The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (15 page)

While there were formal consultative mechanisms with the Left, handling the Left was always a tricky problem for Dr Singh. He managed to keep the PMO staff on a tight leash, never allowing us to upset the Left until Karat’s coup on the nuclear deal, but he did not always succeed with his Cabinet colleagues. An early incident that I got drawn into involved Finance Minister P. Chidambaram. The BJP was refusing to support some of the finance minister’s budget proposals, and the Left, wanting to take advantage of the government’s dependency on it to pass the budget, began arm-twisting him. One day, the CPI(M) issued a statement that it might not be able to vote in support of some of Chidambaram’s budget proposals. Dr Singh called me and asked me to find out from the Left how serious it was about this threat.

Ensuring the successful passage of the finance bill in Parliament is a constitutional requirement for the survival of the government. In India’s parliamentary system the government has to quit if it either loses a vote of confidence or fails to secure support for the finance bill. Not surprisingly, then, Dr Singh wanted to leave nothing to chance. At this stage, he was not seriously worried the government would fall, because both Surjeet and Jyoti Basu had personally assured Dr Singh that the CPI(M) would support him as PM for the entire five-year term. But Dr Singh wanted to be very sure that the Left would vote in favour of the budget. It seemed to me that he also wanted to make sure that the Left had the same view of the understanding with Chidambaram that the latter had claimed he had with them. Were they all on the same page or not?

I went across to the CPI(M) headquarters to meet Yechury. He replied that I should check with Karat, and went down the corridor to see if Karat was free to talk. He returned after a few minutes and said that Karat was busy but had asked him to convey a message to the PM. The message went something like this: The CPI(M) will not bring the government down. So it will not vote against the finance bill. However, the finance minister had said he would like to bring certain financial bills pertaining to the insurance and banking sectors and provident funds. The CPI(M) would vote against such bills.

Having passed on that message, Yechury came out with me as I left the building. As we walked out, he told me, ‘We can only unseat the government by voting against it in Parliament. There are many things the finance minister can do without seeking Parliament’s approval. Let him do those things. We will protest, but we cannot stop him.’ This meant the Left would ‘bark’ but not ‘bite’, a phrase commonly used by the media to interpret its stance. It would publicly dissociate itself from the government’s initiatives, but would not withdraw support. Where a policy initiative required legislative approval and, therefore, the Left’s vote in Parliament, it would support only such policies that had its prior approval.

I delivered this message to the PM. He had also seen Yechury’s statement to the media that the UPA should know that the Left would remain a ‘watchdog’ and ensure that the government stuck to the policy parameters defined by the NCMP. Dr Singh was satisfied with this clarification and wanted to seal the deal and ensure there was no misunderstanding between the CPI(M) and the finance minister. He summoned Chidambaram and the Left leaders for a pow-wow at which the Left assured the PM that they would not vote against the finance bill. Dr Singh understood and, perhaps, was even willing to empathize with the Left’s posture. This was their political compulsion, keeping their ideological hardliners happy while allowing the government to do most of what it wanted to. But he was clearly not sure if Chidambaram would adopt such an accommodating view and feared that he might be tempted to embarrass the Left from time to time to score political points.

That Dr Singh was more adept at handling the Left and Chidambaram was less so became obvious even as Chidambaram, Yechury and I walked back to the car park from the meeting. I quipped to Chidambaram that he should feel reassured by the fact that when Yechury said the CPI(M) would be the UPA’s ‘watchdog’ , he only meant that they would bark but not bite. A diplomatic finance minister would have either kept quiet or said something nice as a gesture of gratitude.

But Chidambaram, being Chidambaram, could not resist a jibe. He retorted, in Yechury’s hearing, ‘Either way he agrees that he is a dog!’

 

 

For Dr Singh, managing the coalition allies was less challenging than managing his own party. He was acutely aware that this was the Congress party’s first attempt at stitching together and running a multiparty coalition government. Political analysts have long made the point that the Congress is itself a coalition, of various factions. It had become even more so during Narasimha Rao’s tenure because the party had reverted to some of its traditional ways of functioning after Rajiv Gandhi’s death, which had ended a long period of Nehru- Gandhi family suzerainty over the party. The splits that had occurred within the party during Rao’s term as party president and prime minister had been reversed after Sonia Gandhi became party president in 1998. On the other hand, new splits surfaced, notably when senior Congress leaders Sharad Pawar and Purno Sangma quit the Congress and formed the NCP.

