by Sanjaya Baru
5
Responsibility without Power
‘I am an accidental prime minister.’
Manmohan Singh
No one in Dr Singh’s council of ministers seemed to feel that he owed his position, rank or portfolio to the PM. While his role in the formation of his original team was understandably marginal, he was increasingly consulted in subsequent reshuffles, but the final word was always that of the leaders of the parties constituting the coalition. That is how all coalitions came to be constituted since Deve Gowda’s time. Quite understandably, in a parliamentary democracy a prime minister never has the kind of free hand that a President enjoys in a presidential system. In India, even Jawaharlal Nehru did not have too much freedom of manoeuvre and his daughter gained space only after 1971, when she was re-elected with a landslide vote on the back of the victory in the Bangladesh war. Rajiv Gandhi, who became prime minister after winning nearly four-fifths of the seats in Parliament, after Indira’s assassination, may have had much greater freedom in constituting his council of ministers, but even he had to accommodate ministers he did not like, Delhi’s H.K.L. Bhagat being a case in point. Narasimha Rao and Vajpayee, not to mention Deve Gowda and Gujral, had to also yield to such political pressures, with Vajpayee forced to drop a colleague, Suresh Prabhu, whom he clearly wished to retain in his team.
While Narasimha Rao established control over his team by getting himself elected Congress president in 1992, Vajpayee did so by his decision to conduct nuclear tests within weeks of becoming PM. His decision to test and declare India a nuclear weapons power was both strategic, that is, a response to what was happening globally on the nuclear non-proliferation front and in India’s neighbourhood, and political, namely an attempt to raise his profile as the head of government and a national leader. Vajpayee’s term began with his inability to get the finance minister he wanted, when his party rejected his initial nominee, Jaswant Singh, and he was forced to appoint Yashwant Sinha. So he chose to establish his leadership of the coalition, outpacing Advani and other challengers to his authority by becoming a national hero.
Well into Vajpayee’s tenure, he was taunted, as Dr Singh would later be, by being called a mukhota, a moniker bestowed on him by senior BJP functionary Govindacharya in the 1990s. The suggestion was that the real power lay elsewhere, with the party’s hardline president L.K. Advani, and with the RSS. However, Vajpayee was quick to give the impression that he was primus inter pares, or first among equals, which is how a prime minister is viewed in a parliamentary system, by declaring India a nuclear weapons power. He also took, before this, another important decision in appointing Brajesh Mishra, a trusted friend and fellow Brahmin from Madhya Pradesh, as his principal secretary. Mishra had not only built relationships within the BJP through his chairmanship of the BJP’s foreign affairs cell, but had also developed a wide range of power relationships over the years, including with senior editors.
In the UPA, however, Congress party spokespersons let it be known to all concerned that Sonia Gandhi would remain the boss even though she was not the PM, despite her ‘renunciation’ of power. Even a Left Front leader like Sitaram Yechury, though not as inimical to Dr Singh as some of the hardliners in his party, would remind political reporters that this was not the first time that the head of the party was seen as more important than the head of government, recalling Jyoti Basu’s early days as CM. In the case of UPA-1, what the arrangement also implied was that the credit for all the good work done by the government would go to Sonia, and all the blame for any mistakes or failures would go to Dr Singh.
Dr Singh never shied away from this political reality. When confronted with a difficult political demand from an ally, or from leaders of other political parties, he would confess to them that he did not have the last word on the matter, that he was an ‘accidental prime minister’ and that the buck stopped with Sonia. Fully conscious of this political Achilles’ heel, he nevertheless tried bringing into line difficult colleagues.
