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

by Sanjaya Baru

  Consequently, it was a relatively smooth ride with the media for Dr Singh in UPA-1. His problem always was that he did not want to become more popular with the media and the general public than Sonia. Whenever a TV channel or newsmagazine conducted an opinion poll and showed that his popularity, while rising, was a few notches below that of Sonia, he would feel relieved. ‘Good,’ he would say, with a mischievous smile. That defined the limit to his projection and brand-building.

  Dr Singh’s ‘silences’ and his unwillingness to project himself became more manifest in UPA-2 and were more widely commented upon. His penchant for a ‘low profile’ was seen in UPA-1 as a defence mechanism, part shyness and part self-preservation, but in UPA-2 it came to be seen as escapism, as shirking responsibility and an unwillingness to take charge. The same trait of self-effacement was seen as a virtue in UPA-1 and a weakness in UPA-2.

  7

  Manmohan’s Camelot

  ‘Public office offers the opportunity to be educated at public expense.’

  Manmohan Singh

  At a meeting of business leaders from India and Southeast Asia in Kuala Lumpur in 2005, the secretary general of the ASEAN, Ong Keng Yong, introduced Dr Singh as ‘the world’s most highly qualified head of government’. A standing ovation followed.

  Dr Singh’s academic and professional credentials had by now become legendary. Intellectuals around the world wanted to meet him. At the Indian Science Congress in Ahmedabad in December 2004, and at subsequent congresses every year, Nobel Prize-winners wanted to be photographed with him. Visiting scholars from around the world sought appointments with him. It is the practice in the PMO that the joint secretary concerned is required to be present when the PM has official visitors. But when the visitor was neither ‘official’ nor ‘personal’ I would often get summoned instead. Thus, I was fortunate enough to be present when an Eric Hobsbawm, or a Norman Borlaug or a Roderick MacFarquhar or even a George Soros came calling.

  It was not just his academic credentials or his continuing interest in engaging academics that attracted so many thinking people to Dr Singh. It was also the fact that many around the world had come to see him, as indeed many at home did, as a thinking man’s political leader. The world had many such leaders in the early post-colonial era. Jawaharlal Nehru himself was one such. Even small countries in obscure parts of the world had produced leaders who were seen by their people as ‘teachers’ and ‘thinkers’. That era seemed to have ended as more practical, tactical and manipulative politicians came to the fore.

  The Indian and Western elite did not regard any of Nehru’s successors as ‘thinking’ leaders. Indira Gandhi tried hard to win over India’s intellectual elite, but the Emergency broke a nascent link. When men like P.N. Haksar and P.N. Dhar were hounded out of her inner circle, India’s intellectuals deserted her. Rajiv Gandhi was never taken seriously by this elite. Narasimha Rao may have been a scholar in his own right, but he was an ‘outsider’ to India’s metropolitan elite. In Andhra Pradesh, among the Telugu-speaking elite he was known as an ashtavadhani, a literary master. But Delhi’s elite tended to conflate his intellectual achievements with the fact that he was fluent in many languages. Vajpayee too was a highly regarded poet. Indeed, Rao and Vajpayee enjoyed the company of intellectuals and could count many professors among their friends. But in the snobbish world of the metropolitan elite, an Oxbridge type like Dr Singh was regarded as a class apart from these home-grown politician-intellectuals.

  Whatever the ups and downs of the daily drill of being PM, Dr Singh enjoyed these intellectual engagements. Every now and then, he would summon me and ask, ‘Who are the wise men I can consult?’ on some issue or the other that he was grappling with. Apart from the distinguished visitors who sought appointments with the PM and the ‘specialists’ who were invited to meet him, he also had his own set of friends from the world of academia and policymaking who would meet him every now and then. This was a long list, including Amartya Sen, Jagdish Bhagwati, Padma Desai, I.G. Patel, Meghnad Desai, H.M. Sethna, M.S. Swaminathan, K. Subrahmanyam and V.S. Arunachalam. Hoping to secure US support for a ‘Second Green Revolution’ in India, a favourite theme of his, Dr Singh met Norman Borlaug, the ‘father of the green revolution’, and talked about agricultural research and ways in which India could boost farm productivity once again. Given his academic bent, he took a keen interest in academic achievements across disciplines. When mathematician S.R. Srinivasa Vardhan was awarded the Abel Prize, the Nobel equivalent in mathematics, Dr Singh shot off a letter of congratulations. Dr Vardhan was reportedly surprised, for he had never before had a letter from a head of government.

