between Home Minister Shivraj Patil and Narayanan. They even dragged the PM into the controversy by suggesting that these turf issues had come up because of prime ministerial activism, that is, the PM, through his advisers, was trying to encroach on ministerial turf. Dr Singh wanted this denied and asked me to draft a public clarification to clear the air. My draft read:

  There have been some speculative and tendentious reports in the media in the recent past suggesting that the Prime Minister has taken direct charge of matters relating to Jammu and Kashmir, the North-Eastern States and the Naxalite-affected regions of the country. These reports are not accurate. All matters pertaining to internal security are directly dealt with by the Ministry of Home Affairs in the Government of India and by the relevant State governments. There is no change in the extant situation.

  The PM asked me to show this to each of the three concerned—Nair, Mani and Narayanan. All of them agreed that this was an acceptable formulation. I went back to the PM with their three signatures on the draft. He smiled as he read the text and, returning the file to me, asked: ‘So what will you call it? Press release or joint statement?’

  My own position within this structure was formally defined by my rank. I had insisted with Dr Singh that I should be given the rank of secretary to government. Dr Singh had readily agreed, but Nair had baulked at the thought. At fifty he thought I was too young to be secretary to government, having himself been promoted to that rank in his late fifties, like most civil servants. He advised me to accept the rank of additional secretary, a step below, so as to not become a victim of bureaucratic jealousy, as he put it. Dr Singh opted for a compromise, urging me to join as additional secretary and assuring me that I would be promoted within the year. I did get promoted a year later and discovered that the only major perk that I was now entitled to was an executive suite at a hotel while travelling with the PM. However, as the son of a civil servant I knew that rank is all in government. It determines seating at meetings, it decides the car in which you travel in a prime ministerial cavalcade; more importantly, it shapes how you are perceived and how much influence others assume you command. I had pushed for a high rank so that I could be a more effective media adviser. It was no bad thing that apart from the big three, all of whom had the rank of a minister of state, all other officials in the PMO, including Pulok, were below me in official rank. Nair feared this would cause resentment but I rarely felt any from my IAS colleagues. The more protocol-conscious IFS diplomats, however, played their little games.