The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (22 page)

The PM’s reply was candid and assertive. ‘Well, Madam, I believe our government is going to last for full five years, and let there be no doubt or ambiguity about this. Therefore, this misconception that I can be pressured into giving up is simply not going to materialize.’ Newspapers also highlighted his assertion that ‘The insinuation that there are two separate centres of power is not true.’ Chandigarh’s
Tribune,
a newspaper that Dr Singh grew up with and which was his first morning read with a cup of tea, opened its report with ‘Prime Minister Manmohan Singh . . . dismissed as “without foundation” the Opposition charge that Congress president and UPA chairperson Sonia Gandhi is the “super Prime Minister”.’
The
Hindu’s
headline summed it up pithily: ‘I am in charge, and will last’.

A fortnight later, when he arrived in New York,
Time
ran a cover story on Dr Singh’s prime ministership with the headline: ‘His Own Man’. The message had gone out to the world. Most reports and editorial comments drew attention to three aspects of the press interaction. First, that it was wide-ranging and the PM answered every single question. Second, the PM’s ‘political personality’ came through. Finally, that he had a clear view of his agenda and his priorities.

The key to ‘Brand Manmohan’ was his projection as his own man. His Achilles’ heel was the equation with Sonia. He would always be tormented by the question of whether he was his own man, or just her puppet. Throughout his two terms, this was always the most difficult and delicate issue for him to handle.

Whenever he asserted prime ministerial authority his image shone. Whenever he shied away from doing so, it took a beating. Creating, building and protecting this image, without necessarily allowing a situation where he would have to publicly differ or confront Sonia or his senior colleagues was the key to his success, his image and his power. With mischief-makers aplenty, protecting the PM’s image required constant vigilance.

 

 

Apart from projecting Dr Singh as a ‘national’ leader, and not just a partisan politician, I also aimed to project him as a ‘consensual’ leader. The purpose of this, too, was to show that like Vajpayee and Narasimha Rao, Dr Singh was a prime minister who tried to build support for his policies cutting across factions within the Congress and across political parties. Whenever he acted as an arbitrator between warring ministers, like Chidambaram and Kamal Nath, or between senior and junior ministers, like Pranab Mukherjee and Anand Sharma, or between the leader of an alliance partner like Sharad Pawar and his own party member Prithviraj Chavan, I would let political reporters and analysts know how the PM was mediating between them and building consensus. Even with the Left, his inveterate critics, he took a conciliatory stance through the first half of his tenure. He would ensure that the PMO acted on every request that came from Left leaders, be it the nomination of a Left-leaning academic to some institution or the clearance of a project in a Left bastion in West Bengal or sending Left MPs off on foreign junkets.

By the time Dr Singh travelled to New York to attend the United Nations General Assembly in September 2004, he had acquired the image of being a businesslike, consensual and capable PM. The September press conference was not planned with a view to projecting the PM’s image to the world. My focus was entirely on building his image at home. However, it was Mani Dixit who made the point to me that by firmly establishing his image as PM at home, we had also sent a message to the world that this was a PM the world could do business with. Given our parliamentary system, it’s important that heads of government of other countries felt confident that an assurance from the Indian head of government was backed by his entire government.

After the first national press conference, few saw Manmohan Singh as a ‘puppet’ PM, or as a novice, a ‘weak’ leader, or just an ‘academic’ or ‘bureaucrat’. Both US President George Bush and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf met him in New York and had substantial conversations. The success of those meetings, which we shall discuss later, bolstered his public image at home.

Flying back home on his seventy-second birthday, Dr Singh looked relaxed as he cut a cake and shared it with the media on Air India One. The phase of teething troubles was over. He was now firmly ensconced as prime minister.

 

 

Given that I had mainly been a financial journalist in the print media, I had to get to know a lot of new media personnel in TV, on the political beat and in Indian-language media. It became apparent to me fairly early in my tenure that a large majority of journalists were just professionals doing their job and as long as one dealt with them with courtesy and regard for their need to get a good story they would always be objective in their reporting, often even supportive without my trying very hard. A second category of journalists were those who liked being pampered and given additional attention. A junket here or an exclusive story there and one had no problem with them. The third category were partisan journalists—pro-BJP, pro-Left, pro-Sonia, pro-Arjun, pro-Pranab and so on—and my approach was to keep them at a distance. This did upset some, especially those close to Sonia who assumed the government was theirs and the PMO should treat them with deference. Finally, there were the prima donnas. Media baron- editors, editor-CEOs, columnists with a brand name.

