by Sanjaya Baru
Considerable work went into preparing Dr Singh for his media interaction in September 2004. Several ministers and senior officials and editors were consulted for advice both on likely questions and possible answers. I personally spoke to several ministers and editors. Mani, Nair and Narayanan worked with PMO officials to put together their own set of likely questions and suggested answers. A final list of seventy-five likely questions and answers was prepared and these were discussed with Dr Singh over several sessions in the preceding week. These sessions proved most instructive because Dr Singh revealed his mind on many issues, rehearsing his replies to potential questions. The internal debate among his key aides on what each thought he should say was the first structured conversation on policy in the PMO.
While my approach was to read out a set of likely questions to him and let him identify the questions for which he needed written draft replies from the PMO, my colleague Sujata Mehta, the joint secretary from the foreign service, prepared elaborate answers for every likely question on foreign policy. The foreign service had got used to tutoring the PM on what he should or should not say to the media. Dr Singh was not someone who needed tutoring, especially on foreign policy. He knew well what to say on key issues and had a mind of his own. But he would never snub an official engaged in tutoring him. He would hear her patiently and say precisely what he wanted to. Every once in a while, though, he would respond to advice from officials on what they thought he ‘should say’, to the media or to a visiting dignitary, by snapping, ‘Tell me what I should know, not what I should say!’
It was decided that the press conference would be in the large hall of Vigyan Bhavan, the premier sarkari conference hall, and would be open to all accredited journalists, Indian and foreign. In order to make the event more inclusive, those not accredited could secure an invitation card. Over 500 journalists trooped into the hall, filling it up. Dr Singh suggested the press conference should be in the morning. Both Mani and Vikram agreed, saying he would look fresh and rested in the morning. I disagreed and told them that in the age of live television Saturday morning was not ‘prime’ time and a pre-lunch event would enable the Opposition to dominate the airwaves at prime time in the evening. The headlines in the evening news bulletins would not be about what the PM said, but about what his critics were saying. The PM agreed to schedule the event at 5 p.m. This would give TV journalists headline material and print journalists enough time to file their reports for the next day’s papers.
On the morning of the press conference, I found only half an hour had been allotted for the interaction. I was dismayed. I was told that Mani and Nair had decided between them that it was best to restrict the press conference to thirty minutes so that nothing went wrong. I went to the PM and told him this would be counterproductive. At least fifty of the 500 journalists expected should be allowed to ask questions, I pointed out. I reasoned that even if each question took a minute to answer, the press conference would have to go on for an hour. To my relief, Dr Singh readily agreed. He asked Vikram Doraiswamy not to schedule any meeting for that evening. I saw this as a welcome signal of his willingness to spend even more than an hour with the media. As it turned out, the press conference lasted for ninety minutes and fifty-two questions were asked.
Later that morning, I went across to Vigyan Bhavan along with my colleague Muthu Kumar, a very competent information service officer with an impressive record at Doordarshan, to arrange the dais and the positioning of the Doordarshan camera. The public broadcaster’s cameras were the only ones to be placed in the hall and private channels would get free live feed from them. This arrangement enabled me to fix the frame to the PM’s advantage, rather than leave the angles to be determined by the private channels. The viewer would see only the PM’s face on television in a close shot and the size of the audience in a long shot. The PM would speak against the backdrop of the Tricolour and the three lions on the Ashoka Pillar—both symbols of the Indian state.
All officials would be seated in the audience. On hearing about this, Minister for Information and Broadcasting Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi called to object. How could the PM address a press conference without the information and broadcasting minister sitting next to him, he protested, when his ministry was the official event organizer. I told him that I had taken this decision on the advice of Sharada Prasad, who had informed me that Indiraji and Rajivji had addressed the media in this manner. He mumbled something and hung up.
Muthu ensured that the journalists were seated in groups, with English-language print in one section and TV in another, the Hindi media in one section and other Indian languages grouped together, and Urdu media given a separate row. Foreign media was seated at the back. This way, I could call out names, or numbers (since every journalist had been given a placard with a number on it), from different sections of the audience, to ensure that every segment of the media got a chance to ask a question.
Logistics were important, no doubt, but the key strategic consideration was that Dr Singh should be seen answering every and any kind of question without reference to officials. By doing so, he was meant to establish that he had command over the entire gamut of policy. He needed to show that he knew as much about nuclear policy as he did about river water disputes; was as familiar with farmers’ issues as with fiscal issues; knew as much about Kashmir as he did about Telangana. In order to save time, the standard opening statement was abandoned. A 1000-word statement detailing what the UPA government had done in its first 100 days in office was circulated and taken as read. The conference went straight into question time.
At the end, I was pleased at our hit rate: we had anticipated fifty- one of the fifty-two questions. The one unanticipated question was from Jay Raina of Hindustan Times, who wanted to know what the PM thought of his ‘spin doctor’s work’. The PM smiled, even as the audience laughed, but gave a quizzical look. It appeared he was not aware of the term ‘spin doctor’.
