The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (3 page)

Moving away from the crowd milling around the new PM, I wandered around the hall, looking for news. Soon enough, I ran into Prithviraj Chavan, a Congress party politician from Maharashtra whom I had known for close to a decade. We were both regulars at the weekly lunch discussion group, the Saturday Group, at the India International Centre. Prithvi had just been sworn in as minister of state (MoS) and I asked if he knew what his new portfolio would be. Looking very pleased with himself, he told me that the PM had confided in him that he would be MoS finance. That was front-page news. So who, I quickly followed up, would be the new finance minister? Prithvi leaned closer to almost whisper into my ear, ‘PM will retain finance.’ I had my headline.

I sat up late into the night waiting for portfolios to be announced but by the time we went to press there was no official word. Finally, we ran the news that Dr Singh would retain the finance portfolio and that Chavan would be named MoS finance.

The morning our story appeared, I had a call from P. Chidambaram, a senior Congress party leader who had served as finance minister in a short-lived coalition government formed in 1996. At that time, he had belonged to a party that had broken away from the Congress, and had returned to its fold shortly before the 2004 elections. Some years earlier he became a weekly columnist in my newspaper and remained one till he returned to government in May 2004.

‘Is your report accurate?’ he asked me. I assured him that I had heard it ‘from the horse’s mouth’.

‘You mean the PM?’ he asked at once. No, the MoS, I said. ‘If the PM keeps finance, what will they give me?’ Chidambaram wondered aloud.

I was amused and surprised to hear that question from the usually self- confident Chidambaram. There was already speculation in the media that he would be given charge of commerce or telecommunications, and I mentioned that to him.

He retorted angrily, ‘Mr Editor, I have been finance minister before! Do you think I will accept anything less than a senior Cabinet position?’

The finance minister sits, along with the PM, the external affairs, defence and home ministers, on Raisina Hill. These are the leading occupants of Delhi’s North and South Blocks. They are all members of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), a body that has seen its clout grow in an era of national security and nuclear power.

So I asked Chidambaram what he would do if he was not on the Hill.

‘I will sit in the backbenches!’ he declared.

‘Good,’ I told him, pulling his leg, ‘you can then continue your weekly column with
FE’

By the time the portfolios were announced that evening, the sands had shifted. Chidambaram was named finance minister. Prithviraj was named MoS in the PMO. I called Prithvi to find out what happened. He told me that the PM had been advised against keeping finance, a heavy portfolio, since his hands would be full managing the government and the coalition. But Prithvi was far from disappointed. Instead of MoS finance under Dr Singh, he was now MoS in the PMO. He had entered the government’s sanctum sanctorum.

While Prithvi clearly owed his portfolio, if not his ministerial berth, to Dr Singh, this was not the case with most of the new council of ministers. The Congress’s allies in UPA-1 nominated their own ministers and bargained for their portfolios with Sonia, not with Dr Singh. The bargaining process reflected the political reality on the ground. No matter how prominent a political leader was, he was not likely to get the portfolio he or his supporters wished for, if his party did not have the numbers in the Lok Sabha, the Lower House of Parliament. Thus Sharad Pawar, who had been defence minister in Narasimha Rao’s Cabinet, could not climb Raisina Hill. Since his party, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), had only nine seats in the new Parliament, he had to be content with agriculture. On the other hand, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a political party that won all the sixteen seats it had contested in Tamil Nadu, made sure it got key economic ministries with, to use a popular phrase, ‘rent-seeking’ opportunities.

As for senior Congress leaders, they owed their Cabinet posts almost entirely to Sonia Gandhi, who did, however, consult Dr Singh and close aides before finalizing the names. When the council of ministers was reshuffled during the term of UPA-I, Dr Singh did have more of a say but even so, few of its members ever behaved as if they owed their ministerial positions to the PM. With time, even the loyalties of Prithviraj Chavan, handpicked by Dr Singh to serve in his own office, became divided as he made sure he was on the right side of his party’s leader. Prithvi was Dr Singh’s protégé but he knew that his political career depended on demonstrating loyalty to Sonia and Rahul.

Dr Singh, far more politically astute than his detractors believed him to be, would have been well aware of the limits to prime ministerial authority under such a dispensation. Prime ministers in earlier coalitions had also had to share their power to nominate ministers with leaders of coalition parties. While his predecessor Atal Bihari Vajpayee had been able to assert himself quite strongly in the NDA coalition, partly because of his standing as a popular leader of his own party, Dr Singh took his cue from the more circumscribed role that H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral enjoyed as heads of the United Front coalition in the mid-1990s. He was also, perhaps, more accepting than another prime minister might have been of his limited power over his own partymen because he saw himself as an ‘accidental prime minister’, by which he meant that he was not the natural choice for the job. After all, had Sonia Gandhi not been born an Italian she would have kept the job for herself. The fact of her alien status had made it necessary for her to choose another leader and Dr Singh was the man she chose.

Manmohan Singh had not expected to become PM. At best, it can be said that he had hoped this opportunity might one day come his way. People have often asked me whether I thought Dr Singh was ambitious. My sense is that ‘ambition’ is too strong a word to describe how he felt about his destiny. I would rather say he had faith in his own abilities, and all the pride, albeit never openly expressed, of a self- made man. Even while he modestly called himself an ‘accidental prime minister’ he did not doubt that he could do the job, and do it better than the other senior leaders around Sonia.

