The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (23 page)

It was not just his academic credentials or his continuing interest in engaging academics that attracted so many thinking people to Dr Singh. It was also the fact that many around the world had come to see him, as indeed many at home did, as a thinking man’s political leader. The world had many such leaders in the early post-colonial era. Jawaharlal Nehru himself was one such. Even small countries in obscure parts of the world had produced leaders who were seen by their people as ‘teachers’ and ‘thinkers’. That era seemed to have ended as more practical, tactical and manipulative politicians came to the fore.

The Indian and Western elite did not regard any of Nehru’s successors as ‘thinking’ leaders. Indira Gandhi tried hard to win over India’s intellectual elite, but the Emergency broke a nascent link. When men like P.N. Haksar and P.N. Dhar were hounded out of her inner circle, India’s intellectuals deserted her. Rajiv Gandhi was never taken seriously by this elite. Narasimha Rao may have been a scholar in his own right, but he was an ‘outsider’ to India’s metropolitan elite. In Andhra Pradesh, among the Telugu-speaking elite he was known as an
ashtavadhani,
a literary master. But Delhi’s elite tended to conflate his intellectual achievements with the fact that he was fluent in many languages. Vajpayee too was a highly regarded poet. Indeed, Rao and Vajpayee enjoyed the company of intellectuals and could count many professors among their friends. But in the snobbish world of the metropolitan elite, an Oxbridge type like Dr Singh was regarded as a class apart from these home-grown politician-intellectuals.

Whatever the ups and downs of the daily drill of being PM, Dr Singh enjoyed these intellectual engagements. Every now and then, he would summon me and ask, ‘Who are the wise men I can consult?’ on some issue or the other that he was grappling with. Apart from the distinguished visitors who sought appointments with the PM and the ‘specialists’ who were invited to meet him, he also had his own set of friends from the world of academia and policymaking who would meet him every now and then. This was a long list, including Amartya Sen, Jagdish Bhagwati, Padma Desai, I.G. Patel, Meghnad Desai, H.M. Sethna, M.S. Swaminathan, K. Subrahmanyam and V.S. Arunachalam. Hoping to secure US support for a ‘Second Green Revolution’ in India, a favourite theme of his, Dr Singh met Norman Borlaug, the ‘father of the green revolution’, and talked about agricultural research and ways in which India could boost farm productivity once again. Given his academic bent, he took a keen interest in academic achievements across disciplines. When mathematician S.R. Srinivasa Vardhan was awarded the Abel Prize, the Nobel equivalent in mathematics, Dr Singh shot off a letter of congratulations. Dr Vardhan was reportedly surprised, for he had never before had a letter from a head of government.

Dr Singh also inducted several experts into various government bodies like the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, the Science Advisory Council to the PM and advisory groups on a range of issues dealing with domestic and foreign policy. Some of the prominent names were C. Rangarajan, VS. Vyas, Suresh Tendulkar, A.Vaidyanathan, Palle Rama Rao, C.N.R. Rao, R.K. Pachauri, Roddam Narasimha, VS. Ananth, Andre Beteille, P.M. Bhargava and Deepak Nayyar. He would patiently sit through long meetings with them and listen to contending viewpoints. When the tiger population in India was threatened, he set up an expert group that included wildlife expert Valmik Thapar and Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment and heard both sides of what was a particularly sharp argument. In the National Knowledge Commission, he would listen to the ‘left-wing’ scientist P.M. Bhargava with as much interest as to the liberal sociologist Andre Beteille.

When Soros sought an appointment, Dr Singh wanted to know what he wished to talk about. Was Soros going to invest in India? Would he want to know about Indian policies? Soros did not have money on his mind. He wanted to meet Dr Singh, not the PM, and discuss his books! I had to quickly read and brief the PM on the key arguments of Soros’ books on globalization, capitalism and terrorism. Soros meant what he said—he did actually talk about his books—but Rupert Murdoch tried a trick to secure an appointment. Having failed on one occasion to meet Dr Singh, he made a second attempt by letting it be known that he was not interested in talking about his media business. Rather, he wanted to talk about China. The PM was amused and granted him an appointment. Murdoch did discuss China and explained where he saw China going. But, as he got up to leave, he expressed the hope that the Indian government would be more receptive to his media plans than China had been.

On China, Dr Singh was an eager learner. For him, China remained an enigma and he eagerly sought out people who were knowledgeable about it. He spent two long afternoons with Singapore’s leader Lee Kuan Yew getting tutored about China and its new generation of leaders. Lee knew the country better than most world leaders. He also invited Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar and Opposition politician and India’s China-watcher Subramaniam Swamy for long conversations on the subject.

He followed these up by doing his own homework, devoting several days to a thorough reading of all the Nehru papers. ‘I do not want to make the mistakes Nehru made, so it is important that I understand his own thinking at the time,’ he once said to me, explaining how he painstakingly read through the official record of what happened between China and India in the years 1957 to 1962. In his second term, as he familiarized himself with China’s new leadership, he read with interest Ezra Vogel’s authoritative biography of Deng Xiaoping. He knew the West and much of East and Southeast Asia well. His stint in the South Commission had given him a good grasp of the developing world, especially Africa.

Before a visit to Russia, he sought out the economist Padma Desai, an acknowledged authority on Russia. He would, of course, also read widely and extensively the biographies of important leaders he had to meet, picking up information about his interlocutors that no Indian diplomat was able to put into his brief before a meeting. Dr Singh was a voracious reader and his living room table always had on it a new book that he was reading. Weekends were mostly spent reading.

