The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (35 page)

After a bout of cooperation in the aftermath of China’s attack on India in 1962, Indo-US relations went through a turbulent, often contentious, phase with the events around the liberation and creation of Bangladesh marking the nadir. Nowhere in the Indian system was the hostility towards the US more palpable, and with good reason, than in its nuclear establishment. Not only had the US, through the NPT, helped legitimize China’s status as a nuclear weapons power, but it also looked the other way when China actively collaborated with Pakistan to help the latter emerge as a nuclear power.

On the other hand, the US continued to impose draconian controls on high-technology and defence-equipment sales to India in the name of non-proliferation. More than one generation of Indian nuclear scientists had worked hard, in the face of US sanctions, to develop India’s nuclear capability and they deeply resented US official attitude towards India’s nuclear aspirations. Even within the Indian foreign service many egos had been bruised because of the rough manner in which US diplomats would deal with what they often regarded as ‘sanctimonious’ Indian diplomats.

The turning point came in March 2005 when the newly appointed US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice chose to make New Delhi her first port of call on a whistle-stop tour of Asia. Rice laid out a broad new agenda of bilateral cooperation, including on the defence and energy fronts. New Delhi woke up to the potential of a new phase in relations with the US and, in April 2005, Dr Singh sent Natwar Singh and Montek to Washington DC. After an unexpected audience with President Bush in the White House, Natwar returned home with the message that Bush was ‘extremely excited’ about the state of India-US relations.

Condoleezza’s outreach on cooperation in the field of energy security became the talking point for Bush and Dr Singh when they met again on the ramparts of the Kremlin on 9 May 2005, the sixtieth anniversary of World War II’s Victory Day. Dr Singh and Mrs Kaur were witnessing the parade when President Bush walked up to them, holding his wife Laura’s hand.

‘Laura, you must meet the Indian prime minister,’ Bush said to his wife. ‘You know India is a democracy of over a billion people, with so many religions and languages and their economy is on the rise, and this man is leading it.’

He then turned to Dr Singh and said that he thought if India had to sustain its growth it needed assured energy. He suggested they talk about it during Dr Singh’s visit to the US that summer and added, ‘We can do great things together.’

Dr Singh returned to Delhi convinced that the US was ready to take a big step forward to help India develop nuclear energy as part of the ‘next steps’. On 4 June he went to the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Mumbai and delivered an important address on taking forward the dialogue on nuclear energy development. Praising India’s nuclear scientists for their contribution, Dr Singh said the time had come for the country to benefit from an expansion of its energy programme, so that by the year 2020 India could generate 20,000 megawatts of nuclear power. Towards this end, he pointed out, India needed access to nuclear fuel and technology, and an end to the sanctions that impeded trade in this field. Emphasizing India’s record as a ‘responsible nuclear power’, Dr Singh added, ‘While we are determined to utilize fully the advanced technologies in our possession—both civilian and strategic— we are also prepared for a constructive dialogue with the international community to remove hindrances to a free flow of nuclear materials, technology and knowhow.’

This was a clear signal to the world, in particular the US, that India would like to do business. Dr Singh’s problem was to convince sceptics on his side. Apart from the residual anti-Americanism in the Indian policy establishment, many in the Congress party were also not keen on closer ties with an administration that was being viewed with great animosity in the Muslim world. Even though opinion polls showed that both the US, as a country, and President Bush, as a leader, were very popular in India, neither enjoyed that popularity within the Muslim minority.

The other, even more pressing, political problem was that the UPA government was dependent for its survival on the Left Front, and the Indian Left was still very anti-US. In short, the wider political context was not favourable to the pursuit of closer ties with the US. If India was unwilling to signal a new warmth in the relationship, it was unlikely that even a friendly administration would go out of its way to grant India the huge favour of ending its nuclear isolation.

