The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (13 page)

Keeping control over both the party and the government was viewed as the best way for a prime minister to ensure political support for his policy initiatives, especially and increasingly so in the Congress party where political loyalty was based on personal advancement and enrichment rather than a commitment to a shared ideology.

On Rajiv’s death, Narasimha Rao took over as Congress president and he, too, retained the post after he was elected prime minister in 1991. However, Rao was challenged at the All India Congress Committee (AICC) session at Tirupati in 1992 by a group led by Arjun Singh and N.D. Tiwari that demanded a separation of roles. Rao had to then fight hard to get re-elected president and retain his control over the Congress Working Committee, the executive committee of the party. Once he was elected, he kept the post till after his defeat in the 1996 General Elections. He was then succeeded by Sitaram Kesari who yielded power to Sonia in March 1998. It was an early mark of Sonia’s regard for and trust in Dr Singh that when she took charge as the party’s leader in the Lok Sabha, she nominated Dr Singh as the party’s leader in the Rajya Sabha.

 

 

Apart from the weekly meeting of the Congress ‘core group’, initially comprising Sonia, the PM, Arjun Singh, A.K. Antony, Pranab Mukherjee and Sonia’s political secretary Ahmed Patel, and messages exchanged through two intermediaries, Pulok and Patel, or occasional telephone conversations, there was not much other regular contact between Dr Singh and Sonia in the early years of UPA-1. The core group met regularly at 7 RCR. Sonia would arrive first and get her exclusive ten minutes with Dr Singh. That was when the two spoke to each other in private. Once their one-to-one conversation was over, the others would be invited in. Dr Singh rarely spoke in the core-group meetings. He would hear what others had to say and take his decisions after having another word with Sonia.

There was also very little social contact between the families of the two leaders. Mrs Kaur and Sonia met rarely, except at official functions and banquets. 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. While she was very close to her mother, her father had passed away. Rajiv’s friends, like Satish Sharma, Sam Pitroda and Suman Dubey, were all her age. 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.

In private, Sonia often addressed Dr Singh as Manmohan, which, given her Western background, suggested she felt closer and more familial in her relationship with him than with other senior leaders of his generation. Dr Singh, for his part, always referred to her as Soniaji or Mrs Gandhi and treated her with old-fashioned courtesy. At the annual UPA anniversary function at 7 RCR he always made it a point to stand up on the dais when Sonia stood up to walk to the podium and deliver her speech, a practice that other Congressmen did not follow. Culturally, it is a Western gesture for a man to stand up when a woman does and women are not expected to reciprocate, so Sonia naturally did not. But Delhi’s political journalists, who were always watching the two like hawks at public events for evidence that the PM was more deferential to her than he needed to be, would draw my attention to the leaders’ ‘body language’ with wicked smiles.

When Sonia turned sixty, Dr Singh sent her a personal letter praising her courage and fortitude. She had been widowed at a young age, and had to bring up her children in the very difficult social and security context of Delhi. And, she had allowed herself to be persuaded to take on the mantle of party presidency by Congressmen who feared the party would disintegrate without her at the helm. Recounting these facts, Dr Singh praised her for her courage and her poise in the face of such adversity and for the energy and wisdom with which she had led the Congress party back to power.

Sonia and Dr Singh’s warm personal equation was also evident in the little gestures he made to show his concern for her welfare, like always calling her to check how she was whenever she took ill.

I had no reason to doubt that Dr Singh and Sonia implicitly trusted each other. Reports appearing in the media about differences between the two were often planted by disgruntled Congressmen and mischievous journalists, some of whom would then point a finger in my direction. That did not mean the two had no differences on policy issues. But any such differences between them would have been aired only in their private meetings and the PM almost never allowed any of this to trickle into the public realm.

The PM never questioned Sonia’s right, as party president, to influence portfolio allocations though, over time, he became quite forthcoming in giving his opinions, and she did accept his advice. While I knew it was not realistic to argue that Dr Singh should have full control over ministerial appointments, I felt he needed to assert himself at least in the allocation of portfolios to junior ministers and would press him when I got the chance. In 2005, for example, 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 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 clarified to Montek that I was not against it, and had only said to the PM that at least younger Congress MPs should feel they owed their ministerial berths to the PM rather than just to Sonia. 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 political clout or loyalty to the leader. For Congress MPs, the leader to please was always Sonia. They did not see loyalty to the PM as a political necessity, nor did Dr Singh seek loyalty in the way in which Sonia and her aides sought it. That Jairam’s loyalty was only with Sonia became clearer within weeks of his becoming a 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 (FTA) with member countries of the ASEAN.

Dr Singh viewed the India-ASEAN FTA as an important geopolitical initiative aimed at India’s economic integration into the rapidly growing Asian economies and as being helpful in balancing China’s growing clout in Asia. The CPI(M), on the other hand, chose to oppose the India-ASEAN FTA on the grounds that it would hurt the interests of plantation workers in Kerala and West Bengal. Keen to blunt the CPI(M)’s criticism, the Congress party in Kerala exerted pressure on the central leadership to abandon the FTA project. Sonia Gandhi’s letter to the PM was written to convey these concerns. It was not normal practice for Sonia to write such formal letters to the PM. She almost always conveyed serious concerns orally and directly or through intermediaries like Ahmed Patel and Pulok Chatterjee. However, since she
had
written, Dr Singh too responded in writing, defending the FTA. He wrote:

Our approach to regional trade agreements in general, and FTAs in particular, has been evolved after careful consideration of our geopolitical as well as economic interests. Although India has a large domestic market, our experience with earlier relatively insular policies, as also the global experience in this regard, clearly bring out the growth potential of trade and economic cooperation with the global economy.

