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

by Sanjaya Baru

  In a bold assertion of these values, he declared in the Lok Sabha, in his May 2005 speech:

  Our steadfast commitment to democracy, to building a multiethnic, multireligious, multilingual, multicultural democracy based on respect for fundamental human rights and the rule of law gives us a unique place in our era. All nations of the world, I believe, will one day function on these very principles of liberal and pluralistic democracy. This enjoins upon us the obligation to nurture these roots of our nationhood. I commit our government to work earnestly to realize this vision of India’s tryst with destiny.

  He went to the ASEAN Summit, the SAARC Summit, the IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) and even the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement with proposals for economic cooperation, defending greater interdependence between nations. Dr Singh recognized that the single most important exception to this worldview on foreign policy is Pakistan. The India-Pakistan relationship stands on a completely different footing, unlike even the India-Bangladesh relationship. He recognized there were limits to the role economic interdependence could play in altering this one relationship. However, even here he was convinced greater interdependence would widen the policy space for normalization of relations.

  On major policy issues, including relations with the US, China and Pakistan, Dr Singh and Natwar came to have similar views and Natwar increasingly became a source of support for the PM in dealing with critics within the Congress party. When Natwar had to resign after the Paul Volcker Committee’s report alleged that both the Congress party and he had benefitted monetarily through deals struck with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Dr Singh was genuinely sorry to see him go. He then took his own time to choose a successor, retaining the portfolio from December 2005 to October 2006, when he handed it over to Pranab Mukherjee.

  Pranab Mukherjee proved to be a more difficult customer. While Natwar was transparent in his dealings, Pranab was difficult to fathom. For me, two incidents captured this difference. At the end of Dr Singh’s first visit to the UN General Assembly in September 2004, he was to address a press conference. Minutes before the conference began I received a call from Natwar.

  ‘Baru, I am told you have not placed a chair for me at the press conference?’

  I told him that earlier that month Dr Singh had addressed a press conference at Vigyan Bhavan where he sat alone on the dais and his colleagues sat in the front row, along with the media. That is what I had proposed for the New York press conference too.

  ‘This is preposterous. You are new, Baru, so you should know this. From the days of Panditji whenever the prime minister of India has met the press at the UN he has done so with the foreign minister next to him. Tell that to the PM and please let him know that I expect to sit next to him.’

  I promptly conveyed this to Dr Singh. Mani Dixit, who was present at the time, interjected and said, ‘Tell Natwar that the PM will sit alone.’

  Dr Singh waved to Mani as if to say ‘let it be’ and turned to me and smiled, nodding his head as if to signal his approval for Natwar to be on the dais with him. Natwar reciprocated the gesture by letting the media know that the PM had excellent meetings with President Bush and President Musharraf, even though he was not privy to what happened in either meeting. Natwar’s public support had its uses.

  Pranab was never so transparent either in expressing his disagreement or support. After returning from an important visit to Washington DC, Pranab chose not to brief the PM for three days. He had gone to see Sonia Gandhi but had not sought an appointment with Dr Singh. On the third day, I asked Dr Singh what had transpired at Pranab’s meetings with President Bush and Condoleezza Rice. ‘I don’t know,’ was his plaintive reply.

  I was taken aback. How could the foreign minister not have briefed the PM immediately on return? I suggested to him that he should summon the foreign minister and demand a briefing. I am not aware if Pranab was actually summoned or himself found time to drop in, but in any event, he visited the PM the next day. Similarly, Pranab would ‘forget’ to brief the PM on his meetings with the Left. Another curious aspect of his personality was his reluctance to delegate much work to his minister of state Anand Sharma. Sharma would sit in his room in South Block with a clean table in front of him, a diary with no appointments and bemoan his marginalization. Pranab routinely declined permission for Sharma to travel abroad, deputing junior officials to go for some of these meetings.

  ‘Tell PM that the external affairs ministry is not even allowing me to reply to questions in Parliament,’ Anand would complain to me. During the debate in Parliament on the nuclear deal, Anand had to lobby to get a speaking opportunity and got one only when the PM intervened to suggest that he be allowed to speak. The PM would try to compensate him for this neglect by his immediate boss by occasionally taking him abroad on his visits.

  When the nuclear deal became a political hot potato for the Congress, some in the party would brief journalists on the Congress party beat that the party was not as keen as the PM on taking this forward. Almost always, the reason given would be the so-called ‘minority vote’, minority being a euphemism in India for ‘Muslim’. When the Left and the BJP started raising their pitch, and the Congress party remained diffident in extending its support to Dr Singh, it was finally left to him to defend himself.

  In fact, fairly early in the game, on his flight to the US in July 2005, the mild-mannered Dr Singh lost his cool when a journalist asked for his response to the criticism that he was deviating from the ‘national consensus on foreign policy’ by seeking closer relations with the US. He retorted: ‘Can you imagine any prime minister consciously or unconsciously selling India? Nobody can sell India. India is not on sale. Nobody has to teach us lessons on patriotism.’