Robert Blackwill, the American ambassador in Delhi during Bush’s first term, put it pithily at one of his famous ‘round-table dinners’ in Roosevelt House, the US ambassador’s home in Delhi: ‘India wants US support for Security Council membership, for its case on Kashmir, for recognition of its nuclear power status, for modernizing its economy and its defence capability. So what will India give the US in return?’

Indian politicians and diplomats were not yet attuned to such a transactional relationship with the US, but they knew that the Bush administration would expect something, and they were not yet prepared to offer anything substantial. Aware of the wariness not just towards America, but the West as a whole, Dr Singh decided to bring some intellectual heft to the discussion. He chose the subject of India’s relations with the West as the broad theme for his special convocation address at Oxford University in July 2005, days before his US visit.

Speaking in Oxford’s imposing seventeenth-century convocation hall, Dr Singh quoted Rabindranath Tagore in support of his worldview. Tagore had written in his Nobel Prize-winning collection of poems,
Gitanjali,
‘The West has today opened its door. / There are treasures for us to take. / We will take and we will also give, / From the open shores of India’s immense humanity.’

So saying, Dr Singh added, ‘To see the India-British relationship as one of “give and take”, at the time when he first did so, was an act of courage and statesmanship. It was, however, also an act of great foresight. As we look back and also look ahead, it is clear that the Indo-British relationship is one of “give and take”. The challenge before us today is to see how we can take this mutually beneficial relationship forward in the increasingly interdependent and globalized world that we live in.’

Many in the audience, including
The
Hindu’s
chief editor N. Ram, walked up to Dr Singh and complimented him for his ‘visionary’ speech. However, a misreading of his speech by the London-based
Times
of
India
reporter, who was not even present in Oxford, resulted in a front-page story accusing Dr Singh of ‘genuflecting before the Empire’. Both the BJP and the communists instantly attacked him. Since Ram had praised the PM, I urged him to write an editorial explaining why he thought the PM’s speech was ‘visionary’ and he agreed to do so. However, the next day he called to say that Irfan Habib, the Marxist historian, and Prabhat Patnaik, the Marxist economist, had penned a strong attack against the PM and it would be difficult for him to editorially defend him. Ram, like Irfan and Prabhat, was a member of the CPI(M). For that matter, even Congress party spokespersons told beat reporters that Dr Singh should not have said what he did, even though the PM had quoted Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Rabindranath Tagore in support of his views!

This setback did not deter Dr Singh from persisting with his view that the time had come for India to renegotiate its relations with the West. He continued to believe that the ending of what K. Subrahmanyam famously dubbed as ‘nuclear apartheid’ against India, was an important step in that process. Ties with the US got a boost when India and the US agreed to cooperate in the field of defence procurement and exercises that year. The initiatives taken during Condoleezza’s visit to India in March that year were pursued by Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee during his visit to Washington DC in June. He signed a defence framework agreement with the US, setting the stage for the PM’s visit in July.

However, on the nuclear deal, the Indian establishment remained deeply divided. There were two sources of dissent. The DAE was, understandably, suspicious of US intentions in befriending India after years of keeping India out of the nuclear club. Subrahmanyam dubbed US critics of India’s nuclear programme the ‘Ayatollahs of nuclear non-proliferation’. While Subrahmanyam himself had come around to accepting President Bush’s sincerity in ending this regime and encouraged Dr Singh to trust the US, the ‘hawks’ in the DAE remained deeply suspicious, arguing that the US was seeking to trap India into technological dependency aimed at ending India’s strategic autonomy. On our flight to Washington DC in July 2005, DAE secretary Anil Kakodkar gave me a lecture on US perfidy and declared emphatically, ‘I will never trust the Americans.’ While his anger and suspicion were understandable, Dr Singh wanted to seize the opportunity being provided and end India’s isolation so that India’s nuclear energy programme would develop, without its strategic programme being impacted. This was the deal on offer. A second source of dissent came from old Cold War ideologues who were unwilling to accept that in the post-Cold War world the US was looking for new partnerships and India would benefit from such a partnership. They held the view that the US would never allow India to emerge as an independent strategic power. Both strands of opinion within the government were used by the Left Front and the BJP to constantly attack the PM in public. When I told some journalists that the DAE scientists and some MEA diplomats were overstepping their brief, and that in a democracy policy is made by the political leadership and not by officials, I was criticized by some of them for, as they put it in complaints to the PM, speaking out of turn.

