April 11, 2014 | UPDATED 20:11 IST
The power and importance of the principal secretary to the PM has always been dependent on the latter's political clout, apart from the officer's own standing within the civil service. As the bureaucratic link between the PM and senior ministers and secretaries to government, the principal secretary commands authority and influences policy. Most principal secretaries have been extremely capable men, well regarded by their peers and respected by their subordinates, like P.N. Haksar in Indira Gandhi's PMO, P.C. Alexander in Rajiv's, A.N. Varma in P.V. Narasimha Rao's, Satish Chandran in Gowda's, N.N. Vohra in Gujral's and Brajesh Mishra in Vajpayee's. However, every now and then, a nondescript official of limited talent has also adorned that job.
Since Manmohan Singh's PMO also included a special adviser, a novelty created to accommodate M.K. Narayanan, part of the NSA's turf, namely the area of internal security, was hived off to him.
J.N. 'Mani' Dixit was, without doubt, the dominant personality among the three (Narayanan, T.K.A. Nair and Dixit). His stature ensured that T.K.A. Nair was not quite the 'principal' secretary that many of his predecessors had been. Of course, Nair's immediate predecessor, the larger-than-life Brajesh Mishra, was more than just a principal secretary. I once jokingly remarked to Dr Singh that in Vajpayee's time the principal secretary functioned as if he were the PM, while in his case it was being said that the PM functioned like a principal secretary. This was a comment on Dr Singh's attention to detail, his involvement in the nitty-gritty of administration, his chairing of long and tedious meetings with officials, which Vajpayee rarely did. He ignored the remark, knowing well that it was also a taunt, drawing attention to the fact that Sonia was the political boss.
Nair was not Dr Singh's first choice for the all-important post of principal secretary. He had hoped to induct Vohra, who had given me news of my job. Not only was he a fellow refugee from west Punjab, now Pakistan, but both had taught in Punjab University and Vohra also went to Oxford, though some years after Dr Singh. Vohra even cancelled a scheduled visit to London to be able to join the PMO. Sonia Gandhi had another retired IAS officer, a Tamilian whose name I am not at liberty to disclose, in mind for the job. He had worked with Rajiv Gandhi and was regarded as a capable and honest official. However, he declined Sonia's invitation to rejoin government on a matter of principle-he had promised his father that he would never seek a government job after retirement.
With
these two distinguished officers ruled out, Dr Singh turned to Nair, a
retired IAS officer who had worked briefly as secretary to the PM in
Gujral's PMO and had also served as Punjab's chief secretary, the top
bureaucrat in the state. Nair's name was strongly backed by a friend of
Dr Singh's family, Rashpal Malhotra, chairman of the Chandigarh-based
Centre for Research on Rural and Industrial Development (CRRID). Dr
Singh himself was the chairman of the CRRID and Nair a member of its
governing board. Apart from his stint in the Gujral PMO, Nair had
neither held the rank of secretary in any of the powerful ministries on
Raisina Hill-home, finance and defence-nor in any key economic ministry.
He had only done so in the less powerful ministries of rural
development and environment and forests. In short, he was a bureaucratic
lightweight.
Always impeccably attired, Nair, small-built and short, lacked the presence of a Brajesh Mishra, whose striking demeanour commanded attention. He rarely gave expression to a clear or bold opinion on file, always signing off with a 'please discuss' and preferring to give oral instructions to junior officials such as joint secretaries and deputy secretaries. They would then be required to put those instructions on file as their own advice. It was classic bureaucratic risk aversion aimed at never getting into any controversy or trouble. Nair depended a great deal on Pulok Chatterjee, a joint secretary who had worked with both Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia, for advice on important policy decisions.
Pulok, like Nair, suffered from the handicap that his own service had never regarded him as one of its bright sparks. A serving IAS officer, he had never worked in any important ministry. He was inducted into Rajiv's PMO as a deputy secretary after having served as a district official in Amethi, his constituency in Uttar Pradesh, where he had caught Rajiv's eye. After Rajiv's death, he chose to work for the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation where he did some worthwhile social development work. But this meant that he was not just outside government but completely identified with the Gandhi family. When Pulok returned to government, it was to work on the personal staff of Sonia Gandhi when she was leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha.
Pulok, who was inducted into the Manmohan Singh PMO at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, had regular, almost daily, meetings with Sonia at which he was said to brief her on the key policy issues of the day and seek her instructions on important files to be cleared by the PM. Indeed, Pulok was the single most important point of regular contact between the PM and Sonia. He was also the PMO's main point of contact with the National Advisory Council (NAC), a high-profile advisory body chaired by Sonia Gandhi...
Even with its combined strength, I felt that the Nair-Pulok duo was not a patch on the magisterial Brajesh Mishra who ran Vajpayee's PMO with great aplomb. Even though he was a diplomat by training, Mishra, the son of a former Congress chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, had politics in his genes and knew exactly what stratagems to adopt to strengthen the authority of the PM in a coalition government. His other great qualification, one that both Nair and Pulok lacked, was that he was a risk-taker. On critical occasions, Mishra was willing to push the envelope and take things forward on behalf of the PM. He established that reputation by taking the decision, along with Vajpayee, to conduct nuclear tests in May 1998 and declare India a nuclear weapons state. Mishra's stature consolidated and expanded Vajpayee's clout within the government.