In Vajpayee’s PMO, the SPG had a list of senior editors who were given various privileges, including being allowed to carry their cell phones into South Block, an entitlement denied to other visitors for security reasons. I discovered that there were even nicer ones, when at a foreign airport I saw a Mercedes car draw up for one editor while the rest of the press contingent accompanying the prime minister filed into a bus. On making inquiries I discovered that the car had been sent by the local embassy and that it was standard practice in the Vajpayee PMO for some journalists to get such limousines when travelling abroad with the PM. I was told that Vajpayee’s son-in-law, Ranjan Bhattacharya, who had befriended many senior editors, had taken personal interest in ensuring that the PMO’s favoured journalists were well looked after. I brought to an end all such privileges and incurred the wrath of some professional peers. The only privilege I retained was the serving of good-quality alcohol on the PM’s plane.

On the first trip out to Bangkok in July 2004 I noticed that drinks were not being served. I was told the PMO had issued instructions that no alcohol be offered on the PM’s plane. This was ridiculous. We were clearly swinging from one extreme, of the Vajpayee days, to the other. The air hostess told me that they had drinks in stock and could serve them if instructed. Mani Dixit thought it would not be appropriate. Not wanting to waste time convincing the bureaucrats on board, I walked into the PM’s cabin and asked him if he had any objection if drinks were served to the media. Dr Singh was engrossed in some official papers. He looked up, thought for a moment and said, ‘You decide.’ When the drinks finally came out, several officials on board also raised a toast.

Dr Singh always made it a point to meet journalists accompanying him on foreign visits and would always ask me if they were being well looked after. On board he would spare time for a private chat with just one or two senior editors. It was a privilege that journalists, especially from regional Indian-language media, valued enormously. Apart from interacting with journalists accompanying him on foreign trips, Dr Singh always made time to meet representatives of the media in every state capital. Finding him more relaxed on these visits outside Delhi, I told a correspondent of the
Economic
Times
who had been seeking an interview for a long time to find his way to Gandhiji’s ashram at Wardha. The PM was scheduled to visit the ashram, have lunch with its residents and rest for a while before moving on to Nagpur. Sitting in a modest hut, under a fan, on a warm July afternoon in 2006, Dr Singh gave an extensive interview to
ET.
It was perhaps his only lengthy interview to an Indian newspaper and the only one given by an Indian PM at Gandhiji’s ashram.

As a former editor I was able to relate to most editors and I managed to befriend several media owners as well, giving them time with the PM or helping them out whenever they had problems with one ministry or another. However, the bulk of my time was spent just chatting up reporters and establishing a personal bond with them. When Parliament was in session, I would visit the media gallery regularly and spend time gossiping with reporters, planting stories and picking up information. On the PM’s aircraft, travelling abroad, I would spend a few minutes with every one of the forty journalists on board, including Doordarshan cameramen and wire-service reporters, regarded as the lowest rung of the media’s social pyramid. All of this came in handy in times of crisis and need. There were always those who took favours but never returned them. But more often than not, one could encash an IOU, earned by nothing more than a show of courtesy and friendship.

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 newsmagazine 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.

‘Public office offers the opportunity to be educated at public expense.’

 

Manmohan Singh

 

At a meeting of business leaders from India and Southeast Asia in Kuala Lumpur in 2005, the secretary general of the ASEAN, Ong Keng Yong, introduced Dr Singh as ‘the world’s most highly qualified head of government’. A standing ovation followed.

Dr Singh’s academic and professional credentials had by now become legendary. Intellectuals around the world wanted to meet him. At the Indian Science Congress in Ahmedabad in December 2004, and at subsequent congresses every year, Nobel Prize-winners wanted to be photographed with him. Visiting scholars from around the world sought appointments with him. It is the practice in the PMO that the joint secretary concerned is required to be present when the PM has official visitors. But when the visitor was neither ‘official’ nor ‘personal’ I would often get summoned instead. Thus, I was fortunate enough to be present when an Eric Hobsbawm, or a Norman Borlaug or a Roderick MacFarquhar or even a George Soros came calling.