  While he had to battle it out pretty much on his own when it came to defending the government’s engagement with the US, Dr Singh found wider support within his party on his initiatives with China and Pakistan. Everyone welcomed ‘normalization of relations’ with both neighbours and a resolution of the border problem. What very few recognized was that any success on those two fronts was linked to success on the Western front. Improved relations with the US were the key to better relations with China, Pakistan and much of the rest of the world. This simple fact, one that Subrahmanyam ingrained in Dr Singh, escaped most of Dr Singh’s critics.

  While the key security and foreign policy challenge that Dr Singh had to deal with in the last months of his first term was the fallout from the Mumbai terror attack of November 2008, it was only fitting that the second major challenge was in a field that he was truly interested in—international economic diplomacy.

  India’s entry into the newly created leaders’ summit of the G-20 was a tribute to Indian diplomacy in UPA-1. The G-20 was created to offer a portmanteau platform of major economies within which the US and the EU could deal with China. When the USSR disintegrated and Russia made peace with the West, the G-7 expanded to include Russia and became the G-8. Something similar could have happened in 2008 when the US and the EU discovered they would need Chinese cooperation to handle the fallout of the post-Lehmann ‘transatlantic’ financial crisis.

  Indeed, Fred Bergsten, at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC, even wrote an essay suggesting that the US and China come together into a ‘G-2’ and manage the global economic slowdown and crisis. President Nicholas Sarkozy of France was horrified. He flew down to Camp David to meet President Bush and suggested that the G-20 finance ministers group should meet at the heads of government / state level and discuss the global crisis.

  Over the previous decade, from 2000 onwards, the G-8 would invite several ‘emerging economy’ leaders to their summit meetings for an ‘outreach’ meet. This group came to include Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. Sarkozy convinced Bush that instead of a G-8 plus 5 summit, it might be best to create a new platform under the G-20. Bush readily accepted the idea since it was appealing to him that the US could deal with China in a larger group that would
include Mexico, India, Indonesia, Australia, Saudi Arabia and other economies.

  Dr Singh played an active role in the first two G-20 summits, in November 2008 and April 2009. The impressive performance of the Indian economy in the 2004-08 period and its ability to withstand the immediate impact of the Lehmann collapse contributed to India’s global standing and to Dr Singh’s global image. Leaving the London G-20 summit in April 2009, President Barack Obama went to Germany where a young school student asked him which politician he admired. Obama’s instant reply was that among existing world leaders he admired Dr Singh of India the most.

  The robust performance of the economy during UPA-1 provided the policy space within which Dr Singh could push his ideas on economic interdependence, the irrelevance of borders and the importance of strategic partnerships defined by economic interests. The Subrahmanyam task force also drew pointed attention to the strategic importance of sustained economic growth.

  The keys to India’s ‘tryst with destiny’ were, first, overcoming the challenge of wiping out ‘poverty, ignorance and disease’, as Nehru reminded the nation in 1947, and, second, creating a competitive economy that would enable India to rebuild the ‘bridges of mutual interdependence’ with the world, as Dr Singh reminded the India Today Conclave. In short, ‘India must do what it must at home’ for it to be able to deal more confidently with the world.

  That, the world believed, India was doing in UPA-1. Once the economy began to falter and the government became wobbly, India and its PM lost their sheen, underscoring the fact that the ‘Manmohan Singh Doctrine’ requires as its foundation a rapidly growing and dynamic economy capable of overcoming domestic challenges, facing international competition and being engaged with the global economy.

  10

  Making Borders Irrelevant

  ‘I dream of a day when, while retaining our respective national identities, one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul. That is how my forefathers lived. That is how I want our grandchildren to live.’

  Manmohan Singh, FICCI annual general meeting

  8 January 2007

  The Indian subcontinent was always a crossroads between Asia to its east and Asia to its west. Conquerors, travellers, traders and teachers set foot or set sail and moved across Asia through India. The Indian cultural and economic footprint extended from the banks of the Mediterranean to the Pacific, from the coasts of East Africa and the Arab/Persian Gulf to the coasts of Vietnam and Indonesia. India was both enriched and impoverished by such flows of people across the Indus and the Gangetic plains.

  It was this vision of India that shaped Dr Singh’s approach to India’s relations with its neighbours, including Pakistan, the land of his birth. Partition in 1947, and the creation of Pakistan, could never be reversed but why should political boundaries now come in the way of free movement of today’s travellers, traders and teachers when they had not done so over centuries? He spoke about a subcontinent without borders or, as he put it to Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, ‘where borders are mere lines on paper’.

  The state of India-Pakistan relations and the need to find a lasting solution to the problem of Jammu and Kashmir, had occupied Dr Singh’s attention for years. His interest in it predated his prime ministership and he kept himself informed on what was happening in J&K. So it was not surprising that while preparing for his first visit as PM to the UN General Assembly, in September 2004, Dr Singh devoted considerable time to his planned meeting with President Pervez Musharraf.

  To create a favourable environment for the meeting, India took the initiative to announce unilateral liberalization of the visa regime for Pakistani academics, businessmen and senior citizens. That some back- channel discussions had already taken place on Kashmir was evident from the fact that President Musharraf made no reference to the troubled issue in his speech. Singh reciprocated the gesture by telling the UN General Assembly that he ‘reaffirmed’ India’s determination to carry forward the dialogue with Pakistan initiated by his predecessor, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, in January 2004, ‘to a purposeful and mutually acceptable conclusion’.

