The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (43 page)

With the date set for the vote of confidence, Dr Singh got down to gathering support. He spoke to all UPA leaders and met as many MPs as necessary. He asked for a list of MPs who had spoken in his support on various occasions and made sure that he called each one of them. The debate in Parliament was exhaustive and had several moments of great oratory, and well-informed and reasoned discourse as well as moments of high emotion, showmanship and drama. The argument that a strategic understanding with the United States would not go down well with India’s Muslim community was rubbished by several Muslim MPs from across parties, including Asaduddin Owaisi of the All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, Omar Abdullah of the National Conference and Mehbooba Mufti of the People’s Democratic Party, all of whom spoke eloquently in Dr Singh’s support. Whatever the outcome of the vote, whoever heard the debate was now well informed on the facts and the fears.

Returning home late on the first day of the debate, 21 July, I switched on the TV and tried to relax. One of the channels was playing a song from a yet-to-be-released film called
Singh
is
Kinng.
The
song had great rhythm and beat. It was the kind of song that made you shake your shoulders and hips. As I went to bed I amused myself by imagining TV news channels playing this song the next day were Dr Singh to indeed win the vote of confidence.

 

 

Tuesday, 22 July was a tense day. Congress party leaders and Narayanan met the PM to assure him that the government had the numbers. Dr Singh looked pleased and confident, though a bit nervous. Everything seemed to be going well until after lunch. But trouble was lying in wait. At 4 p.m., some members of the BJP placed wads of rupee notes on the table of the Lok Sabha secretary general and alleged that they had been paid this money in exchange for support to the government. Senior BJP leaders then informed the media that a sting operation had also been conducted by a TV channel and proof of the bribing would be shown on TV I was in South Block at the time and rushed to Parliament. Dr Singh was closeted with Sonia Gandhi, Pranab Mukherjee and other senior party leaders. Prithviraj Chavan came out of the room and called Rajdeep Sardesai of CNN-IBN, the TV channel that had filmed the alleged sting, and warned him of legal consequences if the channel televised the visuals.

When Sonia Gandhi and other leaders left the PM’s room, I walked in. Dr Singh was ashen-faced; he looked pale and ill, almost as if he would collapse or break down crying. I had never seen him like this— silent, motionless, shell-shocked and grief-stricken. This was not the way he had imagined the day would end. This was not the way, either, that he had imagined the issue would play out. This was his most important political initiative, for which he had fought a hard political battle for three long years. He was on the cusp of victory. Despite the betrayal of the Left, he had managed to stitch together a coalition of the willing. He had never imagined that in the end his heroic enterprise would be so sullied by scandal.

Watching him in silence, I could read his mind. Only the previous evening, on the 21st, he had firmly denied allegations that he was securing support for his government by paying bribes. He had bravely asked the Opposition to produce evidence, confident that there would be no such evidence. Advani was on TV reminding the PM of this challenge. ‘Yesterday he asked for evidence. Today we have brought it.’

But, at no point in the negotiations with Yadav or any other political party had the PM authorized offering cash in exchange for votes. The carrot he was willing to offer was ministerial berths in exchange for political support. That, indeed, was what he had offered Yadav. This was, after all, a legitimate bargaining chip in democratic politics. In all democracies around the world, coalition governments are built by political parties extending support in exchange for ministerial berths and other governmental perks. That is how coalitions had been built in India, too, in the past. He had done nothing illegitimate and Mulayam had extended support. So, how did this ‘cash-for-votes’ scandal happen?

Was this the initiative of an overenthusiastic wheeler-dealer in the party or a conspiracy to sully the PM’s image and reputation? Was it the work of those angry with Dr Singh for forcing a split with the Left and a near collapse of the government? Were there elements that hoped he would resign and quit, opening up the possibility of a change of leadership and a return to business as usual with the Left? A variety of conspiracy theories swirled around in my mind as I sat in front of a man who looked defeated only hours before a victory.

 

 

When the Lok Sabha reconvened, Dr Singh hoped he would get a chance to speak. But that right and courtesy was denied to him by an Opposition that heckled and disrupted the session. He had spent considerable time over the previous week working on his speech. Montek, Narayanan and I worked on various parts of it with the PM himself adding sentences. Referring to the betrayal of the Left, which had originally agreed to support the initiative he had taken and then backed out, he wanted to say:

All I had asked our Left colleagues was ‘please allow us to go through the negotiating process and I will come to Parliament before operationalizing the nuclear agreement’. This simple courtesy, which is essential for the orderly functioning of any government worth the name, particularly with regard to the conduct of foreign policy, they were not willing to grant me. They wanted a veto over every single step of the negotiations, which is not acceptable. They wanted me to behave as their bonded slave.

