The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (7 page)

A day after joining the PMO, I called on H.Y. Sharada Prasad to seek his blessings and advice. A compact, personable man, Sharada Prasad exuded sagacity. His tiny apartment was filled with books and memorabilia from his years in public life. Rare photographs of Gandhiji and Nehru adorned the walls. He spoke softly, choosing his words with deliberation and care.

‘So what room have they given you?’ he asked keenly, as any veteran of the PMO would, knowing how much perceptions about an official’s proximity to the PM, and hence his power and influence, were shaped by what room he had been given.

I said I would be sitting in the very room that he had sat in, when I met him for the first time in 1981. However, since that room was being refurbished, I would temporarily occupy the corner room next to the Cabinet room, near the prime minister’s office on the first floor.

‘Ah!’ he exclaimed. ‘That is a historic room. The first office room of the first prime minister of free India!’

Jawaharlal Nehru spent his first few days in office sitting in that small room adjacent to the Cabinet room because the room that he was to occupy as PM was being used by Sir Girija Shankar Bajpai, secretary general of the ministry of external affairs (MEA). It took a few days for Bajpai to move to a new room and for the room to be refurbished for India’s first prime minister.

‘In my time I met the editors of the major dailies regularly,’ Sharada Prasad said to me. ‘But in those days there were only five editors who mattered. The editors of the
Statesman,
the
Times
of
India,
The
Hindu,
the
Indian
Express
and
Hindustan
Times.
These days you have too many newspapers, and television too. But try and keep in touch with those who matter. Make sure the PM meets them informally once in a while. Make sure the PM compliments an editor and a columnist whenever something worth complimenting is written. Reach out to the Indian- language media. Every morning give the PM a list of major headlines. Make sure you have some role in speech-writing. The civil servants will not like it. But as an editor you have writing skills that the PM would benefit from. Use them.’

I asked him if the PM should address a press conference.

‘Of course, but not right now,’ he said. ‘In the next month, let him meet editors and publishers in small groups. These should be off-the-record conversations. They should get to know him, he should get to know them. After a couple of months, organize a press conference. Make sure you conduct it. And make sure you have thought of the headlines you want the next day. Never organize a media interaction without deciding what headline you want to come out of it!’

In the following weeks, I faithfully followed each of these instructions. I arranged a series of breakfast meetings with important editors, publishers and TV anchors. As an early riser, Dr Singh would schedule his breakfast meetings for half past eight. Being late to bed and late to rise, editors and TV anchors would protest, but turn up on time. When I invited a group of publishers, the only ones to arrive late were Shobhana Bhartia of
Hindustan
Times
because, as she told me, she took a long time drying her hair, and Indu Jain, chairperson of the
Times
of
India,
because she had to finish her morning puja.

Whenever the PM visited a state capital, I would arrange an interaction with the local media. This became an important institution of communication for the PM. It helped break the monopoly of the largely English-language Delhi media over access to him. Editors and correspondents from the Indian-language media got an opportunity to interact with Dr Singh and make their own assessment of a man few of them had ever known. Between 2004 and 2008, Dr Singh addressed a press conference, open to all media, in every single state capital he visited, including Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. This investment of time in befriending regional media, including the Urdu-language media, proved invaluable during the national debate on the India-US civil nuclear agreement, and whenever the PM came under attack from Delhi’s media. I did incur the wrath of New Delhi’s prima donnas every now and then for adopting this inclusive policy, especially if I opted to give the editor of a regional media group exclusive time with Dr Singh on board the PM’s aircraft on one of his foreign trips, ignoring the requests of a New Delhi editor.

As I entered into my new role, my last courtesy call was to the home of P.V Narasimha Rao. During his tenure as PM, there were only two Hyderabadi editors in Delhi, A.M. Khusro at the
Financial
Express
and myself, and he knew us both. I had kept in touch with Rao even after he had retired from active politics. On this latest visit, I found him all alone and reading a book, when his long-serving assistant, Khandekar, ushered me in. Over tea and biscuits, I gave Rao an account of the call from the PMO and my meeting with Dr Singh, and the words of advice from Sharada Prasad.

Rao found it significant that Dr Singh had not opted for a political journalist or a government official as his media adviser but had chosen an economic journalist like myself. ‘Of course, he knows Vithal,’ he added, referring to my father, and suggested Dr Singh’s choice may have also been shaped by that fact.

‘Good,’ he said, as he sipped his tea. ‘Manmohan needs your help.’

 

 

Dr Singh’s three key aides in the PMO happened to be, by mere happenstance, Malayalees and all Nairs to boot: J.N. ‘Mani’ Dixit, the new national security adviser (NSA), T.K.A. Nair, the prime minister’s principal secretary, and M.K. Narayanan, the special adviser for internal security.

The power and importance of the principal secretary to the PM has always been dependent on the latter’s political clout, apart from the officer’s own standing within the civil service. As the bureaucratic link between the PM and senior ministers and secretaries to government, the principal secretary commands authority and influences policy. Most principal secretaries have been extremely capable men, well regarded by their peers and respected by their subordinates, like P.N. Haksar in Indira Gandhi’s PMO, P.C. Alexander in Rajiv’s, A.N. Varma in Narasimha Rao’s, Satish Chandran in Gowda’s, N.N. Vohra in Gujral’s and Brajesh Mishra in Vajpayee’s. However, every now and then, a nondescript official of limited talent has also adorned that job.

The national security adviser is an institution created during Vajpayee’s first term, after India declared herself a nuclear weapons power and a National Security Council (NSC) was established. The NSA is the executive head of the council and, within the PMO, typically deals with the ministries of defence and external affairs, the service chiefs and intelligence agencies and the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE). Since Manmohan Singh’s PMO also included a special adviser, a novelty created to accommodate Narayanan, part of the NSA’s turf, namely the area of internal security, was hived off to him.