  Those statements set the tone for the meeting of the two leaders at New York’s Roosevelt Hotel on 24 September 2004. While Dr Singh drove to the hotel with a delegation that included External Affairs Minister Natwar Singh, the two leaders chose to meet without aides and talked for over an hour. Earlier it had been decided that the two would not meet the media and only a spokesperson would brief journalists. But as the meeting came to an end, they announced that they would like to jointly address the media.

  Almost fifty to sixty waiting journalists from both countries had to be security checked and allowed into the hotel lobby within minutes. The hotel did not have a suitable conference room, so it was decided that the two leaders would stand in a wide corridor outside the room where they met and make a statement. As TV crews set up their cameras, it was left to MEA spokesperson Navtej Sarna to get a hotel staffer to unscrew the ‘Exit’ sign on the wall so that the two leaders would not be caught on camera standing below it.

  The two then issued a bland joint statement, hurriedly drafted by their aides, that said they had ‘agreed that confidence-building measures of all categories under discussion between the two governments should be implemented keeping in mind practical possibilities’. It became clear that the two had a more wide-ranging conversation when, about a month after Musharraf returned home, the Pakistan correspondent of the Tribune reported from Islamabad, on 27 October 2004, that, ‘In a new formulation to resolve the vexed Kashmir issue, President Pervez Musharraf last night suggested that India and Pakistan consider the option of identifying some “regions” of Kashmir on both sides of Line of Control, demilitarize them and grant them the status of independence or joint control or under UN mandate.’ The report quoted Pakistan’s government-run TV channel, PTV, to say that Musharraf had said that ‘a solution to the lingering Kashmir problem cannot be found either by insisting on plebiscite or making the LoC (Line of Control) into a permanent border’.

  Even though the Indian government rejected this interpretation of the New York conversation, it encouraged a public debate on the pros and cons of Musharraf’s thinking. After all, the idea was originally canvassed by none other than Dr Singh. On the eve of his becoming prime minister, in May 2004, Dr Singh told journalist Jonathan Power (Statesman, 20 May 2004) in an off-the-record conversation that Power published without his permission, ‘Short of secession, short of redrawing boundaries, the Indian establishment can live with anything. Meanwhile, we need soft borders—then borders are not so important.’

  Enough had happened in backroom talks between September 2004 and February 2005 for Musharraf to want to carry the conversation forward. He chose to speed up things by publicly expressing his desire to watch the India-Pakistan one-day cricket matches scheduled for that spring. Musharraf’s public solicitation of an invitation from India was met with stunning silence from New Delhi.

  After waiting for a couple of days, the Indian media became restive and sought a response. Several journalists called me to find out if the PM was aware of Musharraf’s stated desire and whether he would invite the Pakistan President to come watch a match. I walked into the PM’s room in South Block and sought an answer.

  ‘I have been advised that this is not a good time for a visit because the budget session is going on,’ the PM told me. ‘The foreign ministry will inform Pakistan that the visit can take place sometime later.’

  I asked the PM if he and his diplomatic advisers had considered what headline they would get the next morning: ‘Musharraf wants to go to India to watch a cricket match. India says no!’

  The PM laughed and asked, ‘So what do you think we should do? You realize if he visits India, it will not be just to watch a cricket match but for formal discussions.’

  True, I said, but for now Musharraf was only seeking an invitation to watch a cricket match. It was clear from the PM’s demeanour that he was quite will
ing to invite Musharraf and continue their conversation from where they had left it in September 2004. In fact, while we were speaking, he summoned Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran and national security adviser Narayanan. Within minutes they joined us. ‘Sanjaya says I must invite Musharraf,’ he told his two nonplussed senior aides, who already appeared unhappy to find me present at such a hurriedly convened meeting with the PM. This was, of course, his old tactic of putting his own views into other people’s mouths. Those unfamiliar with his style would offer a counterview, thinking they were responding to a view other than the PM’s own. Those who had come to know Dr Singh well would realize this was just the PM’s way of expressing his own view, while retaining an exit route. Perhaps both Narayanan and Shyam understood this, but neither hesitated to disagree with my view. Shyam shared Dr Singh’s vision on most foreign policy issues but on Pakistan he was a hawk and was as sceptical as Narayanan about Pakistan’s readiness to normalize relations with India. We were soon joined by Nair and Pulok and I was pleased when they both agreed with me. The PM turned to Shyam and asked him to draft a letter of invitation to Musharraf. The meeting had ended.

  I was asked not to breathe a word of this plan to the media till the diplomats had done their job of deciding the date and the venue, and getting a formal acceptance of the PM’s invitation from Islamabad. For two days, I heard nothing more about this and had to fob off an eager media which kept asking me: ‘Will the PM invite Musharraf?’ I was told by a colleague that both Shyam and Narayanan were in discussions with state governments to figure out which match Musharraf should be invited to—the one in Visakhapatnam or the one in Kochi.