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

  On the eve of Dr Singh’s second budget in February 1992, the Indian Express published some of Dr Singh’s letters to the IMF, suggesting that India’s ‘budget secrets’ had been leaked to the Fund. I called Charles and asked if he had all the documents cited in the Express report. He promptly handed them over to me. The Economic Times was, therefore, able to quickly take the story forward, and Dr Singh had no choice but to table all the documents in Parliament on 26 February, shortly before he presented his budget.

  On the morning of the 29th, the day of the budget presentation, ET carried a front-page piece by me titled ‘Loan Terms: How Many Steps Beyond the Fund?’ My analysis, based on the documents supplied by Charles, highlighted the government’s commitment to the IMF and argued that the government’s sovereignty was compromised since the IMF’s staff was already privy to budgetary policy.

  I reported that Dr Singh had already assured the IMF and the World Bank that India would, among other policy measures, decontrol the price of steel, till then fixed by the government. This was a decision awaiting Cabinet approval. When Dr Singh stood up to read his budget speech in Parliament, the CPM leader Somnath Chatterjee waved a copy of ET. He charged the finance minister with ‘leaking’ the budget and sought to move a privilege motion against the government. Dr Singh was not amused.

  Rising to present his budget to Parliament, Dr Singh was constrained to respond to these charges. Stating that as a founder-member of the IMF and the World Bank India had a right to borrow from them, Dr Singh explained that, ‘As lenders, they (the IMF and the World Bank) are required to satisfy themselves about our capacity to repay loans and this is where conditionality comes into the picture. All borrowing countries hold discussions with these institutions on the viability of the programmes for which assistance is sought. We have also held such discussions.’ However, he assured Parliament, ‘The conditions we have accepted reflect no more than the implementation of the reform programme as outlined in my letters of intent sent to the IMF and the World Bank, and are wholly consistent with our national interests. The bulk of the reform programme is based on the election manifesto of our party. There is no question of the government ever compromising our national interests, not to speak of our sovereignty.’

  He refused to meet me after that. During the months that followed, I continued to write on the government’s economic policies but his doors remained closed to me. My access in the finance ministry was restricted to joint secretaries like Y.V. Reddy, Valluri Narayan and Duvvuri Subbarao, all from Hyderabad, and Deepak Nayyar. When Deepak exited the ministry later that year I did a full-page analysis in ET on the intellectual differences within the government, especially between Deepak and Montek, with the title ‘The Importance of Dissent’. I was told Dr Singh had been irritated by my piece, and had quipped to someone that the ministry of finance was not a ‘debating society’.

  In early 1993, shortly after I had moved from ET to the Times of India as its business and economics editor, Dileep Padgaonkar, the paper’s editor, asked me to seek an appointment with the finance minister and interview him for the paper. I confessed to Dileep that I was unlikely to secure an appointment from Dr Singh. He offered to make the call and managed to get him to agree to a meeting. When Dileep mentioned, during the phone conversation, that I would be accompanying him and we would like to interview him for the Times, Dr Singh fell silent. He then told Dileep that he could not trust me to report his views accurately and recalled the ‘ET at 30’ special-supplement fiasco. It was only after Dileep assured him that he would read the interview before it went to press that he agreed to meet us.

  When we arrived the next day at Dr Singh’s North Block office, I tried to hide behind Dileep and be as unobtrusive as possible. To my surprise, Dr Singh walked up to me, placed his hand on my shoulder and with his signature smile, asked how I was. Dileep was visibly relieved to see that his business and economics editor was now on good terms with the finance minister, and the interview went off smoothly. Years later, while working for Dr Singh, I discovered that misleadingly friendly smile was especially reserved for his critics and opponents. Leaders of the Left Front, editors who had been critical of him in their columns and colleagues in the Congress party known for planting stories against the PM in the media were all greeted with that disarming smile.

