The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (39 page)

‘He has taken a political decision,’ said Ram. ‘It is not about the merits of the deal, but the politics. You have to tell the PM that he should put the deal on hold. Karat will be making a statement asking the government not to operationalize the deal.’

I rushed to RCR to deliver the message to the PM. While driving down I called Sitaram Yechury to seek an explanation. He confirmed Ram’s account and said this was Karat’s decision and would have to be ratified by the politburo. Yechury sounded displeased and helpless. It was he who had read out in the Rajya Sabha the famous ‘red lines’ to the government on what would be acceptable to the Left. He agreed now that the 123 Agreement had offered reassurance on every one of the issues raised by the Left and DAE officials. Neither Ram’s friendship nor Shivshankar’s equations, nor indeed Yechury’s best efforts, would come in the way of Karat’s decision.

It was clear that Yechury was not happy with Karat’s decision. On reaching 7 RCR I conveyed Ram’s message and Yechury’s remarks to the PM. He was furious. He had been let down by the Left.

Before publicly responding to the Left’s rejection of the 123 Agreement, Dr Singh invited its leaders to a briefing and a discussion a couple of days later. All the details of the agreement were presented to them by officials from the DAE and PMO. Shortly after they left the meeting, the Left leaders addressed a press conference rejecting the agreement.

As Dr Singh watched Karat address the press on television, I was struck by the contemptuous manner in which the CPI(M) leader spoke, as he charged the government of giving up India’s ‘independent foreign policy’ and becoming an ally of an imperialist power.

‘It is this same “independent foreign policy” that they opposed when they attacked Panditji and Indiraji,’ Dr Singh said mockingly as he watched Karat fume and fulminate. When the press conference ended, he became glum and angry.

After several minutes of silence, he got up to go home for dinner, making one last comment, ‘The Left have always opposed the Congress on foreign policy when it suited them. They criticized Panditji, they criticized Indiraji, they attacked Narasimha Raoji. Whatever I did as finance minister, they criticized. They criticized non-alignment when it suited them, they supported it when it suited them. As long as I am prime minister, I will not allow these communists to dictate our foreign policy.’

 

 

A couple of days later, Dr Singh met Manini Chattegee of the
Telegraph
(Kolkata) in his room in Parliament. She had just taken charge as the
Telegraph
’s Delhi bureau chief and wanted to meet the PM. It was a courtesy call, not an interview, but it turned into one. The prime minister, still angry, was in a talkative mood and was willing to be candid while replying to her questions on the Left’s demand. As his remarks became more and more interesting and newsy, Manini realized she had a front-page story. She sought the PM’s permission to quote him and report his views. He looked at me. I told him that if he truly felt this way, he owed it to the nation to make his views known. This was an important issue on which his critics were freely offering their criticism. He should not remain silent, I said.

Dr Singh agreed to allow Manini to report what he said. He only insisted that since she had not recorded his remarks on tape she should clear the text of her report with me before its publication. Manini and I sat in an anteroom and shared our notes. She then went to her office, typed out her story and emailed it to me. It was an accurate report and I gave her the green signal.

Next morning, on Saturday 11 August, the
Telegraph
ran the headline ‘Anguished PM to Left: If You Want to Withdraw, So Be It’.

The report said, ‘Tired of the Left parties’ constant bark, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh dared them to bite after their latest diatribe against the Indo-US nuclear deal.’ It quoted Dr Singh as saying, ‘I told them it is not possible to renegotiate the deal. It is an honourable deal, the Cabinet has approved it, we cannot go back on it. I told them to do whatever they want to do. If they want to withdraw support, so be it.’

The news report sent shock waves around Delhi. Narayanan and Nair called me to find out if the report was accurate. They were not aware of the PM’s meeting with Manini, which had taken place in Parliament House while they themselves were in South Block. It is also possible that neither was as aware of the PM’s anger and anguish as I had been. They reported that the Congress party’s leadership was unhappy with the interview and might want the PM to issue a denial. Since the PM’s statements were not taped, felt Narayanan, it should be possible to issue a denial. I was appalled by that line of argument, but kept silent. It occurred to me that they, along with Congress party functionaries, might have already decided to get the PM to issue a denial and to put the blame on me for what Manini had written. I realized that the prime minister might come under pressure from his party, and was not sure what he would do. I returned to my room, read through my own notes of what exactly the PM had said and waited for the summons.

Several journalists called to say that the Congress party was planning to deny the story, saying Dr Singh never issued any such ultimatum to the Left. One senior journalist called to tell me that Ahmed Patel had said to him, ‘How can Doctor Saheb issue any such ultimatum to the Left? He did not bring them into an alliance with us, so he cannot ask them to go.’

I waited the whole day for a call from Dr Singh. Would he regret having said what he said? Would he disclaim his remarks and ask me to issue a denial? The phone never rang through the weekend, but there was no official denial either. Meanwhile, Delhi’s political circles buzzed with speculation.