Over time, I consulted a wide range of scholars and policy experts when writing the PM’s speeches, sometimes seeking draft texts, and would keep him informed of the names. These included scientists like C.N.R. Rao, R.M. Mashelkar and M.S. Swaminathan, strategic affairs guru K. Subrahmanyam, Kashmir expert Amitabh Mattoo, bureaucrat and diplomat Gopalkrishna Gandhi, historian-journalist Rudrangshu Mukherjee, and my father, who had been a speech-writer for Narasimha Rao. It was, on occasion, amusing to see some of our most distinguished scientists and academics sending draft speeches full of self-praise that read more like their resumes, hoping the PM would read them out.

For his first major speech abroad, at New York’s CFR, he wanted me to consult people with specialist knowledge of India-US relations outside government and also find out from those familiar with the event who would be in the audience, and what they might expect to hear from the Indian PM. Accordingly, I consulted Sunil Khilnani and Fareed Zakaria. Not surprisingly, Mani Dixit disapproved of the idea. Reflecting the traditional Indian establishment view, he asked, ‘Can we not write a speech for the PM? Why do we need external advice?’

There was a bit of Camelot in UPA-1. Like John Kennedy’s circle of the ‘best and the brightest’, which included East Coast academics like John Kenneth Galbraith, Walt Rostow and Arthur Schlesinger, Dr Singh too had created a circle of intellect around himself. In the latter half of his first term, as Indian ambassadors began to understand this side of the PM’s personality, they would make sure to offer the PM some time with local scholars and public intellectuals, albeit mostly economists. In Paris he would meet with Alice Thorner, the widow of Daniel Thorner. Both were economists who had researched deeply on India. In New York he would meet Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve; in London he would meet economist Nick Stern and scholars from Cambridge and Oxford.

With his many friends, admirers and students dropping in every now and then, the visitor’s room at RCR became a school at which one learnt a lot, validating one of Dr Singh’s favourite lines, ‘Public office offers the opportunity for private education at public expense.’

 

 

His flaw was, of course, the weak follow-up. The original intention of setting up the National Knowledge Commission was to seek ideas on improving the quality of higher education in India and strengthening the public library system around the country. But the commission got itself embroiled in avoidable controversies, with two members quitting and another becoming a permanent dissenter. Appointing an NRI technocrat like Sam Pitroda, who did not command much respect among liberal academics, was probably a bad idea to begin with.

While Dr Singh valued inputs into policy he would become impatient with purely academic solutions that were not adequately grounded in political reality. However, he did come to appreciate the fact that while the gap between the academic and the policy worlds was not very wide in the field of economics, his own example being a case in point, in other fields, like foreign affairs, the gap was very wide because policymakers rarely shared information with scholars. Releasing a book by diplomat Jagat Mehta in April 2006, Dr Singh regretted the fact that scholars had to depend on the memory of retired civil servants to get a glimpse into the thinking that had gone into policymaking. While agreeing that memoirs like Mehta’s were very useful for scholars, he said, ‘I do hope that we do not have to depend only on memory and personal notes for a record of policymaking. I think the time has come for us to have at least a fifty-year rule, if not a thirty-year rule, that allows scholars and researchers free access to declassified official papers. I would like to have this issue examined so that we can take an early and informed decision. In the long run, this will make it possible for us to draw appropriate lessons from the past and make effective decisions for the future.’

The next day, I took a printout of the PM’s speech and put up a note for his approval saying he might wish to instruct the principal secretary to follow up on this statement and take the necessary steps to have this new policy announced. I heard nothing about this afterwards. Years later, after I left the PMO, I asked Dr Singh why he never followed up on that announcement. His matter-of-fact reply was, ‘This should have been done by the BJP when they were in office. The Congress party is not yet ready to take this step.’ The implication of his remark was that any declassification of official papers based on a thirty-year rule would begin to throw more light on Nehru’s and Indira’s time in office.

 

 

The two key initiatives of the PM for which he sought expert opinion in a systematic fashion were his dialogue with Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf on Jammu and Kashmir and the initiative he took with the US on civil nuclear energy.

In November 2004, Dr Singh was to make his first official visit to Jammu and Kashmir. He had returned from New York in September 2004 after a useful meeting with President Musharraf and felt the time was ripe for a new initiative on Kashmir. Addressing the students and faculty of the Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences, he spoke of his vision of a ‘new Kashmir’
(naya
Kashmir) and said that the ‘time has come to put forward a new blueprint, a fresh vision for Kashmir and for the Kashmiri people, free from the fear of war, want and exploitation’.

Those following the Kashmir issue understood the significance of both the phrase
‘naya
Kashmir’ and, even more importantly, the term ‘new blueprint’—a reference to the Manmohan-Musharraf formula that I will discuss in the next chapter. The speech was drafted by Mani Dixit and Amitabh Mattoo, then vice chancellor of Jammu University, and a Kashmiri Pandit. A few weeks later Mani died and in the transition from Mani to Narayanan, the momentum on the Kashmir initiative was lost. It picked up again when Musharraf visited India in April 2005. The opening up of the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service was a major confidence-building exercise that unfolded the PM’s vision of a
‘naya
Kashmir’. A key idea was free travel across the so-called Line of Control. But, despite this initiative, Dr Singh was not able to make a breakthrough with the Hurriyat and the separatists in Kashmir. He needed an instrument through which he could open an internal dialogue, just as he had by then opened dialogue with Musharraf.