With his hands tied in other areas of governance, he decided that foreign policy was one area where he would be the boss, and used an early opportunity to let his foreign minister Natwar Singh know that. Natwar told the media on 11 June 2004 in Washington DC that India would take a ‘new look’ at the question of sending troops to Iraq to support American-led forces in the war that began in 2003. The Vajpayee government had been divided on the issue, with L.K. Advani and Jaswant Singh in favour of sending troops and Vajpayee and Brajesh Mishra opposed to the idea. Vajpayee finally chose not to send troops. While the earlier request for troops had come directly from the US, making the decision politically sensitive, the UPA government was offered the fig leaf of a UN Security Council resolution that could have helped justify sending troops if India so wanted.
Those who advocated that India should send troops pointed to the historical precedent of Indian soldiers fighting in Iraq in the early part of the twentieth century. Iraq had an intimate relationship with India for centuries, and in the period between the two World Wars, the Indian Rupiah was even legal tender in Iraq. Some felt sending troops would demonstrate a widening of India’s strategic footprint. Those opposed to the move believed India would get drawn into intra-Muslim sectarian conflict which would invariably have echoes back home. The naysayers prevailed then, as they did again in 2004.
Dr Singh was not in favour of sending Indian troops to Iraq, nor was the Congress party. There was surprise in Delhi at Natwar’s remarks and uproar in Parliament. The government denied that it was reconsidering the earlier decision and Dr Singh forced Natwar to recant in Parliament.
Bringing Natwar into line was not a problem, but bringing the politically ambitious Arjun Singh, the left-of-centre Antony and the presumed ‘PM-in-waiting’ Pranab into line was always a challenge. Each had a mind of his own and each was conscious of his political status and rank. Pranab had no ideological problem with Dr Singh’s policies but reportedly nursed the grievance that he was now serving under a person who had served under him many moons ago—Pranab was finance minister when Dr Singh was governor of the Reserve Bank of India in 1982—84. Antony was not a member of the original UPA ministerial team in 2004 and became defence minister only in 2006, when Pranab moved to external affairs. These decisions were essentially Sonia’s, though sometimes taken in consultation with Dr Singh, who generally went along with her suggestions in these matters.
Not having allocated portfolios, Dr Singh did not always find it easy to impose his will in the Cabinet. While he ensured that the Cabinet met regularly, once a week every Thursday, and deliberated at length on issues, Dr Singh would rarely intervene in Cabinet meetings to shape a discussion. Ministers were even known to absent themselves if the agenda did not interest them. However, if he had a firm view on a subject, he would ensure support for it before the Cabinet met, or allow a senior minister like Pawar or Chidambaram to articulate his point of view. This made his pre-meeting consultations with Cabinet ministers more important than the meeting itself.
While the Congress ‘core group’, that met every Friday evening at 7 RCR, became the effective management board of the party and the government, it did not include alliance leaders. Traditionally, the Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs (CCPA), consisting of senior Cabinet ministers, used to take high-level policy decisions with a political edge. The CCPA was the equivalent of the communist politburo. However, as a consequence of the PM’s non-existent political standing within the Cabinet, and the fact that Sonia, not being a Cabinet minister, was not a member of the CCPA, this once-powerful arm of the Cabinet hardly ever met during Dr Singh’s tenure. The core group became the de facto CCPA.
Dr Singh deployed an institutional innovation, first created by Vajpayee to involve senior coalition leaders in policymaking, called the groups of ministers (GoM). GoMs were meant to facilitate consensual decision-making within smaller groups. Those on policy issues would include at least one minister from each major party in the coalition. They enabled coalition p
artners to participate in discussions on policy pertaining to other ministries before policy decisions were brought to the Cabinet for its approval. Scores of GoMs were set up, with Pranab, Pawar, Antony and Chidambaram being the key chairs. The only important GoM that Arjun Singh chaired was on the 2010 Commonwealth Games. The poor frequency with which it met provided an early signal that the preparations for the Games would not be on track.
