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

by Sanjaya Baru

  Having passed on that message, Yechury came out with me as I left the building. As we walked out, he told me, ‘We can only unseat the government by voting against it in Parliament. There are many things the finance minister can do without seeking Parliament’s approval. Let him do those things. We will protest, but we cannot stop him.’ This meant the Left would ‘bark’ but not ‘bite’, a phrase commonly used by the media to interpret its stance. It would publicly dissociate itself from the government’s initiatives, but would not withdraw support. Where a policy initiative required legislative approval and, therefore, the Left’s vote in Parliament, it would support only such policies that had its prior approval.

  I delivered this message to the PM. He had also seen Yechury’s statement to the media that the UPA should know that the Left would remain a ‘watchdog’ and ensure that the government stuck to the policy parameters defined by the NCMP. Dr Singh was satisfied with this clarification and wanted to seal the deal and ensure there was no misunderstanding between the CPI(M) and the finance minister. He summoned Chidambaram and the Left leaders for a pow-wow at which the Left assured the PM that they would not vote against the finance bill. Dr Singh understood and, perhaps, was even willing to empathize with the Left’s posture. This was their political compulsion, keeping their ideological hardliners happy while allowing the government to do most of what it wanted to. But he was clearly not sure if Chidambaram would adopt such an accommodating view and feared that he might be tempted to embarrass the Left from time to time to score political points.

  That Dr Singh was more adept at handling the Left and Chidambaram was less so became obvious even as Chidambaram, Yechury and I walked back to the car park from the meeting. I quipped to Chidambaram that he should feel reassured by the fact that when Yechury said the CPI(M) would be the UPA’s ‘watchdog’ , he only meant that they would bark but not bite. A diplomatic finance minister would have either kept quiet or said something nice as a gesture of gratitude.

  But Chidambaram, being Chidambaram, could not resist a jibe. He retorted, in Yechury’s hearing, ‘Either way he agrees that he is a dog!’

  For Dr Singh, managing the coalition allies was less challenging than managing his own party. He was acutely aware that this was the Congress party’s first attempt at stitching together and running a multiparty coalition government. Political analysts have long made the point that the Congress is itself a coalition, of various factions. It had become even more so during Narasimha Rao’s tenure because the party had reverted to some of its traditional ways of functioning after Rajiv Gandhi’s death, which had ended a long period of Nehru- Gandhi family suzerainty over the party. The splits that had occurred within the party during Rao’s term as party president and prime minister had been reversed after Sonia Gandhi became party president in 1998. On the other hand, new splits surfaced, notably when senior Congress leaders Sharad Pawar and Purno Sangma quit the Congress and formed the NCP.

  Dr Singh had played a role in stitching the new UPA coalition together. It was he who had negotiated the DMK’s entry into the UPA with M. Karunanidhi in January 2004 and had gone to great lengths to be deferential to him. Announcing the new alliance with the DMK in Chennai, twenty-four years after the two parties had parted ways, Dr Singh had said, ‘I have come here to establish a new relationship of trust and confidence with DMK leader M. Karunanidhi and his party.’ Dr Singh went a step further and hailed Karunanidhi as not just the leader of Tamil Nadu but ‘a great leader and one of the builders of the nation. His life and work has inspired many in the country.’

  As prime minister, Dr Singh always received Karunanidhi at the portico of 7 RCR, and not just at the door of his room, as was the norm with most other visitors. Whenever Karunanidhi sent an emissary with a message, Dr Singh would set aside all other work and meet the DMK emissary. This made the DMK feel they had a special equation with Dr Singh. After all, the DMK’s friendship with Sonia was a relatively new one. In 1996, she had rejected Narasimha Rao’s proposal that the Congress ally with the DMK rather than the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK); the former were known to be sympathizers of the LTTE, her husband’s killers.

  The seminar room at the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation in New Delhi had framed pages on its walls of the report of the Jain Enquiry Commission on Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, in which the DMK was named a conspirator. In fact, Sonia pushed Narasimha Rao into joining hands with AIADMK leader Jayalalithaa, a deadly rival of the DMK, in the 1996 elections. This prompted P. Chidambaram, Jayalalithaa’s bete noire, to quit the Congress and join the Tamil Maanila Congress. Against this background, the 2004 alliance with the Congress could not have been negotiated by Sonia. It was left to Dr Singh to do that, and I was always surprised that political analysts paid little attention to these capabilities of the PM.

