The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (25 page)

This did not mean Dr Singh did not believe in the fundamental principles underlining the NCMP. Indeed he did. He had long conceded that as finance minister he had not done enough for health and education and that these would be his priorities as PM. He also recognized that the NDA’s defeat, especially that of Chandrababu Naidu and his Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh, was because of the neglect of agriculture and rural development, and that the UPA had to focus on this. He was among the first to criticize the BJP’s ‘India Shining’ campaign when it was rolled out in the run-up to the 2004 elections. For several months before that Sonia and he sat through long discussions with social scientists and civil-society activists to try and understand the issues they saw as priorities for policy action.

The view often purveyed by Dr Singh’s critics and Sonia’s admirers that he was a late convert to her way of thinking about social policy was just not true. The concerns expressed in the NCMP were uppermost in Dr Singh’s mind and were reflected in his first Independence Day address where he spoke of a ‘New Deal for Rural India’ and the ‘Saat Sutra’ (seven priorities) of the UPA, namely agriculture, water, education, health care, employment, urban renewal and infrastructure. This address was crafted entirely by him.

‘These seven priorities are the pillars of the development bridge we must cross to ensure higher economic growth and more equitable social and economic development,’ Dr Singh told the country from the ramparts of the Red Fort.

The ‘Saat Sutra’ set the policy framework for the government and yielded what came to be known as the UPA’s ‘flagship programmes’— Bharat Nirman, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, National Rural Health Mission, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the expanded Midday Meal Programme.

While the NAC played an important role in developing the government’s thinking on some of these programmes, the PMO too played a key role in drawing up the required legislation and in working out how these programmes would be implemented. The perception that all the UPA’s progressive social policies came out of the NAC, while the PMO was only preoccupied with economic growth and liberalization was false. This was a caricature that many in the Congress party, the Left and in the media liked to draw. Much as I wanted him to, Dr Singh was never keen on politically challenging such propaganda. His usual response, whenever I suggested we should respond to such comments, would be, ‘Let my actions speak for me.’

Bharat Nirman, the flagship rural infrastructure development programme, for example, was entirely conceived in the PMO at the initiative of the late R. Gopalakrishnan, a joint secretary in the PMO. Gopalakrishnan had ground-level experience in development from his tenure in Madhya Pradesh where he had served as secretary to Digvijaya Singh through his two terms as chief minister of the state. A highly motivated, intellectually curious and energetic civil servant, he would never allow himself to be constrained by bureaucratic red tape and rigidity.

He was inspired by business guru C.K. Prahalad’s thesis about the business potential of those at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’. He believed that public investment in rural development would generate a virtuous cycle of win-win outcomes, provided such spending generated new incomes and new employment. Bharat Nirman was conceptualized as a ‘business plan for rural infrastructure’ rather than as a new subsidy programme. The programme sought to bring together existing schemes for rural housing, rural roads, rural electrification, drinking water and irrigation, and rural telecommunications.

When Gopalakrishnan made his initial PowerPoint presentations to the PM on the scheme, there was enormous excitement in the room. This was the kind of growth-oriented and employment-generating programme that Dr Singh liked. When Gopalakrishnan suggested the name Bharat Nirman for this clutch of programmes, Dr Singh readily agreed with a smile.

Young officers in the PMO like V. Vidyavathi and Amit Agarwal were also equally committed to the UPA’s development agenda. The PM’s PS, Subbu, had also worked with Digvijaya Singh’s government in Madhya Pradesh, before opting for Chhattisgarh when the state was divided, and had taken keen interest in the work of NGOs in rural development in both states, as well as in Manipur where he had briefly served. Vidyavathi belonged to the Karnataka cadre of the IAS and Agarwal to the Chhattisgarh cadre. This was the core team that monitored the implementation of the NCMP.

When the idea of a rural employment guarantee scheme travelled to the PMO from the NAC and the rural development ministry, it was received enthusiastically by Dr Singh, who was familiar with Maharashtra’s early initiatives in this regard. Maharashtra had, from the time of Sharad Pawar’s tenure as chief minister, implemented the Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Scheme (MEGS). Though conceptualized in 1977, during Vasantdada Patil’s tenure as chief minister, MEGS was launched by Pawar in 1979. As the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission in the 1980s, Dr Singh had studied this scheme and had been impressed by it. Hence, he was in favour of implementing this programme at the national level and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was nothing more than a variant of MEGS.

The so-called differences on the MGNREGA between the PMO and the finance ministry on the one hand, and the NAC on the other, related mainly to the financial implications of the programme with estimates of how much it would cost the exchequer varying from 1 to 3 per cent of national income. Neither Dr Singh nor Chidambaram wanted an open-ended fiscal commitment, since the benefits of the programme were to be based on self-selection. That is, only a person seeking employment under the MGNREGA would be offered it for the number of days and at a wage rate specified. This would mean that at the beginning of the year the government would not know how many would come forward to seek the benefit.

The minister for rural development Dr Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, a one-time physics professor and a genial grassroots politician for whom Dr Singh had high regard and great affection, played an important role as a bridge between the fiscal conservatives and the populists. Raghuvansh Prasad looked rustic, with a scraggy unshaven appearance, always sporting a well-worn dhoti and not the starched, crisp white dhotis that most politicians normally wear. His English was scratchy; but his knowledge of the subject he was handling was superb.