By the end of the press conference, the media was astounded. Dr Singh had proved the Outlook story right. He had not come across as weak or unsure, and did not appear to need help in answering a question. No one disrupted the press conference. As he left the dais, the entire media stood up as a sign of respect. The first step in branding Manmohan Singh as a man of prime ministerial timber was taken.
That evening Mani Dixit hosted a dinner at his home. When I reached, he held out his hand and hugged me and said he was wrong to have been worried. He conceded that I was right to have adopted a ‘high-risk’ strategy, as he put it. Mani and some others in the PMO had thought that exposing the PM to media scrutiny in the manner I did was fraught with the risk of Dr Singh coming across as inadequately aware of the range of political and diplomatic issues that would be brought up.
‘If it had failed, everyone would have asked for your head,’ said Mani. ‘You deserve a drink. Come in.’
My phone kept ringing through the evening with friends from the media complimenting the PM and congratulating me for getting him to address the media. I took every call. As I walked into Mani’s living room an RCR number flashed on my mobile. It was Dr Singh himself.
‘I was watching TV,’ he said, adding in his economical way, ‘I think they are all happy. There is nothing negative so far.’
I told him he was superb and that I had spent much of the evening responding to callers complimenting the PM. Mani placed a much- needed glass of single malt in my hand.
The national press conference was not an exercise in transparency and accountability. It was meant to demonstrate to the country and even to the media that Dr Singh had a mind of his own. That he was not a ‘rubber stamp’ PM but was in fact ‘in charge’ and au fait with his brief. That he had a prime minister’s grasp on a wide range of national and international issues and was not some academic economist or a file- pushing government official.
While Dr Singh was pleased that night with the generally favourable TV coverage, the next morning’s headlines pleased him even more. Most papers high
lighted Dr Singh’s answer to the very last question of the press conference, from a woman journalist. ‘Mr Prime Minister,’ she asked, ‘it is being said in certain quarters that the threat to Dr Manmohan Singh comes not from the Left or from the Opposition, but from Dr Manmohan Singh himself and that if you are pushed against the wall and compelled to do things that go against your grain in the course of keeping the coalition together, you might just decide to put in your papers. Could such a thing happen?’
The PM’s reply was candid and assertive. ‘Well, Madam, I believe our government is going to last for full five years, and let there be no doubt or ambiguity about this. Therefore, this misconception that I can be pressured into giving up is simply not going to materialize.’ Newspapers also highlighted his assertion that ‘The insinuation that there are two separate centres of power is not true.’ Chandigarh’s Tribune, a newspaper that Dr Singh grew up with and which was his first morning read with a cup of tea, opened its report with ‘Prime Minister Manmohan Singh . . . dismissed as “without foundation” the Opposition charge that Congress president and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi is the “super Prime Minister”.’ The Hindu’s headline summed it up pithily: ‘I am in charge, and will last’.
A fortnight later, when he arrived in New York, Time ran a cover story on Dr Singh’s prime ministership with the headline: ‘His Own Man’. The message had gone out to the world. Most reports and editorial comments drew attention to three aspects of the press interaction. First, that it was wide-ranging and the PM answered every single question. Second, the PM’s ‘political personality’ came through. Finally, that he had a clear view of his agenda and his priorities.
The key to ‘Brand Manmohan’ was his projection as his own man. His Achilles’ heel was the equation with Sonia. He would always be tormented by the question of whether he was his own man, or just her puppet. Throughout his two terms, this was always the most difficult and delicate issue for him to handle.
Whenever he asserted prime ministerial authority his image shone. Whenever he shied away from doing so, it took a beating. Creating, building and protecting this image, without necessarily allowing a situation where he would have to publicly differ or confront Sonia or his senior colleagues was the key to his success, his image and his power. With mischief-makers aplenty, protecting the PM’s image required constant vigilance.
Apart from projecting Dr Singh as a ‘national’ leader, and not just a partisan politician, I also aimed to project him as a ‘consensual’ leader. The purpose of this, too, was to show that like Vajpayee and Narasimha Rao, Dr Singh was a prime minister who tried to build support for his policies cutting across factions within the Congress and across political parties. Whenever he acted as an arbitrator between warring ministers, like Chidambaram and Kamal Nath, or between senior and junior ministers, like Pranab Mukherjee and Anand Sharma, or between the leader of an alliance partner like Sharad Pawar and his own party member Prithviraj Chavan, I would let political reporters and analysts know how the PM was mediating between them and building consensus. Even with the Left, his inveterate critics, he took a conciliatory stance through the first half of his tenure. He would ensure that the PMO acted on every request that came from Left leaders, be it the nomination of a Left-leaning academic to some institution or the clearance of a project in a Left bastion in West Bengal or sending Left MPs off on foreign junkets.