***
'National Security Adviser became the effective boss of IB and R&AW'
PM declined to take daily briefings from intelligence chiefs
It was clear to me that Dr Singh shared a bond with him (Mani Dixit) that was never there between him and Narayanan. It seemed plausible that the latter had been inducted as the third leg of PMO leadership as a concession to Sonia. MK, or Mike, as his contemporaries called him, was the intelligence czar who had headed the Intelligence Bureau (IB), India's internal intelligence agency, under both Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao. He earned his spurs by playing a role in the unseating of the first-ever democratically elected communist government in the world, E.M.S. Namboodiripad's ministry in Kerala, way back in 1957. He was director, IB, when Rajiv was assassinated. Narayanan's favourite line was, 'I have a file on you.' He used it, humourously, with ministers, officials, journalists and others he met, leaving them, however, with the uneasy feeling that he wasn't really joking. Indeed, Narayanan himself gave currency to the tales that circulated about his proclivity to snoop on everyone. He seemed to derive great pleasure in letting me know that he kept a tab on the credit-card spending of influential editors. On long flights in the PM's aircraft, he would regale us with stories about how various prime ministers had summoned him for information on their colleagues.
If
those stories were true, Dr Singh was clearly the exception to that
rule. He not only resisted the temptation to spy on his colleagues, but
gave up even the opportunity to be offered such information by declining
to take a daily briefing from the intelligence chiefs. He was the first
prime minister not to do so. The chiefs of both the IB and the Research
and Analysis Wing (R&AW) were told to report to the NSA instead. I
didn't think the intelligence chiefs would deliver their best if they
reported to an intermediary instead of the prime minister himself, and
repeatedly implored him to take a direct daily briefing from them. Every
now and then he would, but the NSA became their effective boss in the
UPA PMO.
Narayanan,
when he succeeded Dixit as NSA, used this power to its limits, and not
without controversy-he was accused by R&AW officers of being partial
to the IB. But his control over the system also derived from his
professional competence and the respect he commanded even from junior
officers for his non-hierarchical style of functioning. He would deal
directly with them, not bothering about rank and protocol and focusing
on getting the job done. My nickname for him, while talking to friends,
was 'Ed', for J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful boss of the FBI of whom even
US presidents were wary. Dr Singh too was wary of Narayanan's
reputation and would, on occasion, warn me to be cautious while carrying
out sensitive assignments for him that he did not want anyone to know
about.
***
'Active morality for himself, but passive morality for others'
Manmohan turned a blind eye to corruption by his colleagues
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 A. Raja finally was, he let
the law take its course. 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.
***
'I do not want you to project my image'
PM let Rahul take credit for nREGA and UPA winning a second term
When the idea of a rural employment guarantee scheme travelled to the PMO from the NAC and the rural development ministry, it was received enthusiastically by Dr Singh, who was familiar with Maharashtra's early initiatives in this regard. As the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission in the 1980s, Dr Singh had studied this scheme and had been impressed by it. Hence, he was in favour of implementing this programme at the national level and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was nothing more than a variant of MEGS (Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Scheme).
The
so-called differences on MGNREGA between the PMO and the finance
ministry on the one hand, and the NAC on the other, related mainly to
the financial implications of the programme with estimates of how much
it would cost the exchequer varying from 1 to 3 per cent of national
income. Neither Dr Singh nor P. Chidambaram wanted an open-ended fiscal
commitment, since the benefits of the programme were to be based on
self-selection. That is, only a person seeking employment under the
MGNREGA would be offered it for the number of days and at a wage rate
specified. This would mean that at the beginning of the year the
government would not know how many would come forward to seek the
benefit.
The
minister for rural development Dr Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, a one-time
physics professor and a genial grassroots politician for whom Dr Singh
had high regard and great affection, played an important role as a
bridge between the fiscal conservatives and the populists.
The Congress party's obsession with giving the entire credit for MGNREGA to the Gandhi family reached a point where it may have actually embarrassed the family. When I tried to correct that impression, I found myself in a spot of trouble. On September 26, 2007, shortly after he was appointed one of the party's general secretaries, Rahul Gandhi led a delegation of all the party general secretaries to greet Dr Singh on his birthday. After the courtesies and tea and dhokla were done with, the delegation settled down to a discussion on policy issues. At the end of the meeting, Sonia's poIitical secretary, Ahmed Patel, handed over a statement about the meeting, requesting me to release it to the press.