  The very next day, I received a call from the finance minister’s office inviting me to dinner that night. I found myself at an intimate gathering in the private dining room of a five-star hotel. Around the small table at which I was seated, next to Dr Singh, were only four other guests, the then commerce minister P. Chidambaram, Montek and Isher, and the chairperson of the Hindustan Times (HT), Shobhana Bhartia. I knew, as we sat down, that I had been rehabilitated.

  As a journalist, I had heard stories of how Indira Gandhi would suddenly win over a detractor with a smile or a special gesture. As a communist in my youth, I had also read stories of how Stalin had invited a colleague home for dinner before he was sent off to Siberia or just shot dead. Dr Singh was certainly not a Stalin, nor was he an Indira, but I felt he may well have learnt a lesson or two about winning friends and disarming critics from her.

  Later, when I came to work with him closely, I saw how much Dr Singh had imbibed from watching the prime ministers he had worked for. While he did play favourites by meeting journalists and others who were nice to him and refusing to give appointments to those he did not like, he would floor critics, every now and then, with impeccable courtesy. He also learnt to value differences of opinion among his advisers. As PM, he would listen to all opinions, only rarely disagreeing with anyone in meetings, so as not to discourage free expression, and then doing what he felt was needed to be done. An important lesson he seemed to have learnt from his predecessors was to never reveal his mind on a policy issue till it was absolutely necessary to do so.

  That dinner was a turning point in our relationship. By then I had tempered my own views and had become more appreciative of his policies. He too had understood the need to build bridges to his critics. While Narasimha Rao stood like a rock behind him and offered unstinted political backing for his policies in public, he would privately urge his finance minister to be more accommodating of the Congress party’s political concerns, and Dr Singh was clearly learning to soften his stance.

  Even as he learnt the political ropes, he found it hard to handle vociferous public attacks. In August 1991 and March 1992 Dr Singh had offered to resign, the first time when the government was accused of favouring a bank with dubious credentials and the second time when some of his Cabinet colleagues, led by Arjun Singh, attacked his policies. As a staunch Gandhi family loyalist and a prime ministerial aspirant, Arjun Singh was inimical to Rao, as he later would be to Dr Singh, when he became PM. Both times, Narasimha Rao backed Dr Singh to the hilt and told him that he should not take such attacks personally because they were, in fact, directed against the PM. However, in December 1993, when Dr Singh offered to resign a third time, after a parliamentary committee criticized the finance ministry’s handling of a stock market and banking sector scam, Rao was annoyed. He had had enough of Dr Singh’s resignation dramas.

  Narasimha Rao’s aide P.VR.K. Prasad, an IAS officer from Andhra Pradesh and a relative of mine, who also doubled up as the PM’s press secretary, gave me a blow-by-blow account of the drama around that resignation episode. Prasad told me that Rao did not want to reach out directly to Dr Singh to get him to withdraw his resignation. But he was wary of moves being made by both Pranab Mukherjee and Chidambaram to become finance minister in case Dr Singh quit. According to Prasad, Narasimha Rao told him that since Dr Singh was not a politician he had to be handled differently. ‘I cannot send a politician to persuade him,’ Narasimha Rao told Prasad. ‘Even if I send one, he will not relent.’ Prasad was then deputed to win over Dr Singh.

  Prasad had been P.V.’s personal secretary when the latter was chief minister of Andhra Pradesh in 1971. He had run errands for Rao, handling many trick
y issues, and the PM trusted him. Prasad had to meet Dr Singh several times to persuade him to withdraw his resignation. Finally, recalls Prasad, he went to Dr Singh’s home and had a long conversation with him, in the presence of his wife, Gursharan Kaur. Prasad thinks it was a nudge from her that finally persuaded Dr Singh to go meet Rao and sort out the matter, ending the resignation drama. I had reported most of this in the Times of India. Dr Singh was aware of my proximity to Rao and Prasad, and also knew that the prime minister often asked my father to draft his speeches. These factors may have also prompted Dr Singh to be warmer with me, and over time, to trust me.

