The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh Read online

  1

  The Call from PMO

  ‘Call the doctor!’

  Financial Express editorial

  19 May 2004

  It was approaching midnight on an early May night in 2004. J.N. Dixit and I were in the studios of the BBC on the top floor of the AIFACS building on Rafi Marg in New Delhi, discussing how the result of the General Elections, now in its final stages, would impact Indian foreign and economic policy. The election campaign had come alive in its last stages, after having begun with the widespread assumption that the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, would be returned to office. Vajpayee had advanced the election dates by six months in the hope of riding a wave of optimism about India’s economic prospects captured by the ‘India Shining’ campaign mounted by his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the leading party in the alliance. However, reports of suicides by cotton farmers in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra had tarnished the NDA’s image and it now appeared that its battle with the principal Opposition party, the Indian National Congress, would be closely fought.

  Dixit, known by the nickname Mani, was a former foreign secretary, and an outstanding one at that. After his retirement, he had joined the Congress party and guided party president Sonia Gandhi through the foreign policy debates of the early years of the new millennium. Until Mani Dixit joined her, Sonia Gandhi’s principal adviser on foreign policy had been K. Natwar Singh, a diplomat who had worked closely with Indira Gandhi and then joined the Congress party. Natwar was a quintessential Nehruvian and his thinking was shaped by the Cold War and India’s policy of non-alignment. Mani Dixit’s views, on the other hand, were shaped by the end of the Cold War and India’s increased engagement with developed economies. As foreign secretary during the Congress government headed by Narasimha Rao in the early 1990s, he had crafted India’s response to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of its ally, the Soviet Union, authoring radical departures such as Rao’s ‘Look East Policy’ and his openings to South Korea and Israel.

  In 2003 Mani Dixit had been authorized by Sonia Gandhi to draft an alternative view on foreign and national security policy and had put together a discussion group that included, among others, Manmohan Singh, then leader of the Congress party in the Rajya Sabha, the Upper House of Parliament, N.N.Vohra, a retired defence secretary, K. Subrahmanyam, who was until his death in 2011 India’s leading thinker on strategic affairs, and myself. I was then chief editor of the Financial Express (FE). We would meet in the private dining room of the India International Centre, the club favoured by Delhi’s policy elite.

  Since Mani had been given this new political task, I assumed he would play an important role if the Congress came to power in Delhi. I was therefore surprised to hear him ask the anchor at the BBC studio that night to wind up the discussion since he had to leave Delhi in the morning to spend the summer in the hills. The elections would soon be over and some expected the Congress party to form a government. Would you not prefer to remain in Delhi and see if they need you in the new government, I asked Mani curiously.

  He laughed the question off. He pointed out that even if the Congress did come to power, Natwar Singh would be in the government, not him, and went on to ask, ‘You think we will win?’ I echoed the popular view around Delhi that the result would be narrow but Prime Minister Vajpayee was likely to return to office. He agreed with me.

  As we walked out of the studio I said to him cheerily, ‘You go to the hills, I am off to DC.’

  Neither of us could have imagined on that May night that within a month we would be colleagues in the PMO.

  It became clear, just a day later, that Sonia Gandhi had got enough seats to form a new coalition government led by the Congress party. Shortly before I flew to Washington DC to speak at a conference organized by the historian Sunil Khilnani, I typed out an editorial comment that appeared on 15 May with the title ‘Thoughts on a Government’. It was typical of the editorials that editors like to write, advising politicians what they should do. My advice to the victorious Congress President Sonia Gandhi was simple—’. . . invite Dr Manmohan Singh to take charge as the Prime Minister’ and make herself ‘the chairperson of the Congress and allies coordination committee that would oversee the functioning of the government’.

  My suggestion that Dr Singh be made PM was not a new idea. I had floated it five years earlier, almost to the date, on 25 May 1999, in a column in the Times of India. This was shortly after Sonia Gandhi’s failed attempt to form a Congress-led coalition government after the fall of a BJP-led government. She had famously and, as it turned out, erroneously announced, ‘We have 272 (MPs), and we hope to get more.’ Provocatively titled ‘Perils of Sonia Gandhi as PM’, my column advised Sonia to resist the temptation of claiming the job and, instead, name Manmohan Singh as PM, were Congress to form a government.