The statement claimed that Rahul Gandhi had urged the PM to extend the scope of NREGA (this was before it was named after Mahatma Gandhi and consequently became MGNREGA) to all the 500-odd rural districts in the country. Until then, it was being implemented only in 200 of the most backward districts. I told Patel that it was not the practice of the PMO to issue press statements on behalf of those who visited the PM, and that I would draft a statement of my own stating that a delegation of party general secretaries led by Rahul had come to greet the PM on his birthday. As for the political content of the statement, it was better, I suggested, that it came in a separate statement from the party office.
Later that evening, a senior political journalist (then) at the Indian Express, called me to find out if Dr Singh had accepted Rahul's suggestion and whether NREGA would now be extended to the entire country. I reminded him that the prime minister had already stated his commitment to doing so in his Independence Day speech the previous month, and that the PMO was in discussion on this very point with the ministries of rural development and finance.
That evening, all TV channels dutifully reported the Congress party's statement that Rahul had asked the PM to extend NREGA to the entire country, and the next morning's papers did the same. Only the Indian Express made the additional remark in its dispatch the next day that 'Sources said that this issue had been on the PMO radar even before Rahul's elevation to the party post. The Principal Secretary to the PM had already discussed the issue with officials from the Finance Ministry, Rural Development Ministry and Planning Commission almost two weeks ago.'...
I
sent an SMS, half in jest, to a journalist who wanted to know more
about the programme's national roll-out, that this announcement was the
PM's birthday gift to the country. After all, if Sonia or Rahul had been
PM, that is precisely how the party's strategists would have spun out
such an announcement on a leader's birthday.
It later transpired that this SMS had made the rounds and reached the party leadership. One senior leader told a senior editor, 'What does Baru think? He thinks Doctor Saheb [Dr Singh] can win us elections? We have to project Rahulji's image and this kind of SMS does not help.'
When I heard this, I knew I was in trouble. Sure enough, I was summoned by the PM for a dressing-down. As I entered the antechamber of his room, Nair, Narayanan and Pulok were walking out. Noting that all three scrupulousIy avoided eye contact with me, I realized this was going to be serious. When I went in, Dr Singh was seated, arms folded and wearing an angry look.
'Did you send an SMS to journalists that the expansion of the NREGA is my birthday gift?'
I said I did, but half in jest... The PM sat stiff in stony silence. I broke the silence by adding, 'The party wants to give the entire credit for this decision to Rahul. But both you and Raghuvansh Prasad deserve as much credit.'
'I do not want any credit for myself,' he snapped. He was still red with anger.
'Sir, it is my job to project your image and secure the political credit due to you. Let the party do that for Sonia and Rahul. I have to do this for you.'
'No!' he snapped again. 'I do not want you to project my image.'
***
'So who is the architect of this victory?' the CNN-IBN reporter asked Prithvi (Prithviraj Chavan, now Maharashtra chief minister). 'Sonia Gandhi or Manmohan Singh?'
Prithvi, the man who was handpicked by Dr Singh to be his MoS in the PMO and kept there for a full five years despite a lacklustre record, said the politically correct thing, 'Both!' He then added a spin, 'This victory is a vote for Rahul Gandhi. Rahulji's good work helped us win!'
The
chant became the official mantra. Rahul Gandhi, every party loyalist
claimed, was the architect of the 2009 result. In the very hour of
victory, its authorship was denied to the man who made it happen.
The way I saw it, if the Congress had lost, the blame for the defeat would have been placed squarely on the PM's shoulders. It would be said his obsession with the nuclear deal cost the party the support of the Left and the Muslims. His 'neo-liberal' economic policies would have been deemed to have alienated the poor. His attempt to befriend then Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf would have been regarded as having alienated the Hindu vote. A hundred explanations would have been trotted out to pin the defeat on the PM. Now that the party was back in office, and that too with more numbers than anyone in the party had forecast, the credit would go to the party's 'first family'. To the scion and future leader. It was Rahul's victory, not Manmohan's.
After the elections, Dr Singh did try to be more assertive, taking a view on who would be in his Cabinet and who would not, and resisting the induction of the DMK's Raja and T.R Baalu, for their unsavoury reputations. Watching from the sidelines, I had hoped he would not buckle under pressure. Dr Singh stood his ground for a day, managed to keep Baalu out, but had to yield ground on Raja under pressure from his own party. To me, it was a reiteration of the message that the victory was not his but the family's.
***
'He did not want to become more popular with the media and the general public than Sonia'PM's low profile seen as a virtue in UPA 1 but criticised in UPA 2
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 news magazine 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.
***
'Pranab Mukherjee would "forget" to brief the Prime Minister on his meetings'
Manmohan had no control over his Cabinet colleagues
Pranab Mukherjee,
now President of India, 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 (George W.) 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.
***
Pranab and A.K. Antony, as successive defence ministers in UPA-1, were reportedly not enthusiastic about a deal on Siachen, though Sonia had blessed the peace formula. The armed forces were ambivalent, with retired generals who had served in Siachen favouring a deal to end the agony of the troops serving in that inhospitable terrain, but serving generals not willing to trust Pakistan on a deal...