Dr Singh had played a role in stitching the new UPA coalition together. It was he who had negotiated the DMK’s entry into the UPA with M. Karunanidhi in January 2004 and had gone to great lengths to be deferential to him. Announcing the new alliance with the DMK in Chennai, twenty-four years after the two parties had parted ways, Dr Singh had said, ‘I have come here to establish a new relationship of trust and confidence with DMK leader M. Karunanidhi and his party.’ Dr Singh went a step further and hailed Karunanidhi as not just the leader of Tamil Nadu but ‘a great leader and one of the builders of the nation. His life and work has inspired many in the country.’

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 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 sympathizers of the LTTE, her husband’s killers.

The seminar room at the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation in New Delhi had framed pages on its walls of the report of the Jain Enquiry Commission on Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, in which the DMK was named a conspirator. In fact, Sonia pushed Narasimha Rao into joining hands with AIADMK leader Jayalalithaa, a deadly rival of the DMK, in the 1996 elections. This prompted P. Chidambaram, Jayalalithaa’s
bete
noire,
to quit the Congress and join the Tamil Maanila Congress. Against this background, the 2004 alliance with the Congress could not have been negotiated by Sonia. It was left to Dr Singh to do that, and I was always surprised that political analysts paid little attention to these capabilities of the PM.

Initially, Karunanidhi’s nephew, and the UPA government’s telecom minister, Dayanidhi Maran, was the key interlocutor between Dr Singh and the DMK leader in Chennai. Maran’s stars plummeted when he got involved in the DMK’s fratricidal wars, joining forces with Karunanidhi’s son M.K. Stalin against his other son, M.K. Azhagiri. His reputation also became unsavoury as he began using his telecom portfolio to favour his brother Kalanidhi’s media business. I was not sure if Dr Singh had been alerted to this by his officials, but he certainly was by Ratan Tata in early 2007. Dayanidhi had summoned Tata to a meeting in Delhi in the latter’s own Taj Mahal Hotel on Mansingh Road, and tried to browbeat him into doing a deal that would favour his brother Kalanidhi’s Sun TV. Ratan Tata conveyed his disapproval of Dayanidhi’s behaviour to the PM.

On 11 May 2007, Dr Singh and Sonia went to Chennai to participate in a public meeting to celebrate the golden jubilee of Karunanidhi’s first election to the state legislature. At the venue itself, Karunanidhi informed them that henceforth A. Raja would be his key representative in Delhi. That same night, Dr Singh returned from Chennai and implemented Karunanidhi’s request that the telecommunications portfolio be shifted from Dayanidhi to Raja. On 13 May, Raja took charge of telecom and, within months, became embroiled in the allegedly corrupt sale of telecommunications bandwidth to certain companies, popularly known as the 2G scandal.

While by February 2008 the issue of 2G telecom licences had already begun to attract political attention, with Sitaram Yechury writing to the PM on the matter, it had not become a public controversy at the time I left the PMO. In fact, no issue involving the misuse of public office became a media issue in UPA-1. There were, no doubt, rumours about the corrupt practices of some ministers. I was aware that the PM was occasionally briefed by the IB about ministers accumulating property and pursuing business interests. However, none of this ever blew up into a public controversy, barring the Volcker Committee report charges pertaining to Natwar Singh, but that related to activities that took place in 2001. Since I was not privy to government files and the issue never became public in my time, I was blissfully ignorant of the goings-on with regard to telecom licences that have since come to light.

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 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. As his reputation fell, so did that of his government.

 

 

With Sharad Pawar, the boss of the NCP and Lalu Prasad Yadav, the feisty politician who headed the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), both of which were constituents of the UPA, Manmohan Singh had a good equation even if he did not always approve of their conduct. With Pawar, there was a special relationship. Dr Singh often recalled how Pawar always lent support to him whenever his policies came under attack from within the Congress party. He regarded Pawar as an ‘ally’ against his critics in the Cabinet, like Arjun Singh, A.K. Antony and Vayalar Ravi. While Ravi maintained a low profile in the UPA government, both Arjun Singh and Antony remained difficult colleagues to handle. Arjun Singh would openly defy the PM or be critical of his policies, and Antony was guarded in public but difficult in private, often disagreeing with him on his foreign, defence and economic policy initiatives.