  Dr Singh also inducted several experts into various government bodies like the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, the Science Advisory Council to the PM and advisory groups on a range of issues dealing with domestic and foreign policy. Some of the prominent names were C. Rangarajan, VS. Vyas, Suresh Tendulkar, A.Vaidyanathan, Palle Rama Rao, C.N.R. Rao, R.K. Pachauri, Roddam Narasimha, VS. Ananth, Andre Beteille, P.M. Bhargava and Deepak Nayyar. He would patiently sit through long meetings with them and listen to contending viewpoints. When the tiger population in India was threatened, he set up an expert group that included wildlife expert Valmik Thapar and Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment and heard both sides of what was a particularly sharp argument. In the National Knowledge Commission, he would listen to the ‘left-wing’ scientist P.M. Bhargava with as much interest as to the liberal sociologist Andre Beteille.

  When Soros sought an appointment, Dr Singh wanted to know what he wished to talk about. Was Soros going to invest in India? Would he want to know about Indian policies? Soros did not have money on his mind. He wanted to meet Dr Singh, not the PM, and discuss his books! I had to quickly read and brief the PM on the key arguments of Soros’ books on globalization, capitalism and terrorism. Soros meant what he said—he did actually talk about his books—but Rupert Murdoch tried a trick to secure an appointment. Having failed on one occasion to meet Dr Singh, he made a second attempt by letting it be known that he was not interested in talking about his media business. Rather, he wanted to talk about China. The PM was amused and granted him an appointment. Murdoch did discuss China and explained where he saw China going. But, as he got up to leave, he expressed the hope that the Indian government would be more receptive to his media plans than China had been.

  On China, Dr Singh was an eager learner. For him, China remained an enigma and he eagerly sought out people who were knowledgeable about it. He spent two long afternoons with Singapore’s leader Lee Kuan Yew getting tutored about China and its new generation of leaders. Lee knew the country better than most world leaders. He also invited Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar and Opposition politician and India’s China-watcher Subramaniam Swamy for long conversations on the subject.

  He followed these up by doing his own homework, devoting several days to a thorough reading of all the Nehru papers. ‘I do not want to make the mistakes Nehru made, so it is important that I understand his own thinking at the time,’ he once said to me, explaining how he painstakingly read through the official record of what happened between China and India in the years 1957 to 1962. In his second term, as he familiarized himself with China’s new leadership, he read with interest Ezra Vogel’s authoritative biography of Deng Xiaoping. He knew the West and much of East and Southeast Asia well. His stint in the South Commission had given him a good grasp of the developing world, especially Africa.

  Before a visit to Russia, he sought out the economist Padma Desai, an acknowledged authority on Russia. He would, of course, also read widely and extensively the biographies of important leaders he had to meet, picking up information about his interlocutors that no Indian diplomat was able to put into his brief before a meeting. Dr Singh was a voracious reader and his living room table always had on it a new book that he was reading. Weekends were mostly spent reading.

  Over time, I consulted a wide range of scholars and
policy experts when writing the PM’s speeches, sometimes seeking draft texts, and would keep him informed of the names. These included scientists like C.N.R. Rao, R.M. Mashelkar and M.S. Swaminathan, strategic affairs guru K. Subrahmanyam, Kashmir expert Amitabh Mattoo, bureaucrat and diplomat Gopalkrishna Gandhi, historian-journalist Rudrangshu Mukherjee, and my father, who had been a speech-writer for Narasimha Rao. It was, on occasion, amusing to see some of our most distinguished scientists and academics sending draft speeches full of self-praise that read more like their resumes, hoping the PM would read them out.