On Tuesday, 14 August, a day before Independence Day, Subbu told me, to my surprise, that Dr Singh had decided to drop all references to the 123 Agreement from his address to the nation from the ramparts of the Red Fort. The approved draft had a powerful paragraph taking credit for an achievement for which he had been hailed widely. It was dropped at the eleventh hour. Standing on the ramparts, the PM could have proudly claimed that he had done the nation proud. He had secured for India a new status as a nuclear power. But while he spoke at length about everything else the government had done during the year, his one great achievement that year found no mention at all.

As they walked down the stairs from the ramparts of the Red Fort, leaving the function, ministers, officials and diplomats were puzzled by this omission. Those who knew that I was Dr Singh’s speech-writer asked me why there was no reference to the 123 Agreement in the PM’s address. I had no answer.

 

 

While the diplomats had done India proud, negotiating a historic agreement, India’s politicians let the country down. The hypocrisy of the Left was exposed by the somersault Ram had to perform on the editorial pages of
The
Hindu.
After proclaiming the 123 Agreement ‘sound and honourable’, he followed up with an editorial a few days later, toeing Karat’s line and advising the government to put the deal on hold. AndYechury, who had privately agreed that the PM had done what he had promised to, publicly criticized him.

The Left’s opposition evolved from being purely ideological into becoming a political ploy by Karat aimed at marginalizing all the pro-PM elements within his own party. Surjeet,Jyoti Basu, Buddhadeb and Yechury were the moderates. Having upstaged Surjeet, Karat used the issue of opposition to the nuclear deal as a way of consolidating his own position within the CPM. The CPI was uncomfortable with Karat’s rigid opposition. CPI leaders D. Raja and S. Sudhakar Reddy knew me well, especially the latter, whom I had known from my student days in Hyderabad. He was a disciple of Mohit Sen. He came home to see me and let me know that the CPI was not happy with Karat’s rigid anti-deal line, but felt helpless. The CPI, he admitted, did not want to destabilize the government but was unable to get Karat to alter his line.

The BJP too was a divided house. Moderate leaders like Vajpayee and even younger ones like Arun Jaitley were not resolutely opposed to the deal. It was clear that just as Karat had used his opposition to the deal as a way of rallying his own party’s cadres behind him, L.K. Advani, too, chose to adopt a rigid stance to force his party to abandon the Vajpayee line and accept him as the new leader.

Divisions within the BJP came to the fore even at Dr Singh’s briefing of the party’s leaders on the 123 Agreement. Advani was not in Delhi, but the meeting, at 7 RCR, was attended by Vajpayee, Jaswant Singh, Yashwant Sinha, Arun Shourie and Brajesh Mishra. Sinha and Shourie asked the scientists, diplomats and PMO officials many searching questions, expressing their scepticism about what had been secured. Jaswant Singh, on the other hand, complimented the officers with his usual gravitas, saying, ‘Gentlemen, you have done the nation proud!’ Vajpayee remained silent.

At one point Brajesh Mishra walked around the table and handed over a piece of paper to Vajpayee. He looked at the paper, folded it and put it in his pocket. Dr Singh turned to Vajpayee and asked him if he wished to say anything. Vajpayee smiled and remained silent. Yashwant Sinha, Shourie and Brajesh looked eagerly at Vajpayee, obviously hoping he would say something. He still did not oblige. The meeting ended. Everyone stood up and one by one walked out of the room through a door opening into a corridor. Vajpayee took his own time to stand up. Then, Dr Singh walked his predecessor out through an adjacent door with a shorter route close to where his car was parked. I was a step behind Dr Singh. Standing at the door of his car, Vajpayee gave Dr Singh a warm smile and the two shook hands. Vajpayee nodded his head and smiled, as if to suggest the PM had done a good job and he was satisfied.

‘I have only completed what you began,’ Dr Singh said, breaking the silence. Vajpayee smiled, nodded his head again, got into the car and drove away.

What followed, over the next few weeks, was a period of political suspense. It was not clear what would happen next, even though the government kept up the pretence of carrying on negotiations with the Left. Every now and then, rumours would circulate that Dr Singh was contemplating resignation. When a senior political journalist with a major national daily asked a senior Congress leader known to be close to Sonia how true these rumours were, the leader retorted, ‘Let him resign. We have so many others ready to become PM. Any one of them can do an equally good job.’

 

 

On 12 October 2007, both Sonia Gandhi and Dr Singh spoke at the Hindustan Times Summit. In response to pre-approved questions that Vir Sanghvi posed to Sonia, she said the survival of the government took precedence over the nuclear deal and while the Congress would continue to try and win over the Left it would do nothing to force the issue and risk a break with the Left.

Dr Singh watched her remarks live on television at 7 RCR. As soon as her session was over, the PM’s carcade left for Taj Palace Hotel where Dr Singh was scheduled as the second speaker.

In a pointed question, the newspaper’s editorial director, Vir Sanghvi, asked him, ‘You made a statement to a newspaper which was a bit out of sync with your persona and that started all the controversy. Do you think you overstepped a bit?’