The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (30 page)

It is within this framework of thinking that Dr Singh situated his initiatives towards India’s key partners—the United States, Russia, Japan, the European Union and ASEAN—and its important neighbours—China, Pakistan and the South Asian countries. The civil nuclear energy cooperation agreement was not just about India’s nuclear weapons status but was equally importantly about access to high technology and nuclear energy. On the other hand, the India-ASEAN free trade agreement and the South Asian Free Trade Agreement were not just about accessing new markets or opening up one’s own markets but about building strategic partnerships and relationships of interdependence, as he told Sonia Gandhi in his letter of April 2006.

By linking India’s geo-political interests with its economic interests Dr Singh defined the new ‘geo-economics’ of Indian grand strategy. It was easier to explain this to his own party and the wider public in the context of India’s relations with the West, especially the US and the EU, and its relations with the newly industrializing economies of Asia and the global South. Of course, even in the case of the US there was the baggage of Cold War attitudes, both within India and the US, that had to be overcome. The resistance of many in the US State Department and in the Washington DC think-tank community to President Bush’s radical restructuring of India-US relations based on a recognition of India’s nuclear status came from those still living in the past, as did the criticism in India that Dr Singh was taking India into the ‘US camp’.

However, the real problem in seeking to define Indian foreign policy within this geo-economic perspective arose in defining India’s relations with Pakistan and China. India had ‘border’ problems with both. With Pakistan the problems were more deep-rooted. Admittedly there was no simplistic ‘geo-economic’ solution to either relationship. The point, however, was that increased economic interdependence could open up new spaces for diplomacy and high politics. Such interdependence in the case of South Asia had a ‘people-to-people’ dimension.

Dr Singh repeatedly defended his initiatives with the US, with China and with Pakistan within this perspective of people-to-people and business-to-business relations and not just government-to-government relations. India, he always emphasized, is destined to play a larger role in world affairs, but it must first stabilize its own neighbourhood, secure its own borders and create new interdependencies with countries that matter. He saw a ‘stable’ South Asian neighbourhood as an important basis for India’s development. It was in India’s interests to resolve longstanding border disputes and the problem of Kashmir. India was doing no one but itself a favour by seeking to resolve these issues.

But the ‘Manmohan Singh Doctrine’ was not just about ‘interests’ devoid of any ‘values’. On the contrary, Dr Singh made bold to impart to Indian foreign policy new values based on India’s own civilizational inheritance. Rejecting Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ theory he repeatedly spoke of India as a symbol of the ‘confluence of civilizations’ and the ‘coexistence of civilizations’. His repeated use of the idea of
Vasudhaiva
Kutumbakam
—’the whole world is one family’— sought to link this value to India’s ancient heritage.

But he did not stop with mouthing phrases. He readily agreed to sign on to the United Nations Democracy Fund launched by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2005, sitting alongside President Bush, and offered Indian professional expertise in conducting elections, and in the use of electronic voting machines developed by India, to countries that sought such assistance. India had rarely identified itself with such democracy-related foreign policy initiatives in the Cold War era for fear of offending many Third-World potentates.

In a bold assertion of these values, he declared in the Lok Sabha, in his May 2005 speech:

Our steadfast commitment to democracy, to building a multiethnic, multireligious, multilingual, multicultural democracy based on respect for fundamental human rights and the rule of law gives us a unique place in our era. All nations of the world, I believe, will one day function on these very principles of liberal and pluralistic democracy. This enjoins upon us the obligation to nurture these roots of our nationhood. I commit our government to work earnestly to realize this vision of India’s tryst with destiny.

 

He went to the ASEAN Summit, the SAARC Summit, the IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) and even the summit of the Non-Aligned Movement with proposals for economic cooperation, defending greater interdependence between nations. Dr Singh recognized that the single most important exception to this worldview on foreign policy is Pakistan. The India-Pakistan relationship stands on a completely different footing, unlike even the India-Bangladesh relationship. He recognized there were limits to the role economic interdependence could play in altering this one relationship. However, even here he was convinced greater interdependence would widen the policy space for normalization of relations.

 

 

On major policy issues, including relations with the US, China and Pakistan, Dr Singh and Natwar came to have similar views and Natwar increasingly became a source of support for the PM in dealing with critics within the Congress party. When Natwar had to resign after the Paul Volcker Committee’s report alleged that both the Congress party and he had benefitted monetarily through deals struck with Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Dr Singh was genuinely sorry to see him go. He then took his own time to choose a successor, retaining the portfolio from December 2005 to October 2006, when he handed it over to Pranab Mukherjee.

Pranab Mukherjee proved to be a more difficult customer. While Natwar was transparent in his dealings, Pranab was difficult to fathom. For me, two incidents captured this difference. At the end of Dr Singh’s first visit to the UN General Assembly in September 2004, he was to address a press conference. Minutes before the conference began I received a call from Natwar.

‘Baru, I am told you have not placed a chair for me at the press conference?’