  Initially, Karunanidhi’s nephew, and the UPA government’s telecom minister, Dayanidhi Maran, was the key interlocutor between Dr Singh and the DMK leader in Chennai. Maran’s stars plummeted when he got involved in the DMK’s fratricidal wars, joining forces with Karunanidhi’s son M.K. Stalin against his other son, M.K. Azhagiri. His reputation also became unsavoury as he began using his telecom portfolio to favour his brother Kalanidhi’s media business. I was not sure if Dr Singh had been alerted to this by his officials, but he certainly was by Ratan Tata in early 2007. Dayanidhi had summoned Tata to a meeting in Delhi in the latter’s own Taj Mahal Hotel on Mansingh Road, and tried to browbeat him into doing a deal that would favour his brother Kalanidhi’s Sun TV. Ratan Tata conveyed his disapproval of Dayanidhi’s behaviour to the PM.

  On 11 May 2007, Dr Singh and Sonia went to Chennai to participate in a public meeting to celebrate the golden jubilee of Karunanidhi’s first election to the state legislature. At the venue itself, Karunanidhi informed them that henceforth A. Raja would be his key representative in Delhi. That same night, Dr Singh returned from Chennai and implemented Karunanidhi’s request that the telecommunications portfolio be shifted from Dayanidhi to Raja. On 13 May, Raja took charge of telecom and, within months, became embroiled in the allegedly corrupt sale of telecommunications bandwidth to certain companies, popularly known as the 2G scandal.

  While by February 2008 the issue of 2G telecom licences had already begun to attract political attention, with Sitaram Yechury writing to the PM on the matter, it had not become a public controversy at the time I left the PMO. In fact, no issue involving the misuse of public office became a media issue in UPA-1. There were, no doubt, rumours about the corrupt practices of some ministers. I was aware that the PM was occasionally briefed by the IB about ministers accumulating property and pursuing business interests. However, none of this ever blew up into a public controversy, barring the Volcker Committee report charges pertaining to Natwar Singh, but that related to activities that took place in 2001. Since I was not privy to government files and the issue never became public in my time, I was blissfully ignorant of the goings-on with regard to telecom licences that have since come to light.

  Dr Singh’s general attitude towards corruption in public life, which he adopted through his career in government, seemed to me to be that he would himself maintain the highest standards of probity in public life, but would not impose this on others. In other words, he was himself incorruptible, and also ensured that no one in his immediate family ever did anything wrong, but he did not feel answerable for the misdemeanours of his colleagues and subordinates. In this instance, he felt even less because he was not the political authority that had appointed them to these ministerial positions. In practice, this meant that he turned a blind eye to the misdeeds of his ministers. He expected the Congress party leadership to deal with the black sheep in his government, just as he expected the allies to deal with their black sheep. While his conscience was always clear with respect to his own conduct, he believed everyone had to deal with their own conscience.

  When a colleague got caught, as the DMK minister Raja finally was, he let the law take its cours
e. Raja was arrested, placed in judicial custody at Delhi’s Tihar Jail for fifteen months and is currently being prosecuted for his role in the 2G scam. Dr Singh’s approach was a combination of active morality for himself and passive morality with respect to others. In UPA-1 public opinion did not turn against the PM for this moral ambivalence on his part, because the issue had not been prised out into the open. The media focus in the first term was very much on his policy initiatives.

  But in UPA-2 when corruption scandals tumbled out, his public image and standing took a huge hit from which he was unable to recover because there was no parallel policy narrative in play that could have salvaged his reputation. In other words, there were no positive acts of commission that captured the public mind enough to compensate for the negative acts of omission for which he was being chastised. As his reputation fell, so did that of his government.

