The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (14 page)

 

 

The creation of the NAC in June 2004 was the first overt sign to me that Sonia’s ‘renunciation’ of power was more of a political tactic than a response to a higher calling, or to an ‘inner voice’, as she put it at the time. Admittedly, she chose not to head the UPA government even after leading the Congress to electoral success in the 2004 General Elections, instead putting forward the name of Dr Singh. But, while power was delegated, authority was not. Her decisions, early on, to try and appoint a principal secretary to the PM of her choosing—the retired Tamilian official who had worked with Rajiv but declined Sonia’s invitation—and to place her trusted aide Pulok Chatterjee in the PMO, were aimed at ensuring a degree of control over government. Of course, she had a decisive say in the allocation of portfolios.

The creation of the NAC and Sonia’s choice of its members was explained away as a recognition of the growing importance and influence of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), that claimed to represent civil society, in policymaking. However, in actual practice it created a parallel policy structure that sought to project Sonia as the voice of civil society and Dr Singh as the representative of government. While Dr Singh realized that he had no option but to live with this situation, and never complained about it, it always seemed to me that he was not too comfortable with it, even if he was willing to see merit in the ideas that came out of the NAC.

The manner of creation of the NAC, by executive order, was no different from Nehru’s creation of the Planning Commission. Many senior Congress leaders had felt unhappy about Nehru’s decision to create a non-constitutional policy advisory body outside the Cabinet system, even though Nehru appointed himself as chairman of the Commission. John Mathai even resigned as finance minister from Nehru’s Cabinet in protest. Yet, no one in the UPA government raised any such issues about the status and role of the NAC, a body of which the PM was not even formally the chairperson.

Notwithstanding Dr Singh’s discomfort with the NAC, intellectual differences between Sonia and him were never as sharp as projected by both her supporters and critics. Such projection, when it came from her supporters, was part of her image and brand-building. Sonia was to be projected as the ‘caring socialist concerned about the welfare of the poor’, while Dr Singh was to be blamed for being too fiscally conservative and pro-business. Indeed, Dr Singh, essentially a Keynesian, ended up being wrongly portrayed a ‘neo-liberal’ economist.

Faced with this situation, the prime minister felt the need, at times, to make the point that his views were not quite as extreme as those of his friends, the economists Jagdish Bhagwati and T.N. Srinivasan, and that he did differ on some issues even with Montek. He used the opportunity provided by an episode in September 2004 to do so. Montek had come under attack from the Left for inducting what the Left dubbed ‘pro-business and neo-liberal’ consultants into the Planning Commission, such as Arun Maira, the chairman of the Boston Consulting Group in India, and the economist Suman Bery. Dr Singh wanted me to let it be known that he was not entirely happy with Montek’s decision. On such occasions I would draw a politically savvy journalist into a conversation and say things that a good reporter always picked up and did a story on, without being explicitly told to. Montek subsequently withdrew that initiative, though Maira became a Planning Commission member in UPA-2.

When I confronted the CPI(M) ideologue and Marxist economist Prabhat Patnaik and asked him how he could dub Dr Singh a ‘neoliberal’, knowing full well that his academic orientation had all along been Keynesian, Prabhat agreed that Dr Singh was intellectually a Keynesian, but claimed his policies were ‘neo-liberal’. The Left found it useful to make this distinction between Sonia and Dr Singh, approvingly portraying the former as being ‘socialist’ in her orientation, because it provided them with a justification for continuing to extend political support to the Sonia-led UPA, while criticizing the policies of the Singh-led government.

Both the Left and Sonia, or at least her advisers, made good use of this distinction in managing the peculiar balance between two parties, the Congress and the CPI(M), that had fought each other all their lives but were now fellow travellers. The Left would be supportive of ‘leftist’ Sonia and critical of ‘rightist’ Manmohan. It suited them all to play this game till Dr Singh finally forced Sonia to choose between him and the Left in June 2008.

On the issue of the India-ASEAN FTA, the Left tried to gain political advantage by getting Kerala Chief Minister VS.Achuthanandan to lead a delegation, including his finance minister, T.M.Thomas Isaac, and Prabhat Patnaik, who was the deputy chairman of the Kerala State Planning Board, to submit a memorandum to the PM against the India- ASEAN FTA. Dr Singh adroitly deflected this ploy. Receiving the paper, he told the delegation with his signature smile, ‘But, comrades, I am told that the FTA would benefit farmers in the fraternal, socialist Republic of Vietnam.’

Everyone burst out laughing and the matter ended there.

 

 

With Surjeet as general secretary of the CPI(M), Dr Singh may have assumed that he would be able to manage the Left. The two Sardars had a warm relationship, testified to by Surjeet’s acquiescence in Montek’s appointment. Dr Singh also reached out to Jyoti Basu, who had stepped down as West Bengal chief minister, but was still a leading figure in the CPI(M), upon which Basu categorically assured him of his support ‘for a full five-year term’, as he put it. For the smooth functioning of the relationship, a UPA—Left coordination committee was formed. Moreover, the PMO team under Pulok that was responsible for monitoring the NCMP would pay special attention to programmes of interest to the CPM, especially in Kerala and Bengal. Dr Singh also kept in touch with the Left leadership through his own staff in the PMO. When career diplomat Shivshankar Menon was made foreign secretary in 2006, it was hoped he, too, would be a bridge between the government and the Left because of his old friendship with CPI(M) supporters and leaders, going back to his student days and those of his sister, Saraswati Menon, a contemporary of CPI(M) politburo members Prakash Karat and Sitaram Yechury at JNU.

