by Sanjaya Baru
I assumed that Mohit, as an Indira loyalist, had a special regard for her heirs. But his opinion that Sonia should enter politics was also based on his conviction that without a Nehru-Gandhi family member at the top, the Congress party would splinter and wither away. This view was also encouraged by members of the Delhi durbar—a ‘power elite’, to use sociologist C.Wright Mill’s term, comprising civil servants, diplomats, editors, intellectuals and business leaders who had worked with or been close to the regimes of Nehru, Indira and Rajiv. Some of them inhabited the many trusts and institutions that the Nehru-Gandhi family controlled. They had all profited in one way or another, over the years, from their loyalty to the Congress’s ‘first family’.
In opposition to this view was the one held by a Congressman like Narasimha Rao who, while ironically titling his semi-autobiographical book The Insider, believed he was an ‘outsider’ among Delhi’s Nehru- Gandhi ‘power elite’. Rao believed that a political organization that was more than a century old, the party of India’s freedom movement, inspired and led by a Gandhi, a mahatma who was no relative of these Gandhis, ought to imagine for itself a life beyond the Nehru-Gandhi family. Many small regional parties might have become feudal, even despotic, ‘family-led’ parties, but how could a grand old political organization like the Indian National Congress link its future only to the fortunes of one political family? This view had few takers among family loyalists, who took charge of the party after the unceremonious ouster of Sitaram Kesari, the man Narasimha Rao chose as his successor and who in turn placed the party’s crown in Sonia’s hands.
When Sonia Gandhi decided to join active politics and take charge of the Congress party, becoming its president in 1998, few thought through how her elevation would affect the relationship between the party and a future Congress government. While her loyalists argued there was nothing to resolve here, since she would become prime minister, her detractors in the party said they were willing to accept her as party president but not as a future PM because of her Italian origin. It was this issue that led Sharad Pawar and others to exit the party in 1999 and form the NCP.
It was against this background that the arrangement that came into place in 2004 would be viewed and tested. Would Sonia really remain only party president and leave the government for Dr Singh to handle? Having led the Congress back to power, especially in the face of scepticism about her abilities to win an election and the open revolt of party warlords like Pawar, would she rest content allowing someone else to wield that power? What should Dr Singh’s strategy be? Should he assume that while Sonia was the leader of the Congress, he was the head of a coalition government, with non-Congress constituents, including a rebel like Pawar, and carve out his own political space and retain administrative control of government? Or should he be running every day to 10 Janpath, Sonia’s residence-cum-office, to take her instructions? Some chief ministers had done that with their party bosses. Jyoti Basu, in his early days as chief minister (CM) of West Bengal, had a daily meeting with his party boss Pramode Dasgupta at the party headquarters. Manohar Joshi, the Shiv Sena CM of Maharashtra, did the same with his party supremo Bal Thackeray.
Handling the delicate equation with Sonia was Dr Singh’s first and biggest political challenge. How a CM is perceived at the state level is different from the way a PM is perceived at the national and international levels. The prime minister is a national leader and the international face of a country. He negotiates with other heads of government and must be seen to be his own man. Moreover, Dr Singh was PM because the UPA coalition as a whole was willing to accept him. In 1999 Mulayam SinghYadav had refused to support Sonia when she claimed she had the numbers to form a government. So I, at any rate, saw my job as one of establishing Dr Singh’s credibility as PM, while ensuring that the relationship with Sonia and the party was on an even keel.
The first tricky situation presented itself in early August 2004. The PM’s SPG asked me if I would participate in the dress rehearsal for Dr Singh’s first Independence Day address from the ramparts of the Red Fort. This involved travelling in the PM’s motorcade from RCR to Red Fort, stopping to place imaginary wreaths at Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial at Rajghat and the memorials of members of the Nehru-Gandhi family, and then spending forty minutes on the ramparts of the fort, from where the PM would address the nation, before returning to RCR.