Antony was politically
conservative and risk averse and depended excessively on the advice of
IAS officers inexperienced in strategic policy and defence. His
stewardship of the defence ministry has been widely criticized for this
reason.
To add to this, Dr Singh had to also contend with a declining quality of defence services leadership, which has since become all too visible. For me, the first sign of this decline was evident in the manner in which army chief General J.J. Singh dealt with the Siachen issue. In closed-door briefings, the general would say that a deal with Pakistan was doable, but in public he would back Antony when the defence minister chose not to back the PM.
I was never sure whether Antony's hawkish stance was because he genuinely disagreed with the Siachen initiative or whether he was merely toeing a Nehru-Gandhi family line that would not allow Dr Singh to be the one finally normalizing relations with Pakistan. After all the Kashmir problem had its roots in Nehru's policies.
***
'It is for the party to decide if I should contest'
Not contesting Lok Sabha polls denied PM political authority
I suggested to Dr Singh that now that the elections had been called, he should contest a seat in the Lok Sabha. If the party returned to power, he would be PM again, but this time, I argued, he should be in the Lok Sabha. Even if the party lost, he would at least have the satisfaction of ending his political career by winning a seat in the House of the Poeple. Ever since his defeat in the South Delhi constituency in 1999, which his family and friends suspected had partly been caused by internal sabotage by Congressmen, this had been a touchy topic.
I was convinced, even more than before, that the prime minister's decision not to return to office via the Lok Sabha was his biggest political mistake. The political authority and legitimacy that a second term in office offers a head of government was denied to him by his remaining a member of the Upper House and not securing for himself the imprimatur of a popular mandate. He could easily have said to Sonia that he would prefer to retire as PM than to once again return to the job from the Rajya Sabha. If she had refused him a safe Lok Sabha seat he could have gone into retirement on health grounds.
***
As UPA-2 began to unravel, another Mahabharata comparison came to suggest itself to some of Dr Singh's critics. For all his wisdom and strategic brilliance, and despite the enormous respect he commanded from both sides of a family at war, Bheeshma faced his most embarrassing moment when the hapless Draupadi asked him why he could not protect her when she was being disrobed. She mocks Bheeshma for seeking refuge in the finer points of dharma.
An
angry and troubled Bheeshma remains silent. Dr Singh's silences in
UPA-2, for which the media mocked him, made me wonder whether he too was
consumed by impotent rage like Bheeshma.
Like Greek epics and Shakespearean plays, Indian epics too have no untainted heroes. Leave alone mortals, even the gods have flaws; Lord Rama's treatment of Sita raises a question that has never gone away. There are questions that will probably haunt Dr Singh too, most of all: why did he not quit when he realised he had lost all vestiges of control over his own government? If his failure to do so arose from loyalty to the Congress or a promise to Sonia, it was misplaced-and unrewarded-loyalty. Except it enabled him to remain in office, even if not in power. His apparent commitment to ensuring Rahul's succession, perpetuating the Congress party's control by one family, was even more misplaced. That was Bheeshma's failure too: he should have put his foot down on the Kaurava succession. Moreover, promising loyalty to hereditary succession is a monarchical attribute, not a democratic one. That was Dr Singh's fatal error of judgement. n
When Indira Gandhi lost in 1977, she fought back by campaigning long and hard. Sixty-two days and nights of travelling 1,000 km a day, addressing 10 meetings, which meant that she had been seen or heard byone in four voters.
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The power and importance of the principal secretary to the PM has always been dependent on the latter's political clout, apart from the officer's own standing within the civil service. As the bureaucratic link between the PM and senior ministers and secretaries to government, the principal secretary commands authority and influences policy. Most principal secretaries have been extremely capable men, well regarded by their peers and respected by their subordinates, like P.N. Haksar in Indira Gandhi's PMO, P.C. Alexander in Rajiv's, A.N. Varma in P.V. Narasimha Rao's, Satish Chandran in Gowda's, N.N. Vohra in Gujral's and Brajesh Mishra in Vajpayee's. However, every now and then, a nondescript official of limited talent has also adorned that job.
Since Manmohan Singh's PMO also included a special adviser, a novelty created to accommodate M.K. Narayanan, part of the NSA's turf, namely the area of internal security, was hived off to him.
J.N. 'Mani' Dixit was, without doubt, the dominant personality among the three (Narayanan, T.K.A. Nair and Dixit). His stature ensured that T.K.A. Nair was not quite the 'principal' secretary that many of his predecessors had been. Of course, Nair's immediate predecessor, the larger-than-life Brajesh Mishra, was more than just a principal secretary. I once jokingly remarked to Dr Singh that in Vajpayee's time the principal secretary functioned as if he were the PM, while in his case it was being said that the PM functioned like a principal secretary. This was a comment on Dr Singh's attention to detail, his involvement in the nitty-gritty of administration, his chairing of long and tedious meetings with officials, which Vajpayee rarely did. He ignored the remark, knowing well that it was also a taunt, drawing attention to the fact that Sonia was the political boss.
