The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (24 page)

I was not aware what view Narayanan was taking of Dr Singh’s ideas about a
‘naya
Kashmir’ and a ‘new blueprint’ until I was summoned by the PM sometime in August 2005 and asked who I thought were the ‘wise men’ he should consult on Kashmir. He was then preparing for his third meeting with Musharraf in September 2005.

I recalled the fact that when I was editor of the
Financial
Express,
I had once met Dr Singh at the home of journalist Prem Shankar Jha in Delhi’s Golf Links where Prem and my former colleague from the
Economic
Times
David Devadas had brought together some Hurriyat leaders for a conversation over very high-quality Kashmiri
wazwan.
So I first suggested Prem’s name and then went on to add the names of all those who I knew had either some knowledge or interest in the subject. This list included strategic affairs guru K. Subrahmanyam, former home secretary and the government’s special representative on J&K N.N. Vohra, journalists B.G. Verghese, Manoj Joshi (who had published a book on Kashmir) and Bharat Bhushan, Kashmiri economist Haseeb Drabhu, who was then adviser to the chief minister of J&K, and Amitabh Mattoo.

Dr Singh asked me to arrange a meeting with all of them. It was decided that they would all be invited for a pre-lunch meeting on a Saturday morning and the conversation would carry on over lunch. Narayanan was miffed at the idea.

‘Why does he want all these seminar-wallahs here?’ he asked. ‘What can they tell him that we do not already know?’

I said there was no harm in the PM hearing opinions from outside the government.

‘He reads all their columns anyway!’ replied an exasperated and irritated Narayanan.

Later, he sat glumly through the meeting. As he left, he asked me if I had heard one new idea. Not being a subject expert, I was not sure how much of what had been said that morning was new. But I soon realized there was a major takeaway from the meeting when Dr Singh called me and said he liked K. Subrahmanyam’s suggestion that the PM should convene a ‘round-table’ on the future of J&K, ensuring that every single viewpoint was represented around the table.

‘That is what the British did,’ he added for effect. Narayanan was uncomfortable with the term ‘round-table conference’ for precisely that reason. As he pointed out, the British had convened a round-table conference to begin the process of granting India independence. Was that the political message the PM wanted to send? Narayanan did not like the idea at all.

Dr Singh had a different view. He believed the time had come for everyone in the state to freely express their opinion. After all, the Hurriyat and separatists did not represent the majority in the state, nor was
‘azadi’
really on the cards. The separatists were a vocal and an important minority. Let them speak openly in a gathering of fellow Kashmiris and representatives of Jammu and Ladakh, he felt, and let there be an open discussion. In the end it would have to be India and Pakistan that would have to arrive at a settlement of the issue, keeping in mind the welfare of the Kashmiri people.

Invitations were sent out to every political party, to intellectuals, heads of major academic institutions, NGOs and to the Kashmiri separatists as well. On 25 February 2006, after Parliament had opened for the budget session, the First J&K Round-table was convened at 7 RCR. Invitations to the meeting were handed over personally to every important leader from the state. Intelligence officials scouted out even those who were ostensibly underground and letters of invitation were personally handed over to them. No one could claim he or she was not invited.

The round-table was a great success inasmuch as it was the first dialogue process of its kind and allowed a wide cross-section of opinion to be freely expressed. The Hurriyat boycotted the meeting but they seemed impressed by the PM’s sincerity, because soon after, they agreed to meet him for a direct dialogue. He opened the day-long round- table saying:

A round-table is a dialogue. No one preaches and no one just listens. This is a dialogue of equals who promise to work together. Today’s meeting is a significant event. It will, however, achieve historical importance if we are able to unleash a process by which we can arrive at a workable blueprint that can help to create a new chapter in Kashmir’s history. Not by compromising on one’s ideals, but in a spirit of mutual tolerance, understanding and accommodation.

 

This entire process is a good example of how Dr Singh used ‘outsiders’ of repute, like K. Subrahmanyam, Prem Jha, Amitabh Mattoo, Haseeb Drabhu and others to break the mould and seek an ‘out-of- the-box’ solution to a problem to which the governmental system was unable to find a solution. In seeking to push the idea of a civil nuclear energy agreement with the United States that would liberate India from trade denial regimes in strategic technologies, Dr Singh invested even more time and effort into engaging the minds of India’s top strategic affairs, nuclear policy and international relations experts. Over three years, from mid-2005 to mid-2008, 7 RCR played host to a large number of analysts and experts with differing views whose opinions shaped Dr Singh’s own thinking and Indian official policy.

Many retired nuclear scientists came out of the woodwork wanting to be ‘consulted’ and to be seen as part of the historic process. One such senior scientist even sent me his biodata and urged me to get him appointed as an adviser to the PM. When this did not happen, he became a severe critic of the nuclear deal.