As I walked around the ramparts, accompanied by a defence ministry official, I curiously examined the name cards placed on chairs set out for guests at the event. The first seat in the first row, adjacent to the podium from where the PM would speak, was reserved for Mrs Kaur. After that, the seating was in accordance with the defence ministry’s protocol and order of precedence, as issued in the Gazette of India, which meant senior Cabinet ministers, leader of the Opposition, chief justice of the Supreme Court and other holders of high office. Sonia Gandhi’s name was nowhere to be found in the front row. When I asked the official where Sonia would be seated, he looked at the protocol list in his hand and pointed to a chair in the middle of the fourth or fifth row. She was to be seated next to Najma Heptullah, former Congresswoman and deputy chairperson of the Rajya Sabha, who had crossed floors and joined the BJP!
I was aghast. Such an arrangement would embarrass the PM and, I imagined, make Sonia livid. I then recalled noticing that Sonia was always seated in the front row at Rashtrapati Bhavan events, perhaps on the first seat along the aisle. I immediately called Muthu Kumar, an official in the PMO’s media department, and asked him to check with the President’s secretariat how it managed to seat Sonia in the front row when her status as an MP, albeit one who was also chairperson of the NAC with Cabinet rank, merited only a fourth- or fifth-row chair.
Muthu discovered that Rashtrapati Bhavan had made a minor alteration in the seating procedure during President Shankar Dayal Sharma’s time. Sharma, India’s President from 1992 to 1997, had authorized that the spouse of a former prime minister would get the same protocol status as a former PM. The reasoning was that if a former PM had been accompanied by his spouse at a Rashtrapati Bhavan event, the two would have been seated together. This issue had not arisen for previous prime ministers because Nehru, Indira, Morarji Desai and Narasimha Rao had all been pre-deceased by their spouses and the spouses of other deceased PMs were clearly not in the habit of attending state functions. Sonia was the first widowed spouse of a PM in public life.
This episode drew early attention to the purely protocol dimension of Sonia’s new status vis-a-vis the PM. While Sonia did have Cabinet rank as chairperson of the NAC, which was set up on 4 June 2004 shortly after UPA-1 assumed power, and was ‘entitled to the same salary, pay, allowances and other facilities to which a member of the Union Council of Ministers is entitled’, she had to be given a rank that put her next only to the PM and his wife and not further down the order of precedence.
While the protocol issues raised by Sonia’s status were new to the party president-prime minister equation, the relationship problem itself was neither new nor peculiar to India. Defining the relationship between party president (or general secretary in the case of communist parties) and the head of government has bedevilled many regimes around the world for a long time. In non-democratic systems like the erstwhile Soviet Union and contemporary China the protocol and division of real power between the communist party general secretary and the head of government is a complex issue. In democracies, it becomes even more complicated when the popularly elected head of government is different from the leader of the party in power.
In India the problem raised its head on day one. As the first post- Independence Congress party president, Acharya Kripalani demanded that he be taken into confidence on the policies of the government headed by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru rejected this demand, taking the view that while the party could be briefed on broad policy issues, it would not be possible for ministers sworn to secrecy and holding constitutional office to share the contents of government files with the party president.
Nehru invited Kripalani to join the government as a minister without portfolio and secure this entitlement, drawing a sharp distinction between party and government. Ministers, he argued, functioned under a constitutional oath and were subject to the Official Secrets Act. No minister, not even the prime minister, could show a file to someone outside the government, not even to the Congress president.
Kripalani did not accept Nehru’s view or his invitation to join the government, and quit as Congress president. Nehru then took over the party presidency in 1950, combining the two posts for the first time, and continued in this manner until 1954, when U.N. Dhebar became party president. While Indira Gandhi, who had served as party president in 1959, managed a working relationship with Congress presidents during her tenure as PM, including Kamaraj, Jagjivan Ram and Shankar Dayal Sharma, she took over as party president after her defeat in 1977 and retained that post when she returned to office as PM in 1980. Rajiv Gandhi followed suit, keeping the Congress presidency till his death in 1991.