  With Sharad Pawar, the boss of the NCP and Lalu Prasad Yadav, the feisty politician who headed the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), both of which were constituents of the UPA, Manmohan Singh had a good equation even if he did not always approve of their conduct. With Pawar, there was a special relationship. Dr Singh often recalled how Pawar always lent support to him whenever his policies came under attack from within the Congress party. He regarded Pawar as an ‘ally’ against his critics in the Cabinet, like Arjun Singh, A.K. Antony and Vayalar Ravi. While Ravi maintained a low profile in the UPA government, both Arjun Singh and Antony remained difficult colleagues to handle. Arjun Singh would openly defy the PM or be critical of his policies, and Antony was guarded in public but difficult in private, often disagreeing with him on his foreign, defence and economic policy initiatives.

  One day Pawar landed up at 7 RCR with a complaint. A series of anti-Pawar news reports had appeared in the media, both the national and Marathi media, and Pawar had them traced to a ‘PMO source’. He wanted the PM to have this inquired into. Dr Singh asked me to find out who was behind these reports. I asked a few of my contacts in the Hindi and Marathi media to find out. They all returned with the same news: Prithviraj Chavan had planted these stories. It was a delicate issue for Dr Singh. It was hard for him to take any action in the matter because Prithvi might well have been acting under instructions from the party leadership. After all, Sonia and Pawar were not the best of friends, given his grouse that she backed Narasimha Rao against him in 1991 and her grouse that he raised her ‘foreign origin’ issue to split the Congress party.

  As a Maharashtra politician who saw himself as a political rival of Pawar, Prithvi would have happily offered himself as a Congress party instrument in weakening Pawar’s hold over the state. On the other hand, Pawar was a PMO favourite since he clearly preferred Dr Singh as PM rather than Pranab Mukherjee or any other Congress leader.

  At the height of the anti-Manmohan Singh campaign by the Left, on the issue of the civil nuclear energy agreement with the United States, some critics of the PM floated the idea that he could be replaced to save the government. Political reporters would come and tell me that the names of Pranab Mukherjee and Sushil Kumar Shinde were being mentioned as possible replacements by Congress functionaries known to be close to Sonia.

  One day Praful Patel walked into my room and informed me that Shinde’s name was being considered more seriously than Mukherjee’s by some of the ‘backroom boys’ of the Congress. ‘But, don’t worry,’ he assured, ‘no one can replace Doctor Saheb. We will never support anyone else.’

  Thus, even as some in the Congress party targeted an ally like Pawar, Dr Singh sought to maintain good relations with him. Such relationships were Dr Singh’s real source of strength. Political analysts and reporters who skimmed the surface only saw Dr Singh as ‘Sonia’s puppet’. Those who had a deeper knowledge of the power play within the wider coalition knew that Dr Singh had the backing of the coalition partners, some of whom were more loyal to him than to his own party leaders. Sonia chose him, no doubt, but once appointed, he became the UPA’s prime minister. Dr Singh was acutely conscious of the fact that he headed a coalition and not just a monolithic party, and made sure that he maintained the best of relations with all coalition partners.

  On one occasion, in 2007, when the Left and some Congressmen were raising the pitch of their anti-Manmohan Singh campaign, the usual speculation of a possible change of PM once again surfaced. Dr Singh was very upset with such speculation. One evening I found him seated alone in the living room of 7 RCR, looking grim. I could see he was upset about something.

  ‘I cannot go on like this,’ he remarked, as his eyes became moist. I felt he was holding back tears. When I asked what had happened, he kept quiet. I just sat with him and tried to lighten the atmosphere by cracking a joke. It was common for Subbu to summon me whenever he found the PM looking depressed or unhappy and say, ‘Please go and cheer him up.’ I would refer to myself as the court jester, summoned to entertain a morose king. My usual formula was to pass on some gossip from the media about the shenanigans of his ministerial colleagues or about Advani’s latest attempt to unseat him and become PM. That kind of gossip always made him chuckle.

  This time his unhappiness seemed to have been triggered by the renewed speculation about the Congress party seeking a change of PM, rather than parting ways with the Left. A political journalist gave me the name of one senior Congressman who was indulging in such talk. That week there was to be a meeting of the UPA coordination committee. To quell such idle talk I encouraged Lalu Prasad Yadav to reiterate the UPA’s confidence in Dr Singh’s leadership at this meeting. Lalu, rubbishing the idea of any change of leadership, went on to make a statement to that effect at the coordination committee meeting and, in a grand gesture, said he would like to place on record his appreciation of the PM’s stewardship of the government. Others joined in and reiterated their confidence in Dr Singh’s leadership.