Nair was not Dr Singh's first choice for the all-important post of principal secretary. He had hoped to induct Vohra, who had given me news of my job. Not only was he a fellow refugee from west Punjab, now Pakistan, but both had taught in Punjab University and Vohra also went to Oxford, though some years after Dr Singh. Vohra even cancelled a scheduled visit to London to be able to join the PMO. Sonia Gandhi had another retired IAS officer, a Tamilian whose name I am not at liberty to disclose, in mind for the job. He had worked with Rajiv Gandhi and was regarded as a capable and honest official. However, he declined Sonia's invitation to rejoin government on a matter of principle-he had promised his father that he would never seek a government job after retirement.
Sanjaya Baru with Manmohan Singh in 2007
Always impeccably attired, Nair, small-built and short, lacked the presence of a Brajesh Mishra, whose striking demeanour commanded attention. He rarely gave expression to a clear or bold opinion on file, always signing off with a 'please discuss' and preferring to give oral instructions to junior officials such as joint secretaries and deputy secretaries. They would then be required to put those instructions on file as their own advice. It was classic bureaucratic risk aversion aimed at never getting into any controversy or trouble. Nair depended a great deal on Pulok Chatterjee, a joint secretary who had worked with both Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia, for advice on important policy decisions.
Pulok, like Nair, suffered from the handicap that his own service had never regarded him as one of its bright sparks. A serving IAS officer, he had never worked in any important ministry. He was inducted into Rajiv's PMO as a deputy secretary after having served as a district official in Amethi, his constituency in Uttar Pradesh, where he had caught Rajiv's eye. After Rajiv's death, he chose to work for the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation where he did some worthwhile social development work. But this meant that he was not just outside government but completely identified with the Gandhi family. When Pulok returned to government, it was to work on the personal staff of Sonia Gandhi when she was leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha.
Pulok, who was inducted into the Manmohan Singh PMO at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, had regular, almost daily, meetings with Sonia at which he was said to brief her on the key policy issues of the day and seek her instructions on important files to be cleared by the PM. Indeed, Pulok was the single most important point of regular contact between the PM and Sonia. He was also the PMO's main point of contact with the National Advisory Council (NAC), a high-profile advisory body chaired by Sonia Gandhi...
Even with its combined strength, I felt that the Nair-Pulok duo was not a patch on the magisterial Brajesh Mishra who ran Vajpayee's PMO with great aplomb. Even though he was a diplomat by training, Mishra, the son of a former Congress chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, had politics in his genes and knew exactly what stratagems to adopt to strengthen the authority of the PM in a coalition government. His other great qualification, one that both Nair and Pulok lacked, was that he was a risk-taker. On critical occasions, Mishra was willing to push the envelope and take things forward on behalf of the PM. He established that reputation by taking the decision, along with Vajpayee, to conduct nuclear tests in May 1998 and declare India a nuclear weapons state. Mishra's stature consolidated and expanded Vajpayee's clout within the government.
***
'National Security Adviser became the effective boss of IB and R&AW'
PM declined to take daily briefings from intelligence chiefs
It was clear to me that Dr Singh shared a bond with him (Mani Dixit) that was never there between him and Narayanan. It seemed plausible that the latter had been inducted as the third leg of PMO leadership as a concession to Sonia. MK, or Mike, as his contemporaries called him, was the intelligence czar who had headed the Intelligence Bureau (IB), India's internal intelligence agency, under both Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao. He earned his spurs by playing a role in the unseating of the first-ever democratically elected communist government in the world, E.M.S. Namboodiripad's ministry in Kerala, way back in 1957. He was director, IB, when Rajiv was assassinated. Narayanan's favourite line was, 'I have a file on you.' He used it, humourously, with ministers, officials, journalists and others he met, leaving them, however, with the uneasy feeling that he wasn't really joking. Indeed, Narayanan himself gave currency to the tales that circulated about his proclivity to snoop on everyone. He seemed to derive great pleasure in letting me know that he kept a tab on the credit-card spending of influential editors. On long flights in the PM's aircraft, he would regale us with stories about how various prime ministers had summoned him for information on their colleagues.
Sonia Gandhi at a party meeting on January 17
| M.KarunanidhiIt was
Dr Singh who had negotiated the DMK's entry into the UPAwith M.
Karunanidhi in January 2004 and had gone to great lengths to be
deferential to him.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 P.V. 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 sympathisers of the LTTE, her husband's killers. |
***
'Active morality for himself, but passive morality for others'
Manmohan turned a blind eye to corruption by his colleagues
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.
| Jairam RameshIn
2005, when he asked me whether I thought Jairam Ramesh should be
inducted into government, I replied that Jairam ought to be more
demonstrative of his loyalty to the PM if he wanted a berth in the
ministry. I was taken aback when, a few days later, Montek Singh
Ahluwalia took me aside at a Christmas party at journalist T.N. Ninan's
house and asked me why I was opposing Jairam's induction... I am not
aware of what transpired after that, but in the following month,January
2006, Jairam did get inducted as a minister of state in the commerce
ministry. I was not surprised to learn that Jairam later called on
Sonia's friend Suman Dubey and thanked him for the job. Politics is about power and patronage, and ministerial positions are won not just on the basis of competence but also in recognition of a politician's clout or loyalty to the leader. For Congress MPs, the leader to please was always Sonia.That Jairam's loyalty was only with Sonia became clearer within weeks of his becoming minister when he chose to embarrass the PM by leaking a letter that Sonia had written to Dr Singh cautioning him against pursuing an initiative he valued a lot-the free trade agreement with member countries of the ASEAN. |
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.