  For his first major speech abroad, at New York’s CFR, he wanted me to consult people with specialist knowledge of India-US relations outside government and also find out from those familiar with the event who would be in the audience, and what they might expect to hear from the Indian PM. Accordingly, I consulted Sunil Khilnani and Fareed Zakaria. Not surprisingly, Mani Dixit disapproved of the idea. Reflecting the traditional Indian establishment view, he asked, ‘Can we not write a speech for the PM? Why do we need external advice?’

  There was a bit of Camelot in UPA-1. Like John Kennedy’s circle of the ‘best and the brightest’, which included East Coast academics like John Kenneth Galbraith, Walt Rostow and Arthur Schlesinger, Dr Singh too had created a circle of intellect around himself. In the latter half of his first term, as Indian ambassadors began to understand this side of the PM’s personality, they would make sure to offer the PM some time with local scholars and public intellectuals, albeit mostly economists. In Paris he would meet with Alice Thorner, the widow of Daniel Thorner. Both were economists who had researched deeply on India. In New York he would meet Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve; in London he would meet economist Nick Stern and scholars from Cambridge and Oxford.

  With his many friends, admirers and students dropping in every now and then, the visitor’s room at RCR became a school at which one learnt a lot, validating one of Dr Singh’s favourite lines, ‘Public office offers the opportunity for private education at public expense.’

  His flaw was, of course, the weak follow-up. The original intention of setting up the National Knowledge Commission was to seek ideas on improving the quality of higher education in India and strengthening the public library system around the country. But the commission got itself embroiled in avoidable controversies, with two members quitting and another becoming a permanent dissenter. Appointing an NRI technocrat like Sam Pitroda, who did not command much respect among liberal academics, was probably a bad idea to begin with.

  While Dr Singh valued inputs into policy he would become impatient with purely academic solutions that were not adequately grounded in political reality. However, he did come to appreciate the fact that while the gap between the academic and the policy worlds was not very wide in the field of economics, his own example being a case in point, in other fields, like foreign affairs, the gap was very wide because policymakers rarely shared information with scholars. Releasing a book by diplomat Jagat Mehta in April 2006, Dr Singh regretted the fact that scholars had to depend on the memory of retired civil servants to get a glimpse into the thinking that had gone into policymaking. While agreeing that memoirs like Mehta’s were very useful for scholars, he said, ‘I do hope that we do not have to depend only on memory and personal notes for a record of policymaking. I think the time has come for us to have at least a fifty-year rule, if not a thirty-year rule, that allows scholars and researchers free access to declassified official papers. I would like to have this issue examined so that we can take an early and informed decision. In the long run, this will make it possible for us to draw appropriate lessons from the past and make effective decisions for the future.’

  The next day, I took a printout of the PM’s speech and put up a note for his approval saying he might wish to instruct the principal secretary to follow up on this statement and take the necessary steps to have this new policy announced. I heard nothing about this afterwards. Years later, after I left the PMO, I asked Dr Singh why he never followed up on that announcement. His matter-of-fact reply was, ‘This should have been done by the BJP when they were in office. The Congress party is not yet ready to take this step.’ The implication of his remark was that any declassification of official papers based on a thirty-year rule would begin to throw more light on Nehru’s and Indira’s time in office.

  The two key initiatives of the PM for which he sought expert opinion in a systematic fashion were his dialogue with Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf on Jammu and Kashmir and the initiative he took with the US on civil nuclear energy.

  In November 2004, Dr Singh was to make his first official visit to Jammu and Kashmir. He had returned from New York in September 2004 after a useful meeting with President Musharraf and felt the time was ripe for a new initiative on Kashmir. Addressing the students and faculty of the Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, he spoke of his vision of a ‘new Kashmir’ (naya Kashmir) and said that the ‘time has come to put forward a new blueprint, a fresh vision for Kashmir and for the Kashmiri people, free from the fear of war, want and exploitation’.

