The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (16 page)

One day Pawar landed up at 7 RCR with a complaint. A series of anti-Pawar news reports had appeared in the media, both the national and Marathi media, and Pawar had them traced to a ‘PMO source’. He wanted the PM to have this inquired into. Dr Singh asked me to find out who was behind these reports. I asked a few of my contacts in the Hindi and Marathi media to find out. They all returned with the same news: Prithviraj Chavan had planted these stories. It was a delicate issue for Dr Singh. It was hard for him to take any action in the matter because Prithvi might well have been acting under instructions from the party leadership. After all, Sonia and Pawar were not the best of friends, given his grouse that she backed Narasimha Rao against him in 1991 and her grouse that he raised her ‘foreign origin’ issue to split the Congress party.

As a Maharashtra politician who saw himself as a political rival of Pawar, Prithvi would have happily offered himself as a Congress party instrument in weakening Pawar’s hold over the state. On the other hand, Pawar was a PMO favourite since he clearly preferred Dr Singh as PM rather than Pranab Mukherjee or any other Congress leader.

At the height of the anti-Manmohan Singh campaign by the Left, on the issue of the civil nuclear energy agreement with the United States, some critics of the PM floated the idea that he could be replaced to save the government. Political reporters would come and tell me that the names of Pranab Mukherjee and Sushil Kumar Shinde were being mentioned as possible replacements by Congress functionaries known to be close to Sonia.

One day Praful Patel walked into my room and informed me that Shinde’s name was being considered more seriously than Mukherjee’s by some of the ‘backroom boys’ of the Congress. ‘But, don’t worry,’ he assured, ‘no one can replace Doctor Saheb. We will never support anyone else.’

Thus, even as some in the Congress party targeted an ally like Pawar, Dr Singh sought to maintain good relations with him. Such relationships were Dr Singh’s real source of strength. Political analysts and reporters who skimmed the surface only saw Dr Singh as ‘Sonia’s puppet’. Those who had a deeper knowledge of the power play within the wider coalition knew that Dr Singh had the backing of the coalition partners, some of whom were more loyal to him than to his own party leaders. Sonia chose him, no doubt, but once appointed, he became the UPA’s prime minister. Dr Singh was acutely conscious of the fact that he headed a coalition and not just a monolithic party, and made sure that he maintained the best of relations with all coalition partners.

 

 

On one occasion, in 2007, when the Left and some Congressmen were raising the pitch of their anti-Manmohan Singh campaign, the usual speculation of a possible change of PM once again surfaced. Dr Singh was very upset with such speculation. One evening I found him seated alone in the living room of 7 RCR, looking grim. I could see he was upset about something.

‘I cannot go on like this,’ he remarked, as his eyes became moist. I felt he was holding back tears. When I asked what had happened, he kept quiet. I just sat with him and tried to lighten the atmosphere by cracking a joke. It was common for Subbu to summon me whenever he found the PM looking depressed or unhappy and say, ‘Please go and cheer him up.’ I would refer to myself as the court jester, summoned to entertain a morose king. My usual formula was to pass on some gossip from the media about the shenanigans of his ministerial colleagues or about Advani’s latest attempt to unseat him and become PM. That kind of gossip always made him chuckle.

This time his unhappiness seemed to have been triggered by the renewed speculation about the Congress party seeking a change of PM, rather than parting ways with the Left. A political journalist gave me the name of one senior Congressman who was indulging in such talk. That week there was to be a meeting of the UPA coordination committee. To quell such idle talk I encouraged Lalu Prasad Yadav to reiterate the UPA’s confidence in Dr Singh’s leadership at this meeting. Lalu, rubbishing the idea of any change of leadership, went on to make a statement to that effect at the coordination committee meeting and, in a grand gesture, said he would like to place on record his appreciation of the PM’s stewardship of the government. Others joined in and reiterated their confidence in Dr Singh’s leadership.

 

 

The UPA coalition, many believed, was handicapped by not having an active coordination committee and not naming a senior leader as its spokesperson. The NDA benefitted from the institution of a coalition spokesman and George Fernandes did a good job in this role. The United and National Fronts had Jaipal Reddy as their spokesperson. In the NDA, it was the personal equation and chemistry between Vajpayee and Fernandes that had enabled the latter to function effectively. The absence of an effective coalition management mechanism and a coalition spokesperson made the UPA less cohesive than the NDA, and this became more manifest in UPA-2.

To compensate for this organizational weakness, Dr Singh took care to regularly brief the UPA leaders about every important decision his government would take, and they liked him for that. He would do nothing politically significant without informing, not just Sonia but also Karunanidhi, Pawar and Lalu. On many occasions, after a major decision was taken at the weekly meeting of the Congress party ‘core group’, Dr Singh would personally inform the three coalition leaders before letting me inform the media.