 

A few weeks later Sonia’s confidential letter to the PM found its way into the media, with the
Business
Standard
carrying a front-page story. A furious Dr Singh asked me to find out who had leaked it. I asked the editor, T.N. Ninan. Quite understandably, Ninan declined to reveal the identity of a privileged news source. However, a journalist in the know confirmed Jairam Ramesh’s role. I reported this back to Dr Singh who picked up the phone and reprimanded Jairam, even as the latter denied any role in the leak.

Interestingly, the PM was amenable to the suggestion that his letter to Sonia be made public, given that her letter to him had been publicly aired. Therefore, I released his letter to the media. While such a public expression of differences between them was rare, this incident did draw attention to the role of mischief-makers in muddying the waters.

On a daily and regular basis, messages between Sonia and the PM were conveyed either by Ahmed Patel or Pulok Chatterjee. While Pulok met Sonia regularly to brief her on policy issues and seek her guidance on key decisions, Ahmed Patel was the political link between Sonia and Dr Singh. Patel would visit South Block mainly to lobby with Pulok for the inclusion of names of Congress party members on the boards of public enterprises and nationalized banks.

Patel also met the PM from time to time and these meetings were invariably held at 7 RCR. Any increase in the frequency of his visits was almost always a signal of an impending Cabinet reshuffle. Patel was the one who carried, to and fro, the list of names of people to be included or dropped from the council of ministers. Patel was always very courteous and polite. As Sonia’s trusted aide, he never behaved in a manner that would demonstrate his real power. With Dr Singh he was particularly polite and deferential in his behaviour. As Sonia’s chosen courier, he acquired the power to influence decision-making in such matters till the very end. On one occasion, he arrived at 7 RCR just minutes before the PM’s letter to the President listing the names of MPs to be sworn in as ministers in a reshuffle was dispatched. Since the letter had been typed and signed and was ready to be delivered, and the President was waiting to receive it, it was decided that instead of wasting time retyping the letter, the new name being canvassed by Patel would be typed over an existing name, with that name being painted over with whitener. Thus was Andhra MP Subbirami Reddy accommodated into the council of ministers in January 2006, after white paint had been applied over the name of Harish Rawat, an MP from Uttarakhand, who is now the chief minister of that state.

I had very little to do with Patel and during the few times we interacted he was always warm and friendly. I only had two substantive conversations with him during my time at the PMO. The first occurred shortly after Narasimha Rao died. I had accompanied Dr Singh to Rao’s house on Delhi’s Motilal Nehru Marg. As the PM entered the house, Patel pulled me aside. Narasimha Rao’s children wanted the former PM to be cremated in Delhi, like other Congress prime ministers. Impressive memorials had been built for Nehru, Indira and Rajiv at the places where they had been cremated along the river Yamuna, adjacent to Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial. Even former prime minister Charan Singh, who had not belonged to the Congress, and Sanjay Gandhi, who was only an MP, had been cremated and memorialized in the vicinity. However, Patel wanted me to encourage Narasimha Rao’s sons, Ranga and Prabhakar, and his daughter, Vani, to take their father’s body to Hyderabad for cremation. Clearly, it seemed to me, Sonia did not want a memorial for Rao anywhere in Delhi.

I reflected for a few minutes on Patel’s request and felt it would not be appropriate for me to convey this message to the family. They had every right to make the demand they were making. Why should I involve myself in this matter? I kept my counsel and walked away, not saying a word about Patel’s suggestion to Rao’s children when I met them to express my condolences. Later that evening I was told the Congress party had got Rao’s family to agree to fly his body out to Hyderabad by deploying Home Minister Shivraj Patil and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y.S. Rajashekhara Reddy to persuade them to fall in line. The Congress party refused to allow Rao’s body to be brought into the party’s headquarters on its way to the airport, and Sonia chose not to be present at the Hyderabad cremation.

Interestingly, in 2007, the Congress party tried a replay of this stratagem with the family of former prime minister Chandra Shekhar, persuading them to take the body of the former PM to his farm at Bhondsi in Haryana. However, Chandra Shekhar’s son insisted that the family would go to Delhi’s Lodi Crematorium if the former PM was not given a proper state funeral in Delhi. The government fell in line and Chandra Shekhar was cremated on the banks of the Yamuna at a spot designated Ekta Sthal.

The second time Patel approached me was when the leader of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi Chandrashekhara Rao, also a Cabinet minister, demanded that I be sacked from government for issuing a denial to the media about a claim that he had made regarding the subject of his conversation with Dr Singh. Rao had claimed that he met the PM to press for an early decision on Telangana while he had, in fact, met him for some other purpose and the Telangana issue had never come up in the conversation. This is what I had said to the Telugu media when pressed by them for an account of what actually transpired at the meeting. Patel wanted me to apologize to the minister and end the controversy. I had to tell Patel that my briefing was factual and I saw no reason to apologize, but would do so if instructed by the PM. I made it clear I only took my orders from Dr Singh. The matter ended there. Rao reportedly calmed down after calling me names. A few weeks later, on a visit to 7 RCR, he hugged me warmly and offered to invite me home for a meal of Hyderabadi biryani, but the invitation never came.