I told him that earlier that month Dr Singh had addressed a press conference at Vigyan Bhavan where he sat alone on the dais and his colleagues sat in the front row, along with the media. That is what I had proposed for the New York press conference too.

‘This is preposterous. You are new, Baru, so you should know this. From the days of Panditji whenever the prime minister of India has met the press at the UN he has done so with the foreign minister next to him. Tell that to the PM and please let him know that I expect to sit next to him.’

I promptly conveyed this to Dr Singh. Mani Dixit, who was present at the time, interjected and said, ‘Tell Natwar that the PM will sit alone.’

Dr Singh waved to Mani as if to say ‘let it be’ and turned to me and smiled, nodding his head as if to signal his approval for Natwar to be on the dais with him. Natwar reciprocated the gesture by letting the media know that the PM had excellent meetings with President Bush and President Musharraf, even though he was not privy to what happened in either meeting. Natwar’s public support had its uses.

Pranab was never so transparent either in expressing his disagreement or support. After returning from an important visit to Washington DC, Pranab chose not to brief the PM for three days. He had gone to see Sonia Gandhi but had not sought an appointment with Dr Singh. On the third day, I asked Dr Singh what had transpired at Pranab’s meetings with President Bush and Condoleezza Rice. ‘I don’t know,’ was his plaintive reply.

I was taken aback. How could the foreign minister not have briefed the PM immediately on return? I suggested to him that he should summon the foreign minister and demand a briefing. I am not aware if Pranab was actually summoned or himself found time to drop in, but in any event, he visited the PM the next day. Similarly, Pranab would ‘forget’ to brief the PM on his meetings with the Left. Another curious aspect of his personality was his reluctance to delegate much work to his minister of state Anand Sharma. Sharma would sit in his room in South Block with a clean table in front of him, a diary with no appointments and bemoan his marginalization. Pranab routinely declined permission for Sharma to travel abroad, deputing junior officials to go for some of these meetings.

‘Tell PM that the external affairs ministry is not even allowing me to reply to questions in Parliament,’ Anand would complain to me. During the debate in Parliament on the nuclear deal, Anand had to lobby to get a speaking opportunity and got one only when the PM intervened to suggest that he be allowed to speak. The PM would try to compensate him for this neglect by his immediate boss by occasionally taking him abroad on his visits.

When the nuclear deal became a political hot potato for the Congress, some in the party would brief journalists on the Congress party beat that the party was not as keen as the PM on taking this forward. Almost always, the reason given would be the so-called ‘minority vote’, minority being a euphemism in India for ‘Muslim’. When the Left and the BJP started raising their pitch, and the Congress party remained diffident in extending its support to Dr Singh, it was finally left to him to defend himself.

In fact, fairly early in the game, on his flight to the US in July 2005, the mild-mannered Dr Singh lost his cool when a journalist asked for his response to the criticism that he was deviating from the ‘national consensus on foreign policy’ by seeking closer relations with the US. He retorted: ‘Can you imagine any prime minister consciously or unconsciously selling India? Nobody can sell India. India is not on sale. Nobody has to teach us lessons on patriotism.’

While he had to battle it out pretty much on his own when it came to defending the government’s engagement with the US, Dr Singh found wider support within his party on his initiatives with China and Pakistan. Everyone welcomed ‘normalization of relations’ with both neighbours and a resolution of the border problem. What very few recognized was that any success on those two fronts was linked to success on the Western front. Improved relations with the US were the key to better relations with China, Pakistan and much of the rest of the world. This simple fact, one that Subrahmanyam ingrained in Dr Singh, escaped most of Dr Singh’s critics.

 

 

While the key security and foreign policy challenge that Dr Singh had to deal with in the last months of his first term was the fallout from the Mumbai terror attack of November 2008, it was only fitting that the second major challenge was in a field that he was truly interested in—international economic diplomacy.

India’s entry into the newly created leaders’ summit of the G-20 was a tribute to Indian diplomacy in UPA-1. The G-20 was created to offer a portmanteau platform of major economies within which the US and the EU could deal with China. When the USSR disintegrated and Russia made peace with the West, the G-7 expanded to include Russia and became the G-8. Something similar could have happened in 2008 when the US and the EU discovered they would need Chinese cooperation to handle the fallout of the post-Lehmann ‘transatlantic’ financial crisis.

Indeed, Fred Bergsten, at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington DC, even wrote an essay suggesting that the US and China come together into a ‘G-2’ and manage the global economic slowdown and crisis. President Nicholas Sarkozy of France was horrified. He flew down to Camp David to meet President Bush and suggested that the G-20 finance ministers group should meet at the heads of government / state level and discuss the global crisis.

Over the previous decade, from 2000 onwards, the G-8 would invite several ‘emerging economy’ leaders to their summit meetings for an ‘outreach’ meet. This group came to include Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa. Sarkozy convinced Bush that instead of a G-8 plus 5 summit, it might be best to create a new platform under the G-20. Bush readily accepted the idea since it was appealing to him that the US could deal with China in a larger group that would include Mexico, India, Indonesia, Australia, Saudi Arabia and other economies.