  The UPA coalition, many believed, was handicapped by not having an active coordination committee and not naming a senior leader as its spokesperson. The NDA benefitted from the institution of a coalition spokesman and George Fernandes did a good job in this role. The United and National Fronts had Jaipal Reddy as their spokesperson. In the NDA, it was the personal equation and chemistry between Vajpayee and Fernandes that had enabled the latter to function effectively. The absence of an effective coalition management mechanism and a coalition spokesperson made the UPA less cohesive than the NDA, and this became more manifest in UPA-2.

  To compensate for this organizational weakness, Dr Singh took care to regularly brief the UPA leaders about every important decision his government would take, and they liked him for that. He would do nothing politically significant without informing, not just Sonia but also Karunanidhi, Pawar and Lalu. On many occasions, after a major decision was taken at the weekly meeting of the Congress party ‘core group’, Dr Singh would personally inform the three coalition leaders before letting me inform the media.

  In that sense, Dr Singh was a truly ‘consensual’ PM. His success in UPA-1 derived largely from the fact that he invested enormous time and energy into building the required consensus around every important political decision. The criticism sometimes levelled against him that he had taken a particular decision without consulting anyone was never really true. His fault, if anything, was that he spent far too much time building consensus, rather than doing what he thought was right and then demanding that the coalition support him.

  In the end, Dr Singh was always conscious of the fact that while he may have been ‘chosen’ by Sonia to become PM, he had, in fact, become PM as a consequence of an implicit consensus within the UPA coalition as a whole that he was the best man for the job. In other words, he entered office as Sonia’s nominee, but he settled down and retained his office as the consensual and implicit choice of all the UPA allies, especially Karunanidhi, Pawar and Lalu, and indeed even the ‘Bengal faction’ of the CPI(M).

  His name had presented itself as an obvious ‘compromise’ between Sonia on one side and Pawar, Karunanidhi and Surje
et on the other. Sharad Pawar’s opposition to Sonia being PM had been openly stated and was the reason for his quitting the Congress in the first place. The CPI(M) claimed it was open to supporting Sonia as PM, though this has been disputed by I.K. Gujral in his autobiography. Gujral claims that it was Surjeet who was instrumental in getting Mulayam to step back and not support Sonia when she tried to form a government in 1999. But there is no argument that in 2004 Surjeet, as CPI(M) general secretary, enthusiastically endorsed Dr Singh’s nomination to the job. So, there was considerable truth to Dr Singh’s self-perception in UPA-1 that he was not just the ‘nominee’ of Sonia, but was someone acceptable to other stakeholders in the coalition.

  The phenomenon of prime ministers being named by a clique of leaders and compromise candidates coming up from nowhere was not new to Indian politics. That is how Lal Bahadur Shastri, Charan Singh, Narasimha Rao, Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral were named. Indeed, even Indira Gandhi was ‘nominated’ by the so-called ‘syndicate’ that ran the affairs of the Congress party after Nehru’s death. However, both Indira and Rao staged coups and took charge of the party organization, by getting themselves elected as party president. Every now and then, the party experimented with separating the two posts but no one was left in doubt that the real power lay with the PM. Congress party president Dev Kant Barooah’s infamous statement, during the time of Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership, that ‘Indira is India and India is Indira’ showed who the real boss was even when the two posts were separated.

  Given this background, it was not surprising that many initially believed the BJP charge that Dr Singh was a mukhota, a mask, for the Congress president. In August 2004 Yashwant Sinha dubbed him Shikhandi, the man-woman character in the Mahabharata whom Bheeshma refused to fight because it was against his principles to fight a woman. There was a double entendre in that metaphor, implying that the prime minister was controlled by Sonia Gandhi, and it was a damaging allusion. Clearly, my biggest challenge as media adviser was to firmly establish in the minds of ordinary people the credentials and credibility of Dr Singh as PM.