***
'I do not want you to project my image'
PM let Rahul take credit for nREGA and UPA winning a second term
When the idea of a rural employment guarantee scheme travelled to the PMO from the NAC and the rural development ministry, it was received enthusiastically by Dr Singh, who was familiar with Maharashtra's early initiatives in this regard. As the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission in the 1980s, Dr Singh had studied this scheme and had been impressed by it. Hence, he was in favour of implementing this programme at the national level and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was nothing more than a variant of MEGS (Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Scheme).
Rahul Gandhi at a road show at Kathpara village in Assam on February 26
| 'She has let me down'On
October 12 , 2007, both Sonia Gandhi and Dr Singh spoke at the
Hindustan Times Summit. She said the survival of the government took
precedence over the nuclear deal and while the Congress would continue
to try and win over the Left it would do nothing to force the issue and
risk a break with the Left. In a pointed question, the newspaper's editorial director asked him,'You made a statement to a newspaper which was a bit out of sync with your persona and that started all the controversy. Do you think you overstepped a bit?' Dr Singh responded with uncharacteristic firmness,'I don't think I overstepped. I was responding to a public statement issued by the four Left parties and I don't think I overstepped. I am quite conscious of my responsibilities and what I should say and what I should not say.' He returned home deeply disappointed.As I took leave of him he asked me,'Who are the wise men around whom I can turn to for advice?' I said I knew only two wise men.One was my father, who happened to be in Delhi that day, and the other my guru, K. Subrahmanyam. 'She has let me down,'he said to both in the separate meetings he had with them, in a voice tinged more with sadness than anger. |
The Congress party's obsession with giving the entire credit for MGNREGA to the Gandhi family reached a point where it may have actually embarrassed the family. When I tried to correct that impression, I found myself in a spot of trouble. On September 26, 2007, shortly after he was appointed one of the party's general secretaries, Rahul Gandhi led a delegation of all the party general secretaries to greet Dr Singh on his birthday. After the courtesies and tea and dhokla were done with, the delegation settled down to a discussion on policy issues. At the end of the meeting, Sonia's poIitical secretary, Ahmed Patel, handed over a statement about the meeting, requesting me to release it to the press.
The statement claimed that Rahul Gandhi had urged the PM to extend the scope of NREGA (this was before it was named after Mahatma Gandhi and consequently became MGNREGA) to all the 500-odd rural districts in the country. Until then, it was being implemented only in 200 of the most backward districts. I told Patel that it was not the practice of the PMO to issue press statements on behalf of those who visited the PM, and that I would draft a statement of my own stating that a delegation of party general secretaries led by Rahul had come to greet the PM on his birthday. As for the political content of the statement, it was better, I suggested, that it came in a separate statement from the party office.
Later that evening, a senior political journalist (then) at the Indian Express, called me to find out if Dr Singh had accepted Rahul's suggestion and whether NREGA would now be extended to the entire country. I reminded him that the prime minister had already stated his commitment to doing so in his Independence Day speech the previous month, and that the PMO was in discussion on this very point with the ministries of rural development and finance.
That evening, all TV channels dutifully reported the Congress party's statement that Rahul had asked the PM to extend NREGA to the entire country, and the next morning's papers did the same. Only the Indian Express made the additional remark in its dispatch the next day that 'Sources said that this issue had been on the PMO radar even before Rahul's elevation to the party post. The Principal Secretary to the PM had already discussed the issue with officials from the Finance Ministry, Rural Development Ministry and Planning Commission almost two weeks ago.'...
| When the PM quitI
called on Dr Singh at 3 RCR. Both he and Mrs Kaur were seated in the
living room, each reading a book.That was such a familiar sight. I had
seen them this way on innumerable occasions; just the two of them,
reading together in companionable silence. When I asked him about
Sonia's message, sent through Montek,Dr Singh confirmed that she was
trying to persuade him to wait and not force the pace of events. I
warned him that if he did not act now, the rest of his term would be
wasted.The Left would smell victory and might even press for a change of
prime minister. I reminded him that the Left had a track record of doing just that.They had claimed credit for replacing the 'pro-business'Moraji Desai with the 'pro-farmer' Charan Singh in 1978...Now they would claim credit, I warned him, for replacing 'neo-liberal'Manmohan Singh with 'secular'Arjun Singh,'Bengali'Pranab-the CPI(M) was essentially a Bengal party-or 'leftist' Antony, who was an old ally of the comrades from Kerala.Dr Singh laughed.'I am ready to go. Anyone of them can be made PM.Why not?' |
It later transpired that this SMS had made the rounds and reached the party leadership. One senior leader told a senior editor, 'What does Baru think? He thinks Doctor Saheb [Dr Singh] can win us elections? We have to project Rahulji's image and this kind of SMS does not help.'