In itself, the GoM was a good idea. However, Dr Singh went a step further and created the EGoM—empowered GoMs—which effectively undermined prime ministerial authority. The EGoMs, constituted around key policies, projects and issues, became substitutes for the full Cabinet because they were empowered to take decisions that the Cabinet then only ratified. They effectively weakened the authority of the prime minister since they were chaired by senior Cabinet ministers and could approve policy without further reference to the PM. This was especially the case with EGoMs chaired by Pranab Mukherjee, the seniormost minister in the Cabinet. Every now and then a journalist would ask me how many GoMs/EGoMs had been constituted and each time I sought this information from the Cabinet secretariat I would myself be taken aback by the number. At one point in 2007 there was a total of over fifty GoMs, a number that only increased with time.
While the EGoMs may have been created to either share power with senior colleagues like Pranab or pass the buck on tricky issues where he did not want to be seen taking the decision, the fact is that they were a self-inflicted wound on prime ministerial authority. I was puzzled by Dr Singh’s move because, as a long-time player in government, he understood only too well the importance of protecting turf. Once, when I told him I might not be able to accompany him on a foreign tour because of my daughter’s school examinations his uncharacteristic reply, delivered with a smile, was, ‘If you don’t come, someone else will end up doing your work. Never yield space!’
The subject-specific committees of ministers, officials and experts did enable greater intellectual input into policymaking and facilitated the resolution of inter-ministerial differences on policy issues. Thus, to resolve the problem created by the multiplicity of ministries dealing with energy (petroleum and gas, power, coal, nuclear, non-conventional energy and so on), the Energy Coordination Committee (ECC) was created. The ECC, which included the finance minister, also enabled the PM to push through his initiatives on civil nuclear energy development by ensuring a wider consensus within government, going beyond the more conservative DAE. The Agriculture Coordination Committee and Trade and Economic Relations Committee were two other forums that brought several senior ministers and members of the Planning Commission around one table and enabled important initiatives like the India-ASEAN FTA negotiations to be taken up.
The composition of these various committees revealed who Dr Singh felt most comfortable working with. His A-team in UPA-1, if one can call it that, included Pawar and Chidambaram. They had been his colleagues in the Narasimha Rao government and while they had a rocky relationship with Rao, they had a good one with Dr Singh. He also had a satisfactory working equation with senior colleagues like Shivraj Patil and Lalu Yadav, but remained wary of old critics like Arjun Singh and Antony. Among the younger lot, such as Kamal Nath, Dayanidhi Maran and Praful Patel, his affections waxed and waned, and he would balance his disapproval of their ways, expressed only gently, with effusive appreciation of their work when they did something he approved of. From among the allies, a minister he held in high regard was Rural Development Minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, who was from the RJD. This was the minister who implemented the rural employment guarantee programme, an important initiative for UPA-1. Dr Singh was not overly impressed by the administrative capacity of most other senior Congress ministers.
While Home Minister Shivraj Patil was perceived as inefficient and ineffective in the public mind, Dr Singh found him an easy person to work with. At one point in 2006, when Patil was facing a terrible media onslaught, with widespread criticism of his handling of terror attacks and the Naxalite problem, he asked me to meet Patil and offer him advice on how to handle the media. Patil was very courteous and thanked me profusely for my offer to help but was not willing to be proactive. Once, finding both Patil and a bitter critic of his, Shekhar Gupta of the Indian Express, present at a function at 7 RCR, I suggested to Patil that he disarm the editor by walking across to Shekhar and chatting him up.
His reply was classic Patil: ‘It is better you bring him here.’
I had to hold him by his hand and virtually drag him to Shekhar and make them shake hands.
What this incident showed was that the home minister was more concerned about protocol than about winning over a critic. For him, it seemed, form mattered over substance. This also explained his penchant for looking dapper at all times of the day, even if it meant changing his clothes frequently. In the PMO, we would quip that while he might not, despite being home minister, be a ‘man for all occasions’, he was certainly dressed as if he was ready for any occasion.