  In 1995, I had the opportunity to discover other facets of the finance minister’s personality. I covered the annual meetings of the IMF and the World Bank at Madrid, an event that was more special than usual that year because the Fund and the Bank were also celebrating their fiftieth anniversary. Dr Singh, who led the Indian delegation, was in his element. By then he was a celebrated finance minister who had won several international awards. I noted his popularity among fellow finance ministers and watched many of them engage him in lengthy conversations. When he addressed the Fund-Bank meetings he spoke with confidence and authority and was heard with respect. His views prevailed in discussions on development assistance and proposals for opening new lines of credit for developing economies.

  Despite his growing confidence in addressing international gatherings, he was careful, I discovered, when it came to handling issues that could get him into trouble at home. The Sindhi Association of Spain had decided to host a reception one evening in honour of the Indian finance minister, to which I was also invited. On the day of the reception, I ran into Prakash Hinduja at the venue of the Fund-Bank meetings. He was engaged in a serious conversation with the finance minister of Iran, a country with which the businessman and his family had strong connections. Hinduja recognized me and invited me to a party that evening in honour of Dr Singh that he said he was hosting. I told him I was already committed to attending an event hosted by the Sindhi Association. ‘Same thing,’ he said blithely. ‘We are the Sindhi Association!’

  I casually mentioned this encounter to Dr Singh when I ran into him later that afternoon. He became worried, called the Indian ambassador for advice on whether or not he should go to the dinner and finally went only after being assured that it was indeed the Sindhi Association that was hosting the event and the Hindujas would not be playing host. Dr Singh was squeamish about associating with the Hinduja brothers, rich Sindhi businessmen based in Europe who were accused at the time of being middlemen in the Bofors gun deal, the cause of a long-running political scandal. Ironically, years later, when Dr Singh was negotiating the nuclear deal with the US and had to keep a line open to Iran while reaching out to US senators and Congressmen, it was the Hinduja brothers, legally cleared by now of the Bofors charges, who played a key role in winning support for India both in Washington DC and Tehran.

  After the Congress’s defeat in the General Elections of1996, Dr Singh, still a member of the Rajya Sabha, became involved in the activities of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation (RGF), a developmental organization set up by the Gandhi family. Abid Hussain, a retired civil servant from Hyderabad, who had served as India’s ambassador to the United States, took charge of the RGF and involved me in the academic activities of its sister organization, the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies. This kept me in continued contact with Dr Singh, whom I often met at lectures, seminars and lunches that Hussain hosted. Now that he was no longer finance minister, he had more time on his hands, especially when Parliament was not in session. Our interactions became more conversational, and I even turned to him for advice that I knew would always be sound. When I decided to take a sabbatical from journalism in 1997, Dr Singh advised me to join the Research and Information System for Non-aligned and Other Developing Countries (RIS), of which he was then chairman. It was again on his advice that I moved from the RIS to the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, where Isher Ahluwalia had just taken over as the institute’s director.

  It was Dr Singh who encouraged me to study India’s relations with East and Southeast Asian economies, a subject that had remained close to his heart over the years, and I wrote a paper on the importance of trade with ASEAN (Association of South East Asian Nations) countries for India. When Dr Singh became chairman of the governing council of the India Habitat Centre (IHC) in 1997, he drew me into the IHC’s activities. As a result, a plum assignment fell into my lap. I joined a team that included climate-change scientist R.K. Pachauri and others, that tasted the food prepared by applicants for catering licences at the IHC’s various restaurants.

  In 1999, when the Congress party picked Dr Singh as the candidate for the south Delhi Lok Sabha constituency, I joined the Friends of Manmohan group set up by Isher Ahluwalia, G.S. Bhalla and other academics to campaign door to door for him. My daughter and I would walk around our neighbourhood distributing pamphlets. Sadly, Dr Singh lost that election by close to 30,000 votes to the BJP’s Vijay Kumar Malhotra, a considerably less distinguished political personality. His views on the massacre of some 3000 Sikhs in Delhi by Congress party activists and goons after Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 became a subject of controversy. While he condemned the killings unequivocally, the fact that he blamed both the Congress and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for them did not go down well with either. Nor was this argument appreciated by Sikh voters.