By the time Dr Singh travelled to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly in September 2004, he had acquired the image of being a businesslike, consensual and capable PM. The September press conference was not planned with a view to projecting the PM’s image to the world. My focus was entirely on building his image at home. However, it was Mani Dixit who made the point to me that by firmly establishing his image as PM at home, we had also sent a message to the world that this was a PM the world could do business with. Given our parliamentary system, it’s important that heads of government of other countries felt confident that an assurance from the Indian head of government was backed by his entire government.
After the first national press conference, few saw Manmohan Singh as a ‘puppet’ PM, or as a novice, a ‘weak’ leader, or just an ‘academic’ or ‘bureaucrat’. Both US President George Bush and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf met him in New York and had substantial conversations. The success of those meetings, which we shall discuss later, bolstered his public image at home.
Flying back home on his seventy-second birthday, Dr Singh looked relaxed as he cut a cake and shared it with the media on Air India One. The phase of teething troubles was over. He was now firmly ensconced as prime minister.
Given that I had mainly been a financial journalist in the print media, I had to get to know a lot of new media personnel in TV, on the political beat and in Indian-language media. It became apparent to me fairly early in my tenure that a large majority of journalists were just professionals doing their job and as long as one dealt with them with courtesy and regard for their need to get a good story they would always be objective in their reporting, often even supportive without my trying very hard. A second category of journalists were those who liked being pampered and given additional attention. A junket here or an exclusive story there and one had no problem with them. The third category were partisan journalists—pro-BJP, pro-Left, pro-Sonia, pro-Arjun, pro-Pranab and so on—and my approach was to keep them at a distance. This did upset some, especially those close to Sonia who assumed the government was theirs and the PMO should treat them with deference. Finally, there were the prima donnas. Media baron- editors, editor-CEOs, columnists with a brand name.
In Vajpayee’s PMO, the SPG had a list of senior editors who were given various privileges, including being allowed to carry their cell phones into South Block, an entitlement denied to other visitors for security reasons. I discovered that there were even nicer ones, when at a foreign airport I saw a Mercedes car draw up for one editor while the rest of the press contingent accompanying the prime minister filed into a bus. On making inquiries I discovered that the car had been sent by the local embassy and that it was standard practice in the Vajpayee PMO for some journalists to get such limousines when travelling abroad with the PM. I was told that Vajpayee’s son-in-law, Ranjan Bhattacharya, who had befriended many senior editors, had taken personal interest in ensuring that the PMO’s favoured journalists were well looked after. I brought to an end all such privileges and incurred the wrath of some professional peers. The only privilege I retained was the serving of good-quality alcohol on the PM’s plane.
On the first trip out to Bangkok in July 2004 I noticed that drinks were not being served. I was told the PMO had issued instructions that no alcohol be offered on the PM’s plane. This was ridiculous. We were clearly swinging from one extreme, of the Vajpayee days, to the other. The air hostess told me that they had drinks in stock and could serve them if instructed. Mani Dixit thought it would not be appropriate. Not wanting to waste time convincing the bureaucrats on board, I walked into the PM’s cabin and asked him if he had any objection if drinks were served to the media. Dr Singh was engrossed in some official papers. He looked up, thought for a moment and said, ‘You decide.’ When the drinks finally came out, several officials on board also raised a toast.
Dr Singh always made it a point to meet journalists accompanying him on foreign visits and would always ask me if they were being well looked after. On board he would spare time for a private chat with just one or two senior editors. It was a privilege that journalists, especially from regional Indian-language media, valued enormously. Apart from interacting with journalists accompanying him on foreign trips, Dr Singh always made time to meet representatives of the media in every state capital. Finding him more relaxed on these visits outside Delhi, I told a correspondent of the Economic Times who had been seeking an interview for a long time to find his way to Gandhiji’s ashram at Wardha. The PM was scheduled to visit the ashram, have lunch with its residents and rest for a while before moving o
n to Nagpur. Sitting in a modest hut, under a fan, on a warm July afternoon in 2006, Dr Singh gave an extensive interview to ET. It was perhaps his only lengthy interview to an Indian newspaper and the only one given by an Indian PM at Gandhiji’s ashram.
As a former editor I was able to relate to most editors and I managed to befriend several media owners as well, giving them time with the PM or helping them out whenever they had problems with one ministry or another. However, the bulk of my time was spent just chatting up reporters and establishing a personal bond with them. When Parliament was in session, I would visit the media gallery regularly and spend time gossiping with reporters, planting stories and picking up information. On the PM’s aircraft, travelling abroad, I would spend a few minutes with every one of the forty journalists on board, including Doordarshan cameramen and wire-service reporters, regarded as the lowest rung of the media’s social pyramid. All of this came in handy in times of crisis and need. There were always those who took favours but never returned them. But more often than not, one could encash an IOU, earned by nothing more than a show of courtesy and friendship.