Both Subbu and I would encourage Dr Singh to interact more with junior ministers like Sachin Pilot, Purandeswari, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Pallam Raju. But he rarely did so, perhaps not wanting to upset his senior colleagues by appearing to be too friendly with their juniors. Faced with complaints from junior ministers that they were not being given enough work, he tried to boost their morale by interacting with them when he convened a meeting of the entire council of ministers and urged their senior ministers to share more work with them. This never did happen in practice, not even in the PMO. The prime minister evidently found it hard to delegate much work to his MoS, Prithviraj Chavan.
Cabinet reshuffles were an elaborate exercise. Every now and then, Dr Singh would seek feedback on the performance of his ministers. These were more in the nature of informal assessments rather than a ‘report card’, as the media imagined them to be. In May 2005, as the UPA approached its first anniversary, reports began to appear that the PM was reviewing the performance of his ministers. On 9 May, when he was in Moscow, NDTV ran a story that External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh had secured a low ‘score’ on the PM’s ‘report card’ and was likely to be dropped from the Cabinet. Natwar was most unhappy and took the day off on ‘health grounds’. This news reached the PM in Moscow when he was in the midst of a briefing at his hotel. He asked me to find out what exactly NDTV had reported.
When I briefed him he burst out angrily, ‘Tell Prannoy to stop reporting these lies.’
I called Prannoy Roy, the head of NDTV, and had just begun speaking to him when the PM asked for my mobile phone and spoke to Prannoy himself, scolding him like he was chiding a student who had erred, saying, ‘This is not correct. You cannot report like this.’ Indeed, the relationship between him and Prannoy was not that of a prime minister and a senior media editor but more like that of a former boss and a one-time junior. This was because Prannoy had worked as an economic adviser in the ministry of finance under Dr Singh. After a few minutes, Prannoy called me back.
‘Are you still with him?’ he asked.
I stepped out of the room and told him that I was now alone.
‘Boy, I have not been scolded like that since school! He sounded like a headmaster, not a prime minister,’ complained Prannoy.
After the meeting with his aides was over, Dr Singh called Natwar and inquired about his health and let him know that he looked forward to meeting him on his return.
I could see why Dr Singh was livid with Prannoy and gentle with Natwar. By then, he had Natwar on his side and his support was needed for the major initiative he was about to launch in the summer of 2005 with the US, and he could not afford a sulking foreign minister. When Natwar did get involved in the controversy generated by a United Nations commission report on entities that had profited from Iraq’s oil-for-food programme during Saddam Hussein’s time, Dr Singh did seek Natwar’s immediate resignation but responded, many thought, leniently to Natwar’s request that he be allowed to remain in office till the charges had been v
erified. Finally, when Natwar did leave, Dr Singh retained the external affairs portfolio, signalling the importance he attached to keeping the foreign affairs portfolio under his control.
Natwar came in handy in dealing with the tricky issue of India’s vote at the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) against Iran’s nuclear programme. The IAEA vote on Iran’s nuclear programme became a political hot potato. The US wanted India to prove its non- proliferation credentials by supporting its stance. It was also the view of all the signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), of which India was not a signatory, that Iran stand by its NPT commitments. In itself this was a simple demand. However, in India anti-US elements projected it as a surrender of sovereignty to the US, and an act which would displease a friend, Iran, and Shia Muslims in India. Given the political sensitivity around what ought to have been a routine vote, Dr Singh wanted all his senior colleagues, including Sonia, on board.
Natwar called the PM from New York one night saying the Indian ambassador at the IAEA was awaiting instructions on how to vote. Dr Singh was in Chandigarh and chose to keep his opinion to himself. He instructed Natwar to find out what other members of the CSS felt. Natwar then called Pranab, Chidambaram and Shivraj Patil and all three suggested that India should vote along with other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Finally, Natwar called Sonia and ensured she was also on board. Natwar then called the PM back and reported this. Dr Singh asked him what he himself felt. Natwar said he agreed with the others. ‘Then do so accordingly,’ was the PM’s instruction.