The only major organized effort was, not surprisingly, left to K. Subrahmanyam to lead. Dr Singh appointed a task force that was asked to study emerging trends and long-term implications of the global strategy of the United States as it had evolved during the Bush era and draw relevant lessons for Indian economic and foreign policy. The task force report titled ‘The Challenge: India and the New American Global Strategy’ was commissioned in 2005 and submitted to the PM in 2006. The Subrahmanyam task force had among its members scientists P. Rama Rao and M.S. Ananth, economists R.K. Pachauri and Arvind Virmani, strategic affairs analysts Uday Bhaskar and Amitabh Mattoo. Regrettably, it remains a classified document even though Subrahmanyam wanted it made public.

 

 

Social policy, however, was the one area in which the voice of the activist overpowered the voice of the specialist. There were a few experts like development economists Jean Dreze and Mihir Shah, the former a member of the NAC in UPA-1 and the latter a member of the Planning Commission in UPA-2, who combined activism with serious research. However, most others involved in making social policy, including most members of the NAC, were more activists than experts, and far removed from being administrators. Dr Singh tried to infuse rigour into the process of social-sector policymaking, and sometimes found his efforts misinterpreted. For example, Dr Singh was never opposed to the rural employment guarantee programme but sought rigorous analysis of the options available to see how the government could maximize the benefits while minimizing the expenditure. This was construed by activists as opposition to the scheme itself.

This insistence on securing an analytical underpinning for the government’s policy initiatives sometimes made Dr Singh a frustrated head of government, because everything that a government does in a democracy cannot be justified by the principles of rigour and consistency. While, on the one hand, activists disparaged him for not being populist enough, on the other, many of Dr Singh’s more academically oriented friends found fault with him for the intellectual compromises he had to make as a politician. This prompted the jibe that Dr Singh was in fact ‘a first-rate politician but a second-rate economist’. But Dr Singh had been in public life long enough to know, as he often put it, that ‘one has to first succeed as a politician before being viewed a statesman’.

For the same reason, I, too, would not overstate the role of’expertise’ and of the ‘technocracy’ in policymaking. In a democracy, that too with a fractious and ideologically disparate coalition like the UPA at the helm, public policy was inevitably a product of political interest and private lobbying. But subject experts and committees certainly informed Dr Singh’s thinking and gave him the space he needed to negotiate his way through political hurdles in pursuit of policies dear to him, both domestic and foreign.

‘We want India to shine. But India must shine for all.’

 

First national press conference
4 September 2004

 

Even before he was named head of the UPA government, Dr Singh was asked by Sonia to address the media and calm the stock market down. The BSE Sensex had gone into a tailspin after it was announced that the Congress would form a government with the support of the Left. It was left to Dr Singh to calm investors’ nerves. Fortunately, his track record in the 1990s reassured investors at home and abroad. The Vajpayee government had ended its term on a high note, with upwards of 8 per cent growth in the final year, fuelled by a massive expansion of investment in infrastructure, and bequeathed to its successor an economy in reasonably good shape. It was economic optimism that prompted the NDA finance minister Jaswant Singh’s famous ‘India Shining’ campaign, aimed at promoting India internationally as an investment destination. Growth rates were going up, inflation was low, a surplus in the capital account was being registered for the first time in years. The last indicator was a vote of confidence from a global community that viewed the BJP with scepticism when it conducted nuclear tests in 1998. The challenge for the UPA was to address the grievances of farmers, especially in southern India, reassure investors and make the growth process socially ‘inclusive’.

In setting out the new government’s agenda through his first Independence Day address, Dr Singh emphasized that the government’s ‘plans and priorities’ had been defined by three statements—the NCMP, the President’s address to Parliament and the finance minister’s budget speech. The reference to all three statements was significant. It was meant to emphasize the fact that the policy agenda of the government was not defined by the NCMP alone, but also by what the President said in Parliament (this was a speech written by the PMO, which in this case meant me) and what the finance minister said in his budget speech.

What the PM was implicitly telling the nation was that the NCMP would not become a straitjacket but would be interpreted through the government’s policy statements. The NCMP had been hurriedly drafted by Sitaram Yechury and Jairam Ramesh to enable the Left to work with the Congress. It was not a carefully thought through manifesto. Dr Singh was, understandably, not fully satisfied with the NCMP. He thought the Congress had made too many concessions to the Left in its desperation to secure support. He was concerned that both the Left and many in the Congress would expect delivery on all promises, and that this might be a tough task for the government. The party seemed to have taken the easy way out, saying ‘yes’ to words in print and imagining that the government would not be constrained by them in action.

Having lived through the nightmare of 1991—92, namely the economic mess that confronted the Narasimha Rao government, and having handled earlier economic crises, one of Dr Singh’s favourite English proverbs was ‘money does not grow on trees’. He believed the NCMP’s fiscal commitments, and there were many promises of subsidies and new schemes, would prove to be unsustainable. This belief lay behind the more cautious tone of what was possible and doable in the President’s address and the finance minister’s budget speech. Also, by emphasizing the relevance of the budget speech to government policy he was giving the government the option to define policy from time to time, rather than be constrained by commitments made on paper on an eager night.