Keeping control over both the party and the government was viewed as the best way for a prime minister to ensure political support for his policy initiatives, especially and increasingly so in the Congress party where political loyalty was based on personal advancement and enrichment rather than a commitment to a shared ideology.
On Rajiv’s death, Narasimha Rao took over as Congress president and he, too, retained the post after he was elected prime minister in 1991. However, Rao was challenged at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) session at Tirupati in 1992 by a group led by Arjun Singh and N.D. Tiwari that demanded a separation of roles. Rao had to then fight hard to get re-elected president and retain his control over the Congress Working Committee, the executive committee of the party. Once he was elected, he kept the post till after his defeat in the 1996 General Elections. He was then succeeded by Sitaram Kesari who yielded power to Sonia in March 1998. It was an early mark of Sonia’s regard for and trust in Dr Singh that when she took charge as the party’s leader in the Lok Sabha, she nominated Dr Singh as the party’s leader in the Rajya Sabha.
Apart from the weekly meeting of the Congress ‘core group’, initially comprising Sonia, the PM, Arjun Singh, A.K. Antony, Pranab Mukherjee and Sonia’s political secretary Ahmed Patel, and messages exchanged through two intermediaries, Pulok and Patel, or occasional telephone conversations, there was not much other regular contact between Dr Singh and Sonia in the early years of UPA-1. The core group met regularly at 7 RCR. Sonia would arrive first and get her exclusive ten minutes with Dr Singh. That was when the two spoke to each other in private. Once their one-to-one conversation was over, the others would be invited in. Dr Singh rarely spoke in the core-group meetings. He would hear what others had to say and take his decisions after having another word with Sonia.
There was also very little social contact between the families of the two leaders. Mrs Kaur and Sonia met rarely, except at official functions and banquets. Rarely, too, did Dr Singh’s daughters or Sonia’s children join the Congress president and the prime minister at social gatherings. On the odd occasion, Sonia would call on Dr Singh to discuss family matters. There were, after all, few family elders available to give her advice on things that may have bothered her in her personal life. While she was very close to her mother, her father had passed away. Rajiv’s friends, like Satish Sharma, Sam Pitroda and Suman Dubey, were all her age. I was aware that on at least one occasion she came to see Dr Singh to discuss her concerns about Rahul’s personal plans. Following that conversation, Dr Singh invited Rahul for lunch and the two spent time together.
In private, Sonia often addressed Dr Singh as Manmohan, which, given her Western background, suggested she felt closer and more familial in her relationship with him than with other senior leaders of his generation. Dr Singh, for his part, always referred to her as Soniaji or Mrs Gandhi and treated her with old-fashioned courtesy. At the annual UPA anniversary function at 7 RCR he always made it a point to stand up on the dais when Sonia stood up to walk to the podium and deliver her speech, a practice that other Congressmen did not follow. Culturally, it is a Western gesture for a man to stand up when a woman does and women are not expected to reciprocate, so Sonia naturally did not. But Delhi’s political journalists, who were always watching the two like hawks at public events for evidence that the PM was more deferential to her than he needed to be, would draw my attention to the leaders’ ‘body language’ with wicked smiles.
When Sonia turned sixty, Dr Singh sent her a personal letter praising her courage and fortitude. She had been widowed at a young age, and had to bring up her children in the very difficult social and security context of Delhi. And, she had allowed herself to be persuaded to take on the mantle of party presidency by Congressmen who feared the party would disintegrate without her at the helm. Recounting these facts, Dr Singh praised her for her courage and her poise in the face of such adversity and for the energy and wisdom with which she had led the Congress party back to power.
Sonia and Dr Singh’s warm personal equation was also evident in the little gestures he made to show his concern for her welfare, like always calling her to check how she was whenever she took ill.
I had no reason to doubt that Dr Singh and Sonia implicitly trusted each other. Reports appearing in the media about differences between the two were often planted by disgruntled Congressmen and mischievous journalists, some of whom would then point a finger in my direction. That did not mean the two had no differences on policy issues. But any such differences between them would have been aired only in their private meetings and the PM almost never allowed any of this to trickle into the public realm.