While negotiations between officials of the DAE, the ministry of external affairs and the PMO on the Indian side, and State Department and White House officials on the US side, carried on through this period, Dr Singh and Bush had another round of conversation on the sidelines of the G-8 plus 5 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland in early July. Even as back-channel talks continued and there was another round of conversation between Dr Singh and Bush in the G-8 plus 5 summit in Scotland, there was no meeting of minds on the Indian side. Heated arguments between MEA and DEA officials continued even on board the prime minister’s special flight, Air India One, as we flew from Delhi to DC for the PM’s US visit.

During the stopover in Frankfurt, Dr Singh, pondering over the challenges that lay ahead, appeared preoccupied. If he was unable to get his own people to agree to a common position, how would he negotiate with the US when the other side was rife with India-baiters and non-proliferationists. However, when he landed in DC he was pleasantly surprised to find Natwar Singh appearing optimistic and willing to help him strike a deal. After a meeting with Condoleezza, Natwar went across to Blair House, the US President’s guest house, where Dr Singh was staying, to brief the PM. He brought good news—the US was willing to address some of India’s concerns. More importantly, President Bush had let it be known to his staff that he wanted Dr Singh’s visit to bear fruit. The Indian delegation discussed issues late into the night but their differences with their US interlocutors remained.

Early next morning, Condoleezza came over to meet the PM, in an effort to break the impasse, and then went back to the White House to have breakfast with President Bush. Her efforts did not bear fruit, as naysayers on both sides held up an agreement. Even as the President and the PM met in the Oval Room, and had a substantial conversation on a wide variety of issues, their officials had still not come up with an agreed text. A press briefing had been arranged at noon to catch Indian newspaper deadlines.

Briefing the PM in the Oval Room before he came out to face the media, the only advice I could give him was that his body language should exude confidence and suggest that he had achieved what he had wanted. Keep smiling and look confident, that will do for now, I said. After that, the PM was to go to the State Department for a lunch in his honour. With no agreement reached as yet, a bland press statement had to be issued. It was read by the media as a clear sign that the expected breakthrough had not happened.

Just as we left the White House for Foggy Bottom, the home of the State Department, Jaishankar came hurriedly to me, showed a thumbs- up and said, ‘It’s done!’

The negotiations had gone down to the wire. Both leaders had virtually commanded their aides to iron out their differences and produce a mutually acceptable joint statement before the day was out. The assertion of political leadership over bureaucratic and technocratic objections, in both camps, made all the difference.

It was decided that the joint statement would be made public only after another round of talks between the officials after lunch. Till then, mum was the word. But I was worried about newspaper deadlines in India. It was already approaching midnight back home and newspapers would soon be put to bed. We had to get the headline out in time for readers to see it when they opened their newspapers the next morning. I took the PM’s permission to brief a couple of senior journalists, N. Ravi of
The
Hindu
and C. Raja Mohan of the
Indian
Express,
who could be relied upon to keep their stories ready, ask their editors in India to delay printing but not reveal the news till they got the green signal.

This arrangement proved to be useful, since by the time the joint statement was released, it was too late for most newspapers to carry it. News channels were able to report it in their early morning bulletins on 19 July. While
The
Hindu’s
conservative desk staff gave the story a bland headline that said ‘Manmohan Expresses Satisfaction over Talks’, Ravi’s ‘informed’ report said it all:

In a significant development after the meeting that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had with American President George Bush at the White House, the United States, acknowledging India as a nuclear weapons power, agreed to cooperate with it in the area of civilian nuclear energy. This formulation was part of the joint statement to be issued following the talks, according to a highly-placed official source.