  Reading my 2004 editorial, journalist friends who had scoffed at me in 1999 for coming up with a wild idea were amused that I had not given up my ‘campaign’, as some saw it, to make Manmohan Singh prime minister. I was, however, looking at the issue from Sonia’s point of view. She needed to bury the controversy over her Italian birth and retain control of the Congress party till her son or daughter was old enough to take charge. She required, therefore, a reliable, trustworthy and capable head of government. A political leader would always nurse political ambitions and perhaps seek to marginalize the Gandhi family. Hadn’t Narasimha Rao, low profile though he was before he became PM, tried to strike out on his own once he assumed office? By this argument, senior Congress leaders and possible prime ministerial aspirants like Arjun Singh and Pranab Mukherjee were pretty much ruled out. Among the safer choices, few had the experience for the job. A.K. Antony, a Congress leader from Kerala whom Sonia Gandhi reportedly liked, did not, for example. So, I surmised, Dr Singh stood the best chance.

  On the day I arrived in DC, 15 May, news reports suggested that Sonia Gandhi was in two minds on whether or not to head the government that was now likely to be formed. Sycophantic as ever, the rank and file of the party demanded that she become prime minister. On the other hand, BJP leader Sushma Swaraj, who had campaigned vociferously against an Italian-origin prime minister, was dramatically threatening to shave her head if Sonia did so.

  Over the next two days, the subject of government formation in India dominated coffee- and lunch-break conversations at the conference I was attending. On 18 May, the last day of the conference, I shared the dais with Khilnani and Montek Singh Ahluwalia, an economist who had worked with Rajiv Gandhi and had been secretary in the finance ministry when Dr Singh was finance minister, and was now with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington DC.

  Montek spoke first. Shortly after he began speaking, I received an SMS message on my mobile phone from my colleague Rohit Bansal, resident editor of the Delhi edition of the Financial Express. It announced, ‘Sonia says she will not be PM!’ I thought to myself: Step one, she will not be PM. Step two, she will make Dr Singh the PM.

  When my turn came, I gave my audience the breaking news. I then said mischievously that if Sonia named Manmohan Singh as PM, they may have just heard the future principal secretary to the Indian prime minister speak. I was referring, of course, to Montek. Not surprisingly, Montek was mobbed as soon as the session got over. Later that day, Sonia announced that Dr Singh would head a coalition government. The next day, I met Montek and his economist wife, Isher, for lunch at the IMF headquarters. They were excited about the news from Delhi. All we talked about over lunch was what a Manmohan Singh prime ministership would mean for the country.

  While Isher had been Dr Singh’s student at the Delhi School of Economics, Montek’s association with Dr Singh dated back to the late 1970s when he returned to India after a stint at the World Bank to join the ministry of finance as an economic adviser. Dr Singh was at the time a secretary in the ministry of finance and had encouraged Montek to join the government. The two worked together again in 1992-96
when Dr Singh, by then finance minister in the Rao government, re-inducted Montek into the ministry. None of us spoke about what role Montek expected to play—it was too early to engage in that kind of speculation. I did ask, though, if he had spoken to Dr Singh and he said he had called and wished him.

  As we ordered dessert, I asked Montek if he would quit his IMF job and move to India. ‘Of course!’ Isher replied for him, instantly.

  I returned home just in time for the new government’s swearing-in ceremony at Rashtrapati Bhavan. It was the first I had witnessed. Dr Singh appeared nervous and hesitant as he took his oath of office. There was a celebratory air about the place with Congress party leaders present in strength, happy as they were returning to power after six years. Few had, in fact, expected to win the elections and many had been sceptical about the Congress’s ability to stitch together a coalition. Dr Singh’s family, including his daughters and grandchildren, were present but kept a low profile. As soon as the ceremony ended, I tried to walk up to Dr Singh and congratulate him but, unsurprisingly, he was surrounded by an eager throng of Congress party leaders, among them ministers clearly seeking good portfolios (they had not yet been allocated), and journalists. I managed to make eye contact and greet him with folded hands. He smiled.

