The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (48 page)

Should he have resigned at the first whiff of scandal, owning moral responsibility for the corruption of others, instead of defending the government? Perhaps. Could he have resigned? Maybe not. The party would have hounded him for ‘letting it down’. It would have then accused him of trying to occupy the high moral ground and quitting on principle to avoid being sacked for not ‘delivering the goods’. When the horse you are riding becomes a tiger it is difficult to dismount.

 

 

Along with the corruption controversies, the economic slowdown after 2012 and persistent inflation turned Dr Singh’s own political base, the urban middle class, hostile. As the government’s popularity declined, the Congress party began to switch gears and focus on succession, hoping Rahul Gandhi would rise to the occasion and take charge. Planted stories began to appear in the media about Dr Singh’s imminent retirement. However, Rahul’s repeated inability to deliver results for the party in a series of state elections meant that Dr Singh could not be ‘retired’ and created a vacuum at the top.

Probably to bolster his image, Rahul chose defiance to authority as his strategy for political relevance. He had already declared in 2009 that his route to power would be as a ‘rebel’ rather than as a successor to Dr Singh’s legacy. He had said to a gathering of students at JNU in 2009, ‘The hierarchical system exists [in the Congress]. It is a reality. But what is the option before me? I can either propagate the system or change it. I am not the one to propagate it so I am trying to change it. You do not like the system; even I do not like it. We have to work together to change it.’ How could the vice president of a party, that too the son of the party president, be the ‘agent of change’ without positioning himself in opposition to the incumbent PM?

Aware of this strategy on Rahul’s part, I was not surprised when he chose to go public, in late September 2013, and criticize an ordinance that the Union Cabinet had cleared aimed at amending the Representation of Peoples’ Act, 1951, to remove constraints on lawbreakers becoming lawmakers, so to speak. In response to a Supreme Court ruling of 2012, that a member of Parliament or state assembly would be immediately disqualified if convicted by a court in a criminal offence and given a jail sentence of two years or more, the government sought to amend the existing law so that such convicted legislators could continue as elected representatives if they appealed before a higher court within three months. The original bill for this purpose could not be passed in Parliament and the government chose to amend the act through an executive fiat. A public outcry against the ordinance placed the government on the defensive.

Rahul could have urged the government to respond to public opinion and let the PM handle the matter on his return to India from an official visit to the US. Instead, he decided to demand the ordinance’s withdrawal, calling it ‘nonsense’ in front of TV cameras, hours before Dr Singh was to call on President Obama. This public display of disrespect to Dr Singh and disregard for the dignity of the office of the prime minister on a day like this was, I felt, reason enough for Dr Singh to call it quits. He chose not to.

It should have been clear to Dr Singh and his advisers that the Congress party would not go out of its way to defend him against this Opposition onslaught on the ordinance. During UPA-1, it had been forced to defend the PM even when it did not agree with his actions, to ensure the stability of its first-ever experiment in running a coalition government. That compulsion was no longer there. This time round Rahul Gandhi was waiting in the wings.

I had begun my association with Dr Singh as a critic of many of his policies. As I got to know him and then work for him, I became truly impressed by his intellect, his humane persona, his gentle and civil conduct, his political instinct and his deep patriotism. I shared his vision for India in the twenty-first century: a liberal, plural, secular India, an open society and an open economy, pursuing inclusive growth and at peace with its neighbours. He was not a popular leader like Vajpayee, nor an experienced politician like Narasimha Rao. Yet, he showed the country that an ordinary, honest Indian, an
aam
aadmi,
to use the current buzzword in politics, could become prime minister through sheer hard work and professional commitment.

So I, like millions of his middle-class supporters, feel tragically cheated that he has allowed himself to become an object of such ridicule in his second term in office, in the process devaluing the office of the prime minister. This book is an effort to offer a balanced view of Dr Singh’s personality and of his record as head of government.

 

 

It is a testimony to the eternal nature of the great Hindu epic the Mahabharata that so many of India’s movies and television soaps continue to portray their characters as modern-day versions of the various protagonists of that power play. The characterization of today’s personalities in terms of the Mahabharata’s has, quite naturally, extended to the world of politics. As I have mentioned, early in Dr Singh’s tenure Yashwant Sinha, a long-standing critic of the PM, derogatorily called him Shikhandi, the man-woman character in the Mahabharata, a theme that was later taken up by some members of the Aam Aadmi Party. Knowing that Bheeshma, the Mahabharata’s grand strategist and great warrior, would never raise his arrow against a woman, Arjuna hid behind Shikhandi while attacking Bheeshma. Was Yashwant Sinha implying that the Arjunas of the Congress were hiding behind a Shikhandi PM to battle the Bheeshmas of the BJP? Did he mean that Sonia and the Congress would have found it difficult to stitch an anti-BJP alliance without the protection offered by Dr Singh’s personality? Or, was he disingenuously suggesting that he was not a real man and a real leader?

As UPA-2 began to unravel, another Mahabharata comparison came to suggest itself to some of Dr Singh’s critics. They likened him to the blind king Dhritharashtra, unhappily presiding over a strife- torn kingdom. I never accepted this view of a man who had earned himself the slogan ‘Singh is King’. Rather than call him blind, I would say that he sometimes chose to close his eyes to ensure the longevity of his coalition. He shied away from keeping himself briefed every day about the faults and foibles of his ministerial colleagues, something that monarchs have done from time immemorial. He averted his eyes from corruption.

To my mind, he was rather like a Bheeshma. The name Bheeshma, given to Devavrata, means ‘the one who takes a terrible vow and fulfils it’. A good, wise and brave man but on the wrong side, defending a disreputable lot, Bheeshma was a tragic hero rather than an object of pity. Bheeshma was also the king who had to lie on a bed of arrows— condemned to an unsure mandate, an uncomfortable existence and an inelegant exit.

For all his wisdom and strategic brilliance, and despite the enormous respect he commanded from both sides of a family at war, Bheeshma faced his most embarrassing moment when the hapless Draupadi asked him why he could not protect her when she was being disrobed. She mocks Bheeshma for seeking refuge in the finer points of dharma.

An angry and troubled Bheeshma remains silent. Dr Singh’s silences in UPA-2, for which the media mocked him, made me wonder whether he too was consumed by impotent rage like Bheeshma.

Like Greek epics and Shakespearean plays, Indian epics too have no untainted heroes. Leave alone mortals, even the gods have flaws; Lord Rama’s treatment of Sita raises a question that has never gone away. There are questions that will probably haunt Dr Singh too, most of all: why did he not quit when he realized he had lost all vestiges of control over his own government? If his failure to do so arose from loyalty to the Congress or a promise to Sonia, it was misplaced—and unrewarded—loyalty. Except it enabled him to remain in office, even if not in power. His apparent commitment to ensuring Rahul’s succession, perpetuating the Congress party’s control by one family, was even more misplaced. That was Bheeshma’s failure too: he should have put his foot down on the Kaurava succession. Moreover, promising loyalty to hereditary succession is a monarchical attribute, not a democratic one. That was Dr Singh’s fatal error of judgement.

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