He had, over the previous eight years, made clear his commitment to active politics. A technocrat when Narasimha Rao inducted him into his government in 1991, he did not return to that predictable world after Rao was defeated at the hustings in 1996 and later abandoned by the Congress party. Dr Singh remained a party loyalist and as leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha participated actively in the party’s political programmes. He came to play the role of a ‘second in command’ even if he was not explicitly named as such. When Sonia failed to garner enough support to form a coalition government under her own leadership in 1999 and Dr Singh was asked to contest a Lok Sabha elections a few months later, he may have seen this as a signal that he was being groomed for a larger political role. Even though he lost that election, he did emerge as Sonia’s right-hand man in the years between 1999 and 2004. It was Manmohan Singh, not Arjun Singh or Pranab Mukherjee, who was by her side when she met foreign heads of government. Therefore, while he neither planned nor schemed to become prime minister, Dr Singh was not taken by complete surprise when he got the job.

This was, however, the first time ever that the Congress party would be running a coalition government in Delhi. The tough task of managing a fourteen-party coalition was made trickier by the fact that the Congress was to be in office with the support, from the ‘outside’, of the Left Front, a group of Left parties that had been unwavering critics of Dr Singh’s policies as finance minister. Some in the Left were prepared to join the government. It was rumoured that SitaramYechury, a member of the politburo of the Communist Party of India-Marxist [CPI(M)], a leading constituent of the Left Front, had even voiced the hope of becoming minister for railways in a Left-supported and Congress-led coalition. Another member of the front, the Communist Party of India (CPI), was willing to join the government. After all, the CPI had been a part of coalition governments at the Centre in the past, namely those led by H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral in the 1990s, and the party’s senior leader Indrajit Gupta had even served as India’s first communist home minister. However, the leadership of the CPI(M) vetoed the idea of the Left joining the government.

On 24 May, the new ministers took charge of their ministries. The formation and agenda of the new government was front-page news every day. One morning, the media reported that a little-known civil servant, T.K.A. Nair, a member of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), belonging to the Punjab cadre, had been named to the most important administrative post in the PMO, that of principal secretary to the PM.

This surprised me. I had thought the job was Montek’s. But, knowing the relationship between Montek and Dr Singh, I assumed a bigger job was in the works for him, should he return from Washington. That weekend I took a week’s holiday and flew to Hyderabad with my daughter, Tanvika, to celebrate my fiftieth birthday with my parents. My wife, Rama, had gone to Canada to take up a research fellowship. On Friday, 28 May, the day I turned fifty, we were in the dining room of my parents’ home when my mobile phone rang.

‘Is it Mr Sanjay Baru?’ asked an unmistakably sarkari voice from Delhi. ‘Principal secretary to PM, Mr Nair, will speak to you.’

Nair came on the line and introduced himself. ‘Mr Baru, we have never met. I am principal secretary to the PM. The PM would like to meet you. Can you come this evening?’

I informed him that I was in Hyderabad and would only return after the weekend. He said he would get back to me and called a few minutes later to schedule an appointment for Monday morning.

That evening, when I was at a family party, I received another call from Delhi. The caller was N.N. Vohra, a distinguished former civil servant who had served as home and defence secretary and had been Prime Minister Inder Gujral’s principal secretary. I got to know Vohra intimately when he was director of the India International Centre in the late 1990s and I was the convenor of the centre’s economic affairs group. We had also both been members of the National Security Advisory Board (NSAB) from 1998 to 2001, and had, moreover, travelled together to many foreign capitals, notably Tokyo, as part of a delegation sent by the Vajpayee government to persuade Japan to end the economic sanctions imposed on India after the nuclear tests. Vohra had regaled us with jokes and humorous anecdotes from his varied career in the civil and intelligence services. During long walks in Tokyo, we discovered we had similar views on many issues and despite the several years that separated us, became good friends. Our most recent association had been as members of Mani Dixit’s foreign policy group.

‘Sanjaya,’ said Vohra, ‘you are meeting the PM on Monday? He will ask you to join his office. He asked me what I thought of you. I told him you were a good fellow!’

Vohra laughed in his characteristic nasal tone. ‘He said he was planning to appoint you as his information adviser. I told him he had made a wise choice.’

I thanked Vohra for his vote of confidence and returned to join the partying, feeling my excitement rising at what lay ahead. My professional life had been full of twists and turns. At the age of thirty- six, I had given up the staid world of a university campus in Hyderabad where I had taught economics, and entered the rough and tumble of journalism at a time of sweeping economic and political change in India and the world. Later, I had also ventured into the esoteric field of strategic policy as a member of India’s NSAB. Now, I would be making yet another turn and, to tell the truth, I was ready for it. Working in a PMO headed by Manmohan Singh, whom I had come to respect as a professional and a human being, was an opportunity not to be missed. However, while I discreetly shared Vohra’s news with my parents, I did not mention it to anyone else. That day, I was more than happy to celebrate turning fifty with family and friends for whom Delhi was a distant durbar.

‘Sometimes in life it is wise to be foolish.’

 

Raul Prebisch to Manmohan Singh, 1969

 

I first met Manmohan Singh in early 1991 at his office in the University Grants Commission (UGC), across the road from my own office at Times House, on New Delhi’s Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg. The
Economic
Times,
where I was then associate editor, was to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary in March 1991. I was put in charge of producing a special supplement for the occasion. We decided that it would carry interviews with economists who had shaped policy during those thirty years. We picked K.N. Raj, the doyen of the Delhi School of Economics, consulted by both Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi; P.R. Brahmananda, who created a rival group dubbed the Bombay School of Economics; and Manmohan Singh, a disciple of Raj at the Delhi School, but one who had served the Indian government in important policymaking capacities for two-thirds of the period that was our focus.