The PM never questioned Sonia’s right, as party president, to influence portfolio allocations though, over time, he became quite forthcoming in giving his opinions, and she did accept his advice. While I knew it was not realistic to argue that Dr Singh should have full control over ministerial appointments, I felt he needed to assert himself at least in the allocation of portfolios to junior ministers and would press him when I got the chance. In 2005, for example, when he asked me whether I thought Jairam Ramesh should be inducted into government, I replied that Jairam ought to be more demonstrative of his loyalty to the PM if he wanted a berth in the ministry. I was taken aback when, a few days later, Montek took me aside at a Christmas party at journalist T.N. Ninan’s house and asked me why I was opposing Jairam’s induction. I clarified to Montek that I was not against it, and had only said to the PM that at least younger Congress MPs should feel they owed their ministerial berths to the PM rather than just to Sonia. I am not aware of what transpired after that, but in the following month, January 2006, Jairam did get inducted as a minister of state in the commerce ministry. I was not surprised to learn that Jairam later called on Sonia’s friend Suman Dubey and thanked him for the job.
Politics is about power and patronage, and ministerial positions are won not just on the basis of competence but also in recognition of a politician’s political clout or loyalty to the leader. For Congress MPs, the leader to please was always Sonia. They did not see loyalty to the PM as a political necessity, nor did Dr Singh seek loyalty in the way in which Sonia and her aides sought it. That Jairam’s loyalty was only with Sonia became clearer within weeks of his becoming a minister when he chose to embarrass the PM by leaking a letter that Sonia had written to Dr Singh cautioning him against pursuing an initiative he valued a lot—the free trade agreement (FTA) with member countries of the ASEAN.
Dr Singh viewed the India-ASEAN FTA as an important geopolitical initiative aimed at India’s economic integration into the rapidly growing Asian economies and as being helpful in balancing China’s growing clout in Asia. The CPI(M), on the other hand, chose to oppose the India-ASEAN FTA on the grounds that it would hurt the interests of plantation workers in Kerala and West Bengal. Keen to blunt the CPI(M)’s criticism, the Congress party in Kerala exerted pressure on the central leadership to abandon the FTA project. Sonia Gandhi’s letter
to the PM was written to convey these concerns. It was not normal practice for Sonia to write such formal letters to the PM. She almost always conveyed serious concerns orally and directly or through intermediaries like Ahmed Patel and Pulok Chatterjee. However, since she had written, Dr Singh too responded in writing, defending the FTA. He wrote:
Our approach to regional trade agreements in general, and FTAs in particular, has been evolved after careful consideration of our geopolitical as well as economic interests. Although India has a large domestic market, our experience with earlier relatively insular policies, as also the global experience in this regard, clearly bring out the growth potential of trade and economic cooperation with the global economy.
A few weeks later Sonia’s confidential letter to the PM found its way into the media, with the Business Standard carrying a front-page story. A furious Dr Singh asked me to find out who had leaked it. I asked the editor, T.N. Ninan. Quite understandably, Ninan declined to reveal the identity of a privileged news source. However, a journalist in the know confirmed Jairam Ramesh’s role. I reported this back to Dr Singh who picked up the phone and reprimanded Jairam, even as the latter denied any role in the leak.
Interestingly, the PM was amenable to the suggestion that his letter to Sonia be made public, given that her letter to him had been publicly aired. Therefore, I released his letter to the media. While such a public expression of differences between them was rare, this incident did draw attention to the role of mischief-makers in muddying the waters.
On a daily and regular basis, messages between Sonia and the PM were conveyed either by Ahmed Patel or Pulok Chatterjee. While Pulok met Sonia regularly to brief her on policy issues and seek her guidance on key decisions, Ahmed Patel was the political link between Sonia and Dr Singh. Patel would visit South Block mainly to lobby with Pulok for the inclusion of names of Congress party members on the boards of public enterprises and nationalized banks.