When I heard this, I knew I was in trouble. Sure enough, I was summoned by the PM for a dressing-down. As I entered the antechamber of his room, Nair, Narayanan and Pulok were walking out. Noting that all three scrupulousIy avoided eye contact with me, I realized this was going to be serious. When I went in, Dr Singh was seated, arms folded and wearing an angry look.
'Did you send an SMS to journalists that the expansion of the NREGA is my birthday gift?'
I said I did, but half in jest... The PM sat stiff in stony silence. I broke the silence by adding, 'The party wants to give the entire credit for this decision to Rahul. But both you and Raghuvansh Prasad deserve as much credit.'
'I do not want any credit for myself,' he snapped. He was still red with anger.
'Sir, it is my job to project your image and secure the political credit due to you. Let the party do that for Sonia and Rahul. I have to do this for you.'
'No!' he snapped again. 'I do not want you to project my image.'
***
'So who is the architect of this victory?' the CNN-IBN reporter asked Prithvi (Prithviraj Chavan, now Maharashtra chief minister). 'Sonia Gandhi or Manmohan Singh?'
Prithvi, the man who was handpicked by Dr Singh to be his MoS in the PMO and kept there for a full five years despite a lacklustre record, said the politically correct thing, 'Both!' He then added a spin, 'This victory is a vote for Rahul Gandhi. Rahulji's good work helped us win!'
| Sonia GandhiThere was very little social contact between the families of the two leaders.Rarely, too, did Dr Singh's daughters or Sonia's children join the Congress president and the prime minister at social gatherings. On the odd occasion, Sonia would call on Dr Singh to discuss family matters. There were, after all, few family elders available to give her advice on things that may have bothered her in her personal life. I was aware that on at least one occasion she came to see Dr Singh to discuss her concerns about Rahul's personal plans. Following that conversation, Dr Singh invited Rahul for lunch and the two spent time together. |
| Rahul GandhiThe telecom issue came on the back of public criticism of the government's handling of the 2010 Commonwealth Games.The Games fiasco was waiting to happen. At one point ,Dr Singh tried to get Rahul Gandhi interested, suggesting to him that just as his father,Rajiv, had acquired both administrative experience and a reputation for good organisation when he took charge of the 1982 Asian Games, the younger Gandhi could also make good use of this opportunity. Rahul showed no interest. |
The way I saw it, if the Congress had lost, the blame for the defeat would have been placed squarely on the PM's shoulders. It would be said his obsession with the nuclear deal cost the party the support of the Left and the Muslims. His 'neo-liberal' economic policies would have been deemed to have alienated the poor. His attempt to befriend then Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf would have been regarded as having alienated the Hindu vote. A hundred explanations would have been trotted out to pin the defeat on the PM. Now that the party was back in office, and that too with more numbers than anyone in the party had forecast, the credit would go to the party's 'first family'. To the scion and future leader. It was Rahul's victory, not Manmohan's.
After the elections, Dr Singh did try to be more assertive, taking a view on who would be in his Cabinet and who would not, and resisting the induction of the DMK's Raja and T.R Baalu, for their unsavoury reputations. Watching from the sidelines, I had hoped he would not buckle under pressure. Dr Singh stood his ground for a day, managed to keep Baalu out, but had to yield ground on Raja under pressure from his own party. To me, it was a reiteration of the message that the victory was not his but the family's.
***
'He did not want to become more popular with the media and the general public than Sonia'PM's low profile seen as a virtue in UPA 1 but criticised in UPA 2
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 news magazine 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.
Manmohan Singh with former US President George W. Bush at the White House in July 2005
***
'Pranab Mukherjee would "forget" to brief the Prime Minister on his meetings'
Manmohan had no control over his Cabinet colleagues
| Amar SinghAfter
all the hectic activity of the preceding days, Saturday,June 21 was a
quiet day. I had lunch at home and was enjoying a siesta when my mobile
phone rang.Afriend of the Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh was on the
line. 'Mr Baru, I have a message for you,' he said.'My friend Mr Amar
Singh is in hospital in Colorado. He wants you to tell the prime
minister that American doctors are very good and they are taking good
care of him. He is very happy there and he says Americans are such warm
and friendly people, we should have good relations with them.' Later that afternoon, I met Dr Singh and conveyed what was clearly a political signal from Amar Singh. He had hinted, through this intermediary, at the Samajwadi Party's willingness to support Dr Singh on the nuclear deal... Months later Amar Singh would claim credit for getting the nuclear deal done...'So who do you think are the architects of the nuclear deal?'he asked me.Before I could reply, he added,'You will say George Bush and Manmohan Singh. Let me tell you, it was George Bush and Amar Singh.' |
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.