In that sense, Dr Singh was a truly ‘consensual’ PM. His success in UPA-1 derived largely from the fact that he invested enormous time and energy into building the required consensus around every important political decision. The criticism sometimes levelled against him that he had taken a particular decision without consulting anyone was never really true. His fault, if anything, was that he spent far too much time building consensus, rather than doing what he thought was right and then demanding that the coalition support him.

In the end, Dr Singh was always conscious of the fact that while he may have been ‘chosen’ by Sonia to become PM, he had, in fact, become PM as a consequence of an implicit consensus within the UPA coalition as a whole that he was the best man for the job. In other words, he entered office as Sonia’s nominee, but he settled down and retained his office as the consensual and implicit choice of all the UPA allies, especially Karunanidhi, Pawar and Lalu, and indeed even the ‘Bengal faction’ of the CPI(M).

His name had presented itself as an obvious ‘compromise’ between Sonia on one side and Pawar, Karunanidhi and Surjeet on the other. Sharad Pawar’s opposition to Sonia being PM had been openly stated and was the reason for his quitting the Congress in the first place. The CPI(M) claimed it was open to supporting Sonia as PM, though this has been disputed by I.K. Gujral in his autobiography. Gujral claims that it was Surjeet who was instrumental in getting Mulayam to step back and not support Sonia when she tried to form a government in 1999. But there is no argument that in 2004 Surjeet, as CPI(M) general secretary, enthusiastically endorsed Dr Singh’s nomination to the job. So, there was considerable truth to Dr Singh’s self-perception in UPA-1 that he was not just the ‘nominee’ of Sonia, but was someone acceptable to other stakeholders in the coalition.

The phenomenon of prime ministers being named by a clique of leaders and compromise candidates coming up from nowhere was not new to Indian politics. That is how Lal Bahadur Shastri, Charan Singh, Narasimha Rao, Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral were named. Indeed, even Indira Gandhi was ‘nominated’ by the so-called ‘syndicate’ that ran the affairs of the Congress party after Nehru’s death. However, both Indira and Rao staged coups and took charge of the party organization, by getting themselves elected as party president. Every now and then, the party experimented with separating the two posts but no one was left in doubt that the real power lay with the PM. Congress party president Dev Kant Barooah’s infamous statement, during the time of Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership, that ‘Indira is India and India is Indira’ showed who the real boss was even when the two posts were separated.

Given this background, it was not surprising that many initially believed the BJP charge that Dr Singh was a
mukhota,
a mask, for the Congress president. In August 2004 Yashwant Sinha dubbed him Shikhandi, the man-woman character in the Mahabharata whom Bheeshma refused to fight because it was against his principles to fight a woman. There was a double entendre in that metaphor, implying that the prime minister was controlled by Sonia Gandhi, and it was a damaging allusion. Clearly, my biggest challenge as media adviser was to firmly establish in the minds of ordinary people the credentials and credibility of Dr Singh as PM.

‘I am an accidental prime minister.’

 

Manmohan Singh

 

No one in Dr Singh’s council of ministers seemed to feel that he owed his position, rank or portfolio to the PM. While his role in the formation of his original team was understandably marginal, he was increasingly consulted in subsequent reshuffles, but the final word was always that of the leaders of the parties constituting the coalition. That is how all coalitions came to be constituted since Deve Gowda’s time. Quite understandably, in a parliamentary democracy a prime minister never has the kind of free hand that a President enjoys in a presidential system. In India, even Jawaharlal Nehru did not have too much freedom of manoeuvre and his daughter gained space only after 1971, when she was re-elected with a landslide vote on the back of the victory in the Bangladesh war. Rajiv Gandhi, who became prime minister after winning nearly four-fifths of the seats in Parliament, after Indira’s assassination, may have had much greater freedom in constituting his council of ministers, but even he had to accommodate ministers he did not like, Delhi’s H.K.L. Bhagat being a case in point. Narasimha Rao and Vajpayee, not to mention Deve Gowda and Gujral, had to also yield to such political pressures, with Vajpayee forced to drop a colleague, Suresh Prabhu, whom he clearly wished to retain in his team.

While Narasimha Rao established control over his team by getting himself elected Congress president in 1992, Vajpayee did so by his decision to conduct nuclear tests within weeks of becoming PM. His decision to test and declare India a nuclear weapons power was both strategic, that is, a response to what was happening globally on the nuclear non-proliferation front and in India’s neighbourhood, and political, namely an attempt to raise his profile as the head of government and a national leader. Vajpayee’s term began with his inability to get the finance minister he wanted, when his party rejected his initial nominee, Jaswant Singh, and he was forced to appoint Yashwant Sinha. So he chose to establish his leadership of the coalition, outpacing Advani and other challengers to his authority by becoming a national hero.