In the early days, the relationship did run quite smoothly. Surjeet and Basu loyalists in the CPI(M) were in general accommodating with Dr Singh. As long as this group, led by Yechury, was in control of the party’s Delhi office, Dr Singh had little trouble working with the Left. Karat’s takeover of the CPI(M) changed all that. His attempt to seize power from Surjeet had begun in the run-up to the CPI(M)’s 17 th party congress in 2002. The ‘Bengal faction’ of the party, led by Jyoti Basu and including Buddhadeb Bhattacharya and Sitaram Yechury, opposed Karat’s move and Surjeet stayed on. By 2004 the stakes had gone up. The CPI(M) was, after six years, once again extending support to a government in New Delhi, and it mattered who controlled the party’s national leadership in Delhi.

On the eve of the 18th party congress in Delhi in April 2004, Buddhadeb met Dr Singh and assured him that there would be no change of leadership and that Surjeet would continue. Even as Dr Singh and Buddhadeb were having a private dinner at 7 RCR, the private television news channel NDTV reported as ‘breaking news’ that the CPI(M) party congress would see a change of guard with Karat replacing Surjeet.

I was sitting in the visitors’ room at 7 RCR and watching the news while Dr Singh and Buddhadeb were having dinner. I immediately went into the dining room and informed them that NDTV had claimed Karat was likely to replace Surjeet. We all knew that NDTV had an inside line to the CPI(M) since NDTV’s Prannoy Roy was married to Radhika Roy, sister of Brinda Karat, a CPI(M)leader and the wife of Prakash Karat.

The PM looked quizzically at Buddhadeb and the latter appeared surprised. He smiled and added, ‘We will see.’

NDTV turned out to be right, in the end. The CPI(M) party congress ended with Surjeet being replaced by Karat. We braced ourselves for rockier times, knowing full well that Karat and the party’s hardliners disliked Surjeet’s softness towards Dr Singh. Karat was among those who had been unhappy at Montek’s appointment and, perhaps even more, Surjeet’s acquiescence to it. Clearly, the honeymoon between the PM and the CPI(M) was now over. When Surjeet fell ill in 2008, Dr Singh was very particular that a warm tribute be paid to him in the event of his passing away. As soon as we heard that Surjeet had been hospitalized, he asked me to draft a condolence message. Surjeet survived his initial hospitalization, but finally passed away when Dr Singh was in Colombo in August that year.

With Karat at the helm, the stronger anti-Congress line of past CPI(M) leaders, the late P. Sundarayya and the late A.K. Gopalan, gained ground at the expense of the softer Basu-Suqeet-Yechury line of being more accommodating towards the Congress and Dr Singh. I warned Dr Singh that if the CPI(M) chose to move further left, partly in response to its growing unpopularity in Bengal, Dr Singh was bound to face even more difficult times.

In July 2006, when Dr Singh came under sharp attack from the CPM hardliners on the India-US nuclear deal, he called on Jyoti Basu to find out if there was any rethinking on the part of the Left on the assurance given to him that he would be allowed to serve his full term as PM. Basu reassured him that Dr Singh had his full support, as long as he adhered to the NCMP. Thus, when the Left finally withdrew support it said it was doing so because the prime minister had deviated from the NCMP, though Dr Singh had maintained all along that the nuclear deal was not a deviation from the NCMP. The NCMP had not only emphasized the importance of ‘energy security’ for India, a commitment this deal would address, it had also explicitly stated, ‘Even as it pursues closer engagement and relations with the USA, the UPA government will maintain the independence of India’s foreign policy position on all regional and global issues.’

While Dr Singh was prepared to deal with the Left’s tantrums and demands, and appoint Left nominees to various positions in government and academic institutions, he was always conscious of the threat posed by the Left to his own situation. He was aware of the role the CPI(M) had played in all coalition governments that it had supported from 1977 onwards in unseating prime ministers. It had helped eject Morarji Desai and bring in Charan Singh in 1979, defending this on ideological grounds. A pro-business PM had been replaced by a peasant leader. The motive at the time was to try and make inroads into the Hindi heartland, which included the most backward and impoverished parts of India, and where the CPI(M) hardly had any presence. In 1990 the Left played a similar role, helping Chandra Shekhar displace Janata Dal leader V.P. Singh as prime minister. In 1997, it once again played a part in ousting H.D. Deve Gowda, the prime minister installed in 1996, and propping up I.K. Gujral, who replaced him.

Dr Singh had to constantly live with the assumption that the Left might try this tactic once again, securing his ouster and having him replaced by either a Bengali (Pranab Mukherjee) or a Malayalee (A.K. Antony), to win brownie points in the two states where it needed to bolster its presence. Arjun Singh tried to woo the Left with his political posturing but it never really trusted him. When the Left finally withdrew support to the government in July 2008, it tried till the very last to get Sonia to save the government by dumping Dr Singh and replacing him with a ‘pro-Left’ PM. Karat failed where his predecessors had succeeded, because by July 2008, Dr Singh’s personal credibility and his standing as PM had reached such heights that the Congress would have been grievously wounded if Sonia had dumped Dr Singh to please the Left and retain power.