***
Pranab and A.K. Antony, as successive defence ministers in UPA-1, were reportedly not enthusiastic about a deal on Siachen, though Sonia had blessed the peace formula. The armed forces were ambivalent, with retired generals who had served in Siachen favouring a deal to end the agony of the troops serving in that inhospitable terrain, but serving generals not willing to trust Pakistan on a deal...
| Pervez MusharrafAfter
watching the cricket match at Delhi's Ferozshah Kotla grounds, Dr Singh
and Musharraf went to Hyderabad House for a formal conversation. Musharraf was in a great mood because Pakistan had got off to a good start. In fact, the President, who had apparently been informed by his staff that Pakistan was set to win (which it did in the end), began the conversation saying, 'Doctor Saheb, if you and I decide,we can resolve all our disputes before lunch and go back to watch the match.' 'General Saheb, you are a soldier and much younger,' replied Dr Singh to Musharraf,'but you must allow for my age. I can only walk step by step.'The septuagenarian economist and the sixty-one-year-old general walked their talk. Over the next two years, they outlined a roadmap for the resolution of the Kashmir issue based on Dr Singh's famous formulation that 'borders cannot be changed, but they can be made irrelevant.' |
To add to this, Dr Singh had to also contend with a declining quality of defence services leadership, which has since become all too visible. For me, the first sign of this decline was evident in the manner in which army chief General J.J. Singh dealt with the Siachen issue. In closed-door briefings, the general would say that a deal with Pakistan was doable, but in public he would back Antony when the defence minister chose not to back the PM.
I was never sure whether Antony's hawkish stance was because he genuinely disagreed with the Siachen initiative or whether he was merely toeing a Nehru-Gandhi family line that would not allow Dr Singh to be the one finally normalizing relations with Pakistan. After all the Kashmir problem had its roots in Nehru's policies.
***
'It is for the party to decide if I should contest'
Not contesting Lok Sabha polls denied PM political authority
I suggested to Dr Singh that now that the elections had been called, he should contest a seat in the Lok Sabha. If the party returned to power, he would be PM again, but this time, I argued, he should be in the Lok Sabha. Even if the party lost, he would at least have the satisfaction of ending his political career by winning a seat in the House of the Poeple. Ever since his defeat in the South Delhi constituency in 1999, which his family and friends suspected had partly been caused by internal sabotage by Congressmen, this had been a touchy topic.
I was convinced, even more than before, that the prime minister's decision not to return to office via the Lok Sabha was his biggest political mistake. The political authority and legitimacy that a second term in office offers a head of government was denied to him by his remaining a member of the Upper House and not securing for himself the imprimatur of a popular mandate. He could easily have said to Sonia that he would prefer to retire as PM than to once again return to the job from the Rajya Sabha. If she had refused him a safe Lok Sabha seat he could have gone into retirement on health grounds.
***
As UPA-2 began to unravel, another Mahabharata comparison came to suggest itself to some of Dr Singh's critics. For all his wisdom and strategic brilliance, and despite the enormous respect he commanded from both sides of a family at war, Bheeshma faced his most embarrassing moment when the hapless Draupadi asked him why he could not protect her when she was being disrobed. She mocks Bheeshma for seeking refuge in the finer points of dharma.
| George W. BushWhatever
his political image, at a personal level Bush was warm and friendly.
Being shy and a poor conversationalist, Dr Singh always relaxed in the
company of men who were gregarious, and took an instant liking to Bush.
When the two first met in New York in September 2004, Bush was
deferential and, rather surprisingly for an American President, kept
addressing Dr Singh as 'Sir'.By the time they met in Delhi in March
2006, the two had become buddies. Bush's gesture of placing his arm around Dr Singh's shoulder as the two walked towards the media was frowned upon by some Indian diplomats and journalists, who read it as a patronising one. But to me,watching from close quarters, he seemed to be treating Dr Singh like a 'buddy'in a natural sort of way. |
Like Greek epics and Shakespearean plays, Indian epics too have no untainted heroes. Leave alone mortals, even the gods have flaws; Lord Rama's treatment of Sita raises a question that has never gone away. There are questions that will probably haunt Dr Singh too, most of all: why did he not quit when he realised he had lost all vestiges of control over his own government? If his failure to do so arose from loyalty to the Congress or a promise to Sonia, it was misplaced-and unrewarded-loyalty. Except it enabled him to remain in office, even if not in power. His apparent commitment to ensuring Rahul's succession, perpetuating the Congress party's control by one family, was even more misplaced. That was Bheeshma's failure too: he should have put his foot down on the Kaurava succession. Moreover, promising loyalty to hereditary succession is a monarchical attribute, not a democratic one. That was Dr Singh's fatal error of judgement. n
When Indira Gandhi lost in 1977, she fought back by campaigning long and hard. Sixty-two days and nights of travelling 1,000 km a day, addressing 10 meetings, which meant that she had been seen or heard byone in four voters.
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