Unlike many other Cabinet ministers who left it to their secretaries to brief the PM on policy issues concerning their ministries, Raghuvansh Prasad would make his own presentations. He understood the PM’s fiscal concerns and worked towards a fiscally responsible programme. Raghuvansh Prasad was one person Dr Singh would have loved to induct into his council of ministers in 2009, but could not because of the parting of ways between the Congress and Lalu Prasad’s RJD, of which Raghuvansh Prasad was a senior leader. On several occasions I could sense his irritation with Congress party propagandists who claimed credit for the MGNREGA in the name of Sonia and later Rahul, but would never give Raghuvansh Prasad credit for his stellar work on it.

 

 

The Congress party’s obsession with giving the entire credit for the MGNREGA to the Gandhi family reached a point where it may have actually embarrassed the family. When I tried to correct that impression, I found myself in a spot of trouble. On 26 September 2007, shortly after he was appointed one of the party’s general secretaries, Rahul Gandhi led a delegation of all the party general secretaries to greet Dr Singh on his birthday. After the courtesies and tea and dhokla were done with, the delegation settled down to a discussion on policy issues. At the end of the meeting, Sonia’s political secretary, Ahmed Patel, handed over a statement about the meeting, requesting me to release it to the press.

The statement claimed that Rahul Gandhi had urged the PM to extend the scope of NREGA (this was before it was named after Mahatma Gandhi and consequently became MGNREGA) to all the 500-odd rural districts in the country. Until then, it was being implemented only in 200 of the most backward districts. I told Patel that it was not the practice of the PMO to issue press statements on behalf of those who visited the PM, and that I would draft a statement of my own stating that a delegation of party general secretaries led by Rahul had come to greet the PM on his birthday. As for the political content of the statement, it was better, I suggested, that it came in a separate statement from the party office.

Later that evening, Shishir Gupta, a senior political journalist at the
Indian
Express,
called me to find out if Dr Singh had accepted Rahul’s suggestion and whether NREGA would now be extended to the entire country. I reminded Shishir that the prime minister had already stated his commitment to doing so in his Independence Day speech the previous month, and that the PMO was in discussions on this very point with the ministries of rural development and finance.

That evening, all TV channels dutifully reported the Congress party’s statement that Rahul had asked the PM to extend NREGA to the entire country, and the next morning’s papers did the same. Only the
Indian
Express
made the additional remark in its dispatch the next day that ‘Sources said that this issue had been on the PMO radar even before Rahul’s elevation to the party post. The Principal Secretary to the PM had already discussed the issue with officials from the Finance Ministry, Rural Development Ministry and Planning Commission almost two weeks ago.’

Raghuvansh Prasad had, in fact, been the original enthusiast in favour of extending the employment programme to the entire country and he was amused when he found himself upstaged by a Congress party now claiming this was Rahul’s idea. But he sportingly went along with the Congress party’s spin, confining himself to telling a few reporters from his home state, Bihar, that it was he who had been pushing the finance ministry and the Planning Commission to extend the programme.

I sent an SMS, half in jest, to a journalist who wanted to know more about the programme’s national roll-out, that this announcement was the PM’s birthday gift to the country. After all, if Sonia or Rahul had been PM, that is precisely how the party’s strategists would have spun out such an announcement on a leader’s birthday.

It later transpired that this SMS had made the rounds and reached the party leadership. One senior leader told a senior editor, ‘What does Baru think? He thinks Doctor Saheb [Dr Singh] can win us elections? We have to project Rahulji’s image and this kind of SMS does not help.’

When I heard this, I knew I was in trouble. Sure enough, I was summoned by the PM for a dressing-down. As I entered the antechamber of his room, Nair, Narayanan and Pulok were walking out. Noting that all three scrupulously avoided eye contact with me, I realized this was going to be serious. When I went in, Dr Singh was seated, arms folded and wearing an angry look.

‘Did you send an SMS to journalists that the expansion of the NREGA is my birthday gift?’

I said I did, but half in jest. I pointed out that the Independence Day speech had already reiterated the government’s commitment to expanding it. But even conceding that Rahul had taken things forward by demanding an early roll-out, the decision had indeed been taken on the PM’s birthday.

The PM sat stiff in stony silence. I broke the silence by adding, ‘The party wants to give the entire credit for this decision to Rahul. But both you and Raghuvansh Prasad deserve as much credit.’

‘I do not want any credit for myself,’ he snapped. He was still red with anger.

‘Sir, it is my job to project your image and secure the political credit due to you. Let the party do that for Sonia and Rahul. I have to do this for you.’

‘No!’ he snapped again. ‘I do not want you to project my image.’

There was dead silence in the room after this. I just sat there, in that still room. After several minutes of silence, Dr Singh’s tense face and body relaxed.

In an almost paternal tone, he admonished me, ‘Why do you do these things?’

I did not respond and, after many seconds of deafening silence, the PM said, ‘Let them take all the credit. I don’t need it. I am only doing my work. You just write my speeches for me. I do not want any media projection.’

He then stood up and I left the room. It was the second time I had got a scolding from him, a decade and a half after being pulled up for those editing mistakes in the
‘ET
at 30’ special edition, but this time it was serious. I was told, in essence, to stop doing the work I had been hired to do. Clearly, the blowback from the party and its ‘first family’ must have been serious enough to warrant this. I did not actually stop projecting the prime minister after this. Events themselves demanded it, like his successes in negotiating and delivering the nuclear deal. However, this episode left me with a depressing awareness of the limitations of my job as Dr Singh’s spin doctor. I felt less free after this than I had been before.