 

He had agreed to conclude on an uncharacteristically personal note:

I have often said that I am a politician by accident. I have held many diverse responsibilities. I have been a teacher, I have been an official of the Government of India, I have been a member of this greatest of Parliaments, but I have never forgotten my life as a young boy in a distant village. Every day that I have been prime minister of India I have tried to remember that the first ten years of my life were spent in a village with no drinking water supply, no electricity, no hospital, no roads and nothing that we today associate with modern living. I had to walk miles to school, I had to study in the dim light of a kerosene oil lamp. This nation gave me the opportunity to ensure that such would not be the life of our children in the foreseeable future. Sir, my conscience is clear that on every day that I have occupied this high office, I have tried to fulfil the dream of that young boy from that distant village.

 

But the speech was never delivered, merely tabled and circulated to the media. That afternoon Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee, who belonged to the CPI(M), revealed in public what we all knew in private. He expressed his anger at the political games Prakash Karat had been playing and at the wrecking of a coalition that he [Somnath] had helped construct. A short while earlier, he had refused to accept the CPI(M)’s demand that he quit as Lok Sabha Speaker because his party had withdrawn support to the UPA. Chatterjee had been elected Speaker as part of the Left’s understanding to support UPA. On 22 July he went on to chair a meeting of political parties in Parliament to resolve the crisis created by the so-called ‘cash-for-votes’ scandal and reconvened the Lok Sabha to put the confidence motion to vote. The next day, the CPI(M) politburo met and expelled Chatterjee from the party’s membership. Chatterjee remained unfazed. He had not only disapproved of Karat’s tactics, but had also openly supported the prime minister and his initiative.

Somnath had personal regard for Dr Singh. Their friendship was cemented by their years together in the Rajya Sabha. But Dr Singh would always recall the fact that Somnath’s father, Nirmal Chandra Chatterjee, a lawyer and a public intellectual and once-president of the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, had awarded him a scroll of honour for securing the first rank at Amritsar’s Hindu College way back in 1950. It was the same Somnath who had held up a copy of the
Economic
Times
on budget day in 1992 to charge the then finance minister with leaking budget secrets to the IMF. Now, more than fifteen years later, he presided over Dr Singh’s toughest day in Parliament and declared his victory. At the end of a long day, made longer by the fact that several MPs had preferred to cast their vote on paper, rather than use the Lok Sabha’s electronic voting system and those votes had to be physically counted, Somnath announced that 275 MPs had voted in support of the government, 256 had voted against it and ten had either abstained or were absent.

An uproar greeted the victory. I sent a text message from my mobile phone to several journalists with just three words on it: ‘Singh is King’. Late that night, when I reached home and switched on the TV, every channel was running that jingle from that movie with visuals of a tired prime minister standing in front of TV cameras holding his hand up in a V-sign.

‘There cannot be two centres of power. That creates confusion. I have to accept that the party president is the centre of power.’

 

Manmohan Singh, 2009

 

It was early evening on Saturday, 6 September 2008. I was in Singapore travelling to the university campus where I taught, when my mobile phone rang. It was Jaideep Sarkar, the PM’s private secretary.

‘NSG waiver is done!’ he said. The PM was thrilled and Narayanan was ecstatic, he added, describing the celebratory mood that had swept RCR after this important breakthrough in the India-US nuclear agreement.

At noon that day in Vienna, the NSG had finally voted to lift the embargo on nuclear trade with India. Dr Singh had made the history that we all hoped he would make. Its news had reached Dr Singh while he was drinking his afternoon tea in Delhi. I had been keeping close track of events from Singapore, with Jaideep keeping me informed. I knew much drama and hard bargaining by various NSG member countries had gone into the final outcome. President Bush had delivered on his promise by finally twisting China’s arm to get it to vote in favour of India. I placed the mobile phone back in my pocket and looked out of the bus at Singapore’s greenery. Tears welled up in my eyes.

My thoughts went back to all those battles in Parliament, the arguments within government, the negotiations with the US, my own negotiations with the media and arguments with colleagues and politicians. For three years, I was a part of it all. When the deed was done, I was far away on an alien university campus.

I called my friends, Jaishankar, who was now India’s high commissioner in Singapore, and Raja Mohan, an important analyst and media commentator on the deal, who was, like me, a professor at a Singapore university. Jaishankar, the son of my guru K. Subrahmanyam, Raja and I had all been in Washington DC on 18 July 2005, the day when it all began to come together, with the US implicitly acknowledging India’s status as a nuclear weapons power. We had been in the thick of it all for three years, each in his own way. Even after moving to Singapore Jaishankar was retained by the PM as a negotiator, Raja continued to write his columns and I had continued my speech- writing for Dr Singh, writing and emailing speeches between cooking at home and teaching at the university. We decided to meet the next day and raise a toast.