  Delhi’s Sikh community had, in fact, been grateful to the RSS for protecting Sikh families from the wrath of mobs attacking them, often led by local Congressmen. Their anger was reserved wholly for the Congress. The Congress, on the other hand, was also upset with Dr Singh’s stance because it had pretended all along that the killing of Sikhs after Indira’s assassination was a spontaneous expression of popular anger rather than an organized pogrom. In attempting to take a principled position on the massacre without frontally attacking his own party, Dr Singh ended up satisfying nobody.

  But Dr Singh’s family and close friends were convinced that his defeat was in part due to internal sabotage and blamed the local leaders of the Congress party for doing little to get him elected. Perhaps some Congressmen had already suspected by then that Sonia was grooming Dr Singh as a future head of government and hoped to nip this plan in the bud. In any event, the campaign, run mainly by his friends, did not succeed, and the race was lost. Dr Singh was never to contest another Lok Sabha election, preferring to enter Parliament through a less turbulent route, the Rajya Sabha. The Delhi defeat left a scar on the family’s memory. While Dr Singh never discussed this with me, his family members did, on several occasions, refer to this episode as an experience that left them with the bitter taste of betrayal.

  Despite the fact that I got to know Dr Singh well over the years, he continued to remain an enigma. A man of few words, he almost never engaged in conversation of a private or intimate nature. While he found it easier to ‘talk shop’—policy or current affairs—he was rarely animated. When I began to work for him, I would often see him sitting quietly, even awkwardly, with visitors and betraying very little emotion. He had no gift for small talk. When obliged to interact with relatives during a visit to Kolkata or Amritsar, or with old friends in Geneva, it seemed Dr Singh did not quite know what to say to them, and it was left to Mrs Kaur to keep the conversation going. Amusingly, even with fellow economists who were his friends, like Jagdish Bhagwati or I.G. Patel, he would be happy to let them do most of the talking.

  In a moment of frankness, Dr Singh narrated a typical tale of his diffidence to Mark Tully, the legendary BBC correspondent in India. When Tully interviewed him for Cam, the Cambridge University alumni magazine, Dr Singh told him that as a student at St John’s College he would get up early in the morning before his fellow students to finish bathing because he felt shy about going into the common bathing rooms with his turban off and his hair tied up. Since hot water was not available at that hour, Dr Singh chos
e to bathe in cold water, justifying this to his friends on health grounds, as a way of fighting the common cold.

  His shyness, however, often made him appear lacking in warmth and emotion. Successful politicians are Janus-faced. They know when to be withdrawn and cold, and when to be warm and expressive. The wilier among them make the switch between these two personas in a flash. Dr Singh was not capable of such swift transformations. He may well have learnt the art of disarming his critics, but he could never create the illusion of intimacy that journalists crave in their interactions with the powerful. Worse, he seemed to find it hard to be genuinely expressive. I always wondered how much of this ‘shyness’ was a defence mechanism acquired during a difficult childhood when, after his mother’s death, he had to live with an uncle’s family because his father was rarely at home. Since his uncle and aunt had their own children to take care of, the young Manmohan was left to his own devices. Dr Singh had happy memories of his student and teaching life in Amritsar but I noticed that he rarely spoke about his childhood in Gah.

  Working with him in the PMO, I discovered his introverted nature extended to his family as well. His daughters would say that they did not know their father’s mind on many issues because he kept his work and family life in two separate, largely watertight, compartments and rarely gave expression to his thoughts, his desires or frustrations when at home. As Mrs Kaur once put it to me, ‘He swallows everything, doesn’t spit anything out.’