Mani Dixit was, without doubt, the dominant personality among the three. His stature ensured that T.K.A. Nair was not quite the ‘principal’ secretary that many of his predecessors had been. Of course, Nair’s immediate predecessor, the larger-than-life Brajesh Mishra, was more than just a principal secretary. I once jokingly remarked to Dr Singh that in Vajpayee’s time the principal secretary functioned as if he were the PM, while in his case, it was being said that the PM functioned like a principal secretary. This was a comment on Dr Singh’s attention to detail, his involvement in the nitty-gritty of administration, his chairing of long and tedious meetings with officials, which Vajpayee rarely did. He ignored the remark, knowing well that it was also a taunt, drawing attention to the fact that Sonia was the political boss.

Nair was not Dr Singh’s first choice for the all-important post of principal secretary. He had hoped to induct N.N. Vohra, who had given me the news of my job. Not only was he a fellow refugee from west Punjab, now Pakistan, but both had taught in Punjab University and Vohra also went to Oxford, though some years after Dr Singh. Vohra even cancelled a scheduled visit to London to be able to join the PMO. Sonia Gandhi had another retired IAS officer, a Tamilian whose name I am not at liberty to disclose, in mind for the job. He had worked with Rajiv Gandhi and was regarded as a capable and honest official. However, he declined Sonia’s invitation to rejoin government on a matter of principle—he had promised his father that he would never seek a government job after retirement.

With these two distinguished officers ruled out, Dr Singh turned to Nair, a retired IAS officer who had worked briefly as secretary to the PM in Gujral’s PMO and had also served as Punjab’s chief secretary, the top bureaucrat in the state. Nair’s name was strongly backed by a friend of Dr Singh’s family, Rashpal Malhotra, chairman of the Chandigarh-based Centre for Research on Rural and Industrial Development (CRRID). Dr Singh himself was the chairman of the CRRID and Nair a member of its governing board. Apart from his stint in the Gujral PMO, Nair had neither held the rank of secretary in any of the powerful ministries on Raisina Hill—home, finance and defence—nor in any key economic ministry. He had only done so in the less powerful ministries of rural development and environment and forests. In short, he was a bureaucratic lightweight.

Always impeccably attired, Nair, small-built and short, lacked the presence of a Brajesh Mishra, whose striking demeanour commanded attention. He rarely gave expression to a clear or bold opinion on file, always signing off with a ‘please discuss’ and preferring to give oral instructions to junior officials such as joint secretaries and deputy secretaries. They would then be required to put those instructions on file as their own advice. It was classic bureaucratic risk aversion aimed at never getting into any controversy or trouble. Nair depended a great deal on Pulok Chatterjee, a joint secretary who had worked with both Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia, for advice on important policy decisions.

Pulok, like Nair, suffered from the handicap that his own service had never regarded him as one of its bright sparks. A serving IAS officer, he had never worked in any important ministry. He was inducted into Rajiv’s PMO as a deputy secretary after having served as a district official in Amethi, his constituency in Uttar Pradesh, where he had caught Rajiv’s eye. After Rajiv’s death, he chose to work for the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation where he did some worthwhile social development work. But this meant that he was not just outside government but completely identified with the Gandhi family. When Pulok returned to government, it was to work on the personal staff of Sonia Gandhi when she was leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha.

Pulok, who was inducted into the Manmohan Singh PMO at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, had regular, almost daily, meetings with Sonia at which he was said to brief her on the key policy issues of the day and seek her instructions on important files to be cleared by the PM. Indeed, Pulok was the single most important point of regular contact between the PM and Sonia. He was also the PMO’s main point of contact with the National Advisory Council (NAC), a high-profile advisory body chaired by Sonia Gandhi, with social activists as members. It was sometimes dubbed the Shadow Cabinet.

When not at these meetings, the affable, pipe-smoking, and understated Pulok remained mostly confined to his room in South Block, rarely travelling outside Delhi. During my time in the PMO, the only occasion on which I found him keen on accompanying the PM was when Dr Singh went to Cuba. With leftist leanings, Pulok was never too enthusiastic about Dr Singh’s focus on improving relations with the US. Whenever Dr Singh and Sonia had to speak from the same platform, Pulok and I would exchange their draft speeches so that they remained in step in their public utterances. While I always wrote these speeches for the PM, Pulok was largely a messenger carrying Sonia’s speeches to me, since her speeches were mostly written by Congress party politicians or her close associates. Pulok was in charge of monitoring the implementation of the UPA’s National Common Minimum Programme (NCMP)—the joint key objectives of the coalition government. This enabled him to seek regular information from all ministries on what they were doing. Pulok would duly produce elaborate charts that listed the promises—more than a hundred— enshrined in the NCMP, assign responsibility for their implementation to various ministries and report back to the PMO on the status of their implementation.

Apart from teaming up with Pulok, Nair also sought to make himself politically relevant to the PM by projecting himself as the PM’s link with the Left. He had been a member of the CPI(M)’s Students Federation of India (SFI) during his college days in Kerala. He revived these ties by becoming close to the senior CPI(M) leader Harkishan Singh Surjeet, who hailed from Punjab, Nair’s parent state in the IAS. Proximity to Surjeet served Nair well, earning him a place in Gujral’s PMO. Apart from being fellow Punjabis, Gujral and Surjeet were close friends. During his second stint in the PMO, Nair was able to use his association with Surjeet and with CPI(M) leaders from Kerala, especially S.R. Pillai, a member of the CPI(M) politburo, to help Dr Singh manage the Left.