  Moving away from the crowd milling around the new PM, I wandered around the hall, looking for news. Soon enough, I ran into Prithviraj Chavan, a Congress party politician from Maharashtra whom I had known for close to a decade. We were both regulars at the weekly lunch discussion group, the Saturday Group, at the India International Centre. Prithvi had just been sworn in as minister of state (MoS) and I asked if he knew what his new portfolio would be. Looking very pleased with himself, he told me that the PM had confided in him that he would be MoS finance. That was front-page news. So who, I quickly followed up, would be the new finance minister? Prithvi leaned closer to almost whisper into my ear, ‘PM will retain finance.’ I had my headline.

  I sat up late into the night waiting for portfolios to be announced but by the time we went to press there was no official word. Finally, we ran the news that Dr Singh would retain the finance portfolio and that Chavan would be named MoS finance.

  The morning our story appeared, I had a call from P. Chidambaram, a senior Congress party leader who had served as finance minister in a short-lived coalition government formed in 1996. At that time, he had belonged to a party that had broken away from the Congress, and had returned to its fold shortly before the 2004 elections. Some years earlier he became a weekly columnist in my newspaper and remained one till he returned to government in May 2004.

  ‘Is your report accurate?’ he asked me. I assured him that I had heard it ‘from the horse’s mouth’.

  ‘You mean the PM?’ he asked at once. No, the MoS, I said. ‘If the PM keeps finance, what will they give me?’ Chidambaram wondered aloud.

  I was amused and surprised to hear that question from the usually self- confident Chidambaram. There was already speculation in the media that he would be given charge of commerce or telecommunications, and I mentioned that to him.

  He retorted angrily, ‘Mr Editor, I have been finance minister before! Do you think I will accept anything less than a senior Cabinet position?’

  The finance minister sits, along with the PM, the external affairs, defence and home ministers, on Raisina Hill. These are the leading occupants of Delhi’s North and South Blocks. They are all members of the Cabinet Committee on Security (CCS), a body that has seen its clout grow in an era of national security and nuclear power.

  So I asked Chidambaram what he would do if he was not on the Hill.

  ‘I will sit in the backbenches!’ he declared.

  ‘Good,’ I told him, pulling his leg, ‘you can then continue your weekly column with FE’

  By the time the portfolios were announced that evening, the sands had shifted. Chidambaram was named finance minister. Prithviraj was named MoS in the PMO. I called Prithvi to find out what happened. He told me that the PM had been advised against keeping finance, a heavy portfolio, since his hands would be full managing the government and the coalition. But Prithvi was far from disappointed. Instead of MoS finance under Dr Singh, he was now MoS in the PMO. He had entered the government’s sanctum sanctorum.

  While Prithvi clearly owed his portfolio, if not his ministerial berth, to Dr Singh, this was not the case with most of the new council of ministers. The Congress’s allies in UPA-1 nominated their own ministers and bargained for their portfolios with Sonia, not with Dr Singh. The bargaining process reflected the political reality on the ground. No matter how prominent a political leader was, he was not likely to get the portfolio he or his supporters wished for, if his party did not have the numbers in the Lok Sabha, the Lower House of Parliament. Thus Sharad Pawar, who had been defence minister in Narasimha Rao’s Cabinet, could not climb Raisina Hill. Since his party, the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP), had only nine seats in the new Parliament, he had to be content with agriculture. On the other hand, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), a political party that won all the sixteen seats it had contested in Tamil Nadu, made sure it got key economic ministries with, to use a popular phrase, ‘rent-seeking’ opportunities.

  As for senior Congress leaders, they owed their Cabinet posts almost entirely to Sonia Gandhi, who did, however, consult Dr Singh and close aides before finalizing the names. When the council of ministers was reshuffled during the term of UPA-I, Dr Singh did have more of a say but even so, few of its members ever behaved as if they owed their ministerial positions to the PM. With time, even the loyalties of Prithviraj Chavan, handpicked by Dr Singh to serve in his own office, became divided as he made sure he was on the right side of his party’s leader. Prithvi was Dr Singh’s protégé but he knew that his political career depended on demonstrating loyalty to Sonia and Rahul.

  Dr Singh, far more politically astute than his detractors believed him to be, would have been well aware of the limits to prime ministerial authority under such a dispensation. Prime ministers in earlier coalitions had also had to share their power to nominate ministers with leaders of coalition parties. While his predecessor Atal Bihari Vajpayee had been able to assert himself quite strongly in the NDA coalition, partly because of his standing as a popular leader of his own party, Dr Singh took his cue from the more circumscribed role that H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral enjoyed as heads of the United Front coalition in the mid-1990s. He was also, perhaps, more accepting than another prime minister might have been of his limited power over his own partymen because he saw himself as an ‘accidental prime minister’, by which he meant that he was not the natural choice for the job. After all, had Sonia Gandhi not been born an Italian she would have kept the job for herself. The fact of her alien status had made it necessary for her to choose another leader and Dr Singh was the man she chose.

  Manmohan Singh had not expected to become PM. At best, it can be said that he had hoped this opportunity might one day come his way. People have often asked me whether I thought Dr Singh was ambitious. My sense is that ‘ambition’ is too strong a word to describe how he felt about his destiny. I would rather say he had faith in his own abilities, and all the pride, albeit never openly expressed, of a self- made man. Even while he modestly called himself an ‘accidental prime minister’ he did not doubt that he could do the job, and do it better than the other senior leaders around Sonia.

  He had, over the previous eight years, made clear his commitment to active politics. A technocrat when Narasimha Rao inducted him into his government in 1991, he did not return to that predictable world after Rao was defeated at the hustings in 1996 and later abandoned by the Congress party. Dr Singh remained a party loyalist and as leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha participated actively in the party’s political programmes. He came to play the role of a ‘second in command’ even if he was not explicitly named as such. When Sonia failed to garner enough support to form a coalition government under her own leadership in 1999 and Dr Singh
was asked to contest a Lok Sabha elections a few months later, he may have seen this as a signal that he was being groomed for a larger political role. Even though he lost that election, he did emerge as Sonia’s right-hand man in the years between 1999 and 2004. It was Manmohan Singh, not Arjun Singh or Pranab Mukherjee, who was by her side when she met foreign heads of government. Therefore, while he neither planned nor schemed to become prime minister, Dr Singh was not taken by complete surprise when he got the job.

  This was, however, the first time ever that the Congress party would be running a coalition government in Delhi. The tough task of managing a fourteen-party coalition was made trickier by the fact that the Congress was to be in office with the support, from the ‘outside’, of the Left Front, a group of Left parties that had been unwavering critics of Dr Singh’s policies as finance minister. Some in the Left were prepared to join the government. It was rumoured that SitaramYechury, a member of the politburo of the Communist Party of India-Marxist [CPI(M)], a leading constituent of the Left Front, had even voiced the hope of becoming minister for railways in a Left-supported and Congress-led coalition. Another member of the front, the Communist Party of India (CPI), was willing to join the government. After all, the CPI had been a part of coalition governments at the Centre in the past, namely those led by H.D. Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral in the 1990s, and the party’s senior leader Indrajit Gupta had even served as India’s first communist home minister. However, the leadership of the CPI(M) vetoed the idea of the Left joining the government.

  On 24 May, the new ministers took charge of their ministries. The formation and agenda of the new government was front-page news every day. One morning, the media reported that a little-known civil servant, T.K.A. Nair, a member of the Indian Administrative Service (IAS), belonging to the Punjab cadre, had been named to the most important administrative post in the PMO, that of principal secretary to the PM.