  Those following the Kashmir issue understood the significance of both the phrase ‘naya Kashmir’ and, even more importantly, the term ‘new blueprint’—a reference to the Manmohan-Musharraf formula that I will discuss in the next chapter. The speech was drafted by Mani Dixit and Amitabh Mattoo, then vice chancellor of Jammu University, and a Kashmiri Pandit. A few weeks later Mani died and in the transition from Mani to Narayanan, the momentum on the Kashmir initiative was lost. It picked up again when Musharraf visited India in April 2005. The opening up of the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service was a major confidence-building exercise that unfolded the PM’s vision of a ‘naya Kashmir’. A key idea was free travel across the so-called Line of Control. But, despite this initiative, Dr Singh was not able to make a breakthrough with the Hurriyat and the separatists in Kashmir. He needed an instrument through which he could open an internal dialogue, just as he had by then opened dialogue with Musharraf.

  I was not aware what view Narayanan was taking of Dr Singh’s ideas about a ‘naya Kashmir’ and a ‘new blueprint’ until I was summoned by the PM sometime in August 2005 and asked who I thought were the ‘wise men’ he should consult on Kashmir. He was then preparing for his third meeting with Musharraf in September 2005.

  I recalled the fact that when I was editor of the Financial Express, I had once met Dr Singh at the home of journalist Prem Shankar Jha in Delhi’s Golf Links where Prem and my former colleague from the Economic Times David Devadas had brought together some Hurriyat leaders for a conversation over very high-quality Kashmiri wazwan. So I first suggested Prem’s name and then went on to add the names of all those who I knew had either some knowledge or interest in the subject. This list included strategic affairs guru K. Subrahmanyam, former home secretary and the government’s special representative on J&K N.N. Vohra, journalists B.G. Verghese, Manoj Joshi (who had published a book on Kashmir) and Bharat Bhushan, Kashmiri economist Haseeb Drabhu, who was then adviser to the chief minister of J&K, and Amitabh Mattoo.

  Dr Singh asked me to arrange a meeting with all of them. It was decided that they would all be invited for a pre-lunch meeting on a Saturday morning and the conversation would carry on over lunch. Narayanan was miffed at the idea.

  ‘Why does he want all these seminar-wallahs here?’ he asked. ‘What can they tell him that we do not already know?’

  I said there was no harm in the PM hearing opinions from outside the government.

  ‘He reads all their columns anyway!’ replied an exasperated and irritated Narayanan.

  Later, he sat glumly through the meeting. As he left, he asked me if I had heard one new idea. Not being a subject expert, I was not sure how much of what had been said that morning was new. But I soon realized there was a major takeaway from the meeting when Dr Singh called me and said he liked K. Subrahmanyam’s suggestion that the PM should convene a ‘round-table’ on the future
of J&K, ensuring that every single viewpoint was represented around the table.

  ‘That is what the British did,’ he added for effect. Narayanan was uncomfortable with the term ‘round-table conference’ for precisely that reason. As he pointed out, the British had convened a round-table conference to begin the process of granting India independence. Was that the political message the PM wanted to send? Narayanan did not like the idea at all.

  Dr Singh had a different view. He believed the time had come for everyone in the state to freely express their opinion. After all, the Hurriyat and separatists did not represent the majority in the state, nor was ‘azadi’ really on the cards. The separatists were a vocal and an important minority. Let them speak openly in a gathering of fellow Kashmiris and representatives of Jammu and Ladakh, he felt, and let there be an open discussion. In the end it would have to be India and Pakistan that would have to arrive at a settlement of the issue, keeping in mind the welfare of the Kashmiri people.

  Invitations were sent out to every political party, to intellectuals, heads of major academic institutions, NGOs and to the Kashmiri separatists as well. On 25 February 2006, after Parliament had opened for the budget session, the First J&K Round-table was convened at 7 RCR. Invitations to the meeting were handed over personally to every important leader from the state. Intelligence officials scouted out even those who were ostensibly underground and letters of invitation were personally handed over to them. No one could claim he or she was not invited.

  The round-table was a great success inasmuch as it was the first dialogue process of its kind and allowed a wide cross-section of opinion to be freely expressed. The Hurriyat boycotted the meeting but they seemed impressed by the PM’s sincerity, because soon after, they agreed to meet him for a direct dialogue. He opened the day-long round- table saying: