by Sanjaya Baru
Even while working with the PM on this issue, Natwar wanted to keep his non-aligned, left-of-centre credentials intact, and therefore tried to give the impression to the media that he was not really on board. A story appeared in the Asian Age, under Seema Mustafa’s byline, that it was the PM who had instructed Natwar, against the latter’s wishes, to vote against Iran. I had to write a letter to the editor protesting against this distortion of facts. When the letter did not appear in print the next day, I issued a press release to all media. Taking a public stand on such matters helped. It put ministers on notice that if they briefed the press wrongly, the PMO would not hesitate to state facts as they were, even if this embarrassed the minister concerned.
In defending Dr Singh’s policies I found myself getting into many such arguments with Congressmen. Once on a flight with the PM on an Air Force aircraft, Mani Shankar Aiyar was holding forth on the problems of the nuclear deal. Aiyar was not a supporter and had even said to some journalists that if the PM threatened to resign on the issue he should be allowed to go. On this flight he was openly critical of the US and said he was a proud communist who would rather have the old Soviet Union back than befriend the US.
I had to tell the outspoken Congressman that if he were a minister in Stalin’s Cabinet then the official who would have been my equivalent, Stalin’s media adviser, would simply have opened the door of the aircraft and pushed him out. I reminded him that he felt secure criticizing the PM on the PM’s official aircraft because Dr Singh was a gentleman, not a dictator, nor a party boss!
This, indeed, was at once Dr Singh’s strength and weakness. His soft touch and his unwillingness to confront and discipline his detractors in the party encouraged many of them to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. On the other hand, his willingness to give them political space despite their mischief and worse disarmed them and often made them look foolish.
Dr Singh rarely chided his ministers. His strategy was to simply do other people’s work when they were not doing it themselves. If he was not happy with Shivraj Patil’s handling of internal security, he would rather step in and do the home minister’s job himself than reprimand him. On one occasion, after a terrorist attack the PM summoned a meeting to get himself briefed. The home secretary and IB chief reached 7 RCR in good time but Patil was delayed. We quipped that he must be changing his clothes. Instead of waiting for Patil to arrive, the PM insisted that the meeting begin. If he was unhappy about the way Kamal Nath was handling trade talks at the World Trade Organization, he would summon the commerce secretary and instruct him on how to handle a particular issue, rather than seek ways to win Nath over. Stepping in to do a minister’s job for them was his characteristic way of expressing displeasure at the minister’s work, but it wasn’t necessarily an effective one.
I would only find out what Dr Singh really thought of a minister when I sat down with him to discuss ideas for a Cabinet reshuffle. When I would suggest a minister’s name for a better portfolio or an elevation in rank he would, every now and then, say what he felt about the person. Sometimes, he would just make a face that conveyed disapproval. Over time, I realized that there were few members of his council of ministers that he truly valued as administrative assets. His constant refrain was that there was a paucity of administrative talent in the Congress and among the allies.
Whenever a reshuffle was being considered, Dr Singh would ask for lists of MPs, their resumes and any other relevant information. He would also like to be kept informed on changes in power equations in the states to understand the political weight of ministers belonging to different states and caste groups. Several people in the PMO, including Narayanan, Nair, Subbu and myself, would be asked for such information. His grasp of caste and social dynamics was good but not as sound as that of a regular politician. On occasion I would take a senior editor from an Indian-language publication from one or another state to him, and request him to brief the PM on local politics.
Much could have been done to improve governance and to make the PMO the instrument of governance reform, had Dr Singh had political authority or was willing to invest more effort. In June 2004, in his very first address to the nation, he had said, ‘No objective in this development agenda can be met if we do not reform the instrument in our hand with which we have to work, namely the government and public institutions. Clearly, this will be my main concern and challenge in the days to come.’ Failure to act on this assurance remained a major weakness of UPA-1.
Some initiatives were taken, like declaring 21 April as Civil Services Day, with the PM giving away awards to the best civil servants, who were identified through a nationwide effort. But there was no attempt to undertake major administrative reform. An administrative reforms committee, headed by Veerappa Moily, produced many voluminous reports but there was very little follow-up.
In the context of growing concern about the inadequacies of Indian diplomacy, I had suggested the PM constitute a high-level committee on the reform and modernization of the foreign service. He liked the idea but was not sure if he could secure the desired result without the active cooperation of the foreign minister. And he was never sure that Natwar, or Pranab after him, would go along with the kind of reforms he may have had in mind.
Ostensibly, the most important governance reform was supposed to be the Right to Information (RTI) Act that aimed to impose greater accountability on the government. It was an NAC initiative. Several senior and retired civil servants cautioned Dr Singh against the RTI, worrying that rather than expose corruption and sloth in government, it would sap initiative and encourage officers to pass the buck.
The jury is still out on whether or not RTI was a wise move and what its impact on governance has been. Has it made the government more transparent and accountable or has it made civil servants risk averse and unwilling to take difficult decisions? In UPA-1, when there was considerable euphoria over the RTI Act, few would have imagined that analysts would hold the RTI Act responsible for at least some of the so-called ‘policy paralysis’ that UPA-2 came to be charged with.
In the PMO, some officials shared my unfashionable scepticism about the efficacy of the RTI Act but Sonia was so committed to this initiative that no one seriously resisted it. I was not convinced that transparency, in terms of public access to internal government communication, was a necessary condition to making the government more responsive to people’s needs, and to good governance. By this token, few organizations, including most NGOs and the media as an institution, were ‘transparent’ even though they were more ‘responsive’. The glare of public scrutiny would not scare corrupt and inefficient officers, who would always find new means of playing old tricks, but it would certainly discourage honest officers from stating in writing views that might later be used to question their motives. I felt Dr Singh was sympathetic to my view though he never explicitly said so.
At the heart of the governance reform failure lay the weakening of the PMO. Dr Singh’s deliberately low-profile style was compounded by the relative inexperience of Principal Secretary Nair, who lacked the confidence of some of his distinguished predecessors, and had not been able to build up the kind of networks they had developed. Despite these weaknesses, and its limited political power and influence within government, internally, the PMO functioned efficiently. Pulok and his assistant Amit Agarwal listed every promise made in the NCMP and created a spreadsheet on which responsibilities were assigned to individual ministries. The PMO would seek a status report from each ministry from time to time and report back to the PM. This was the first time such a review system was devised and systematically implemented.
The sense of purpose this regular monitoring imparted to the PMO team was palpable, but it also meant that Dr Singh would himself chair long meetings to review the NCMP, getting into too much micro- management. Moreover, monitoring what others were doing was one thing, getting others to do what the PM wanted, quite another.
At the time I did not realize how the limits to the PM�
��s political authority and the PMO’s institutional weakness in fact meant that there was very little control of the PM and his office over the misdemeanours of ministers. Whenever I heard a tale about ministerial corruption that was credible enough to bear repeating, I would relate this to Dr Singh. He would always listen with attention. Most of the tales related to ministers belonging to parties that were allies in the coalition, but a good many also related to Congress ministers. It was clear that Dr Singh wanted to know what was happening. I assumed this information would help the PM to remain alert, especially when signing files, and that he would perhaps pull up the minister concerned.
All coalition PMs found their power limited by political compulsions, but none of them exercised as little power while taking on as much responsibility as Dr Singh. With the benefit of hindsight I would say that Dr Singh has to take some of the blame for this. If he had stuck to the dictum he quoted to me, ‘Never yield space’ and ensured that the PM and the PMO played their due role in decision-making, Cabinet formation and political communication, he may not have felt as disempowered as he came to be.
The politically fatal combination of responsibility without power and governance without authority meant that Dr Singh was unable, even when he was aware, of checking corruption in his ministry without disturbing the political arrangement over which he nominally presided. Political power resided with the heads of parties of the coalition and, as PM, he could not dismiss ministers at will. He could, perhaps, have done more to discipline his ministers. One way in which this could have been done would have been to appoint upright and effective officers as secretaries under corrupt ministers. Here too the PM often failed to assert his authority, appointing as secretary a person that the minister concerned preferred.
The consequence of all of this was to bring the PM into disrepute despite his own impressive record and reputation for personal probity and integrity. Still, I never imagined that charges of corruption of the kind that came to haunt him, in the manner they did, in years to come would so sully his reputation. For a long time the media was willing to give him the benefit of doubt on his role in questionable decisions by accepting the view that his lack of political authority prevented him from disciplining his wayward ministers. But when the issue of corruption took centre stage in public discourse, the question that was relentlessly asked was why had the PM not prevented what was going on. That he had ‘yielded so much space’ to other centres of power, so that he had little of his own to act, was not viewed as an adequate defence.
6
Brand Manmohan
‘There is no foundation to the insinuation that there are two power centres. I am the prime minister.’
Manmohan Singh, first national press conference
4 September 2004
Manmohan Singh began his tenure with a problem. Even though many coalition prime ministers before him had come to that office as the result of a political compromise between various power brokers of different parties and factions, Dr Singh was the first one to be seen as being ‘nominated’ by one person. Moreover, while he was not the first PM to be a member of the Rajya Sabha at the time of taking office, he was certainly the first to not seek a Lok Sabha seat after being elected PM. While there was no legal impediment to remaining a prime minister indirectly elected to Parliament through its Upper House, the Rajya Sabha, most prime ministers were directly elected by ‘the people’ to the Lok Sabha, the House of the People, which is the normal practice in all parliamentary systems.
I assumed at first that Dr Singh saw an election to the Lok Sabha as a risky venture, given his experience of 1999. This time around the stakes were infinitely higher: he was not just a Congress leader, but a prime minister. So perhaps, I thought, it was a case of better safe than sorry. However, Dr Singh’s decision—or was it Sonia’s, I was never too sure—that the prime minister not contest in the General Elections of 2009 suggested, with hindsight, that it was not just risk-aversion that led Dr Singh to not seek re-election to Parliament through the Lok Sabha in 2004. This, I concluded, was to be the nature of the arrangement. In 2004 he was, without doubt, an ‘accidental prime minister’ and, it would appear, neither he nor Sonia wanted to alter the arrangement in UPA-2. In an early conversation with him, I asked if he was considering seeking a seat in the Lok Sabha and his answer was that it was for the party to decide. I never raised the question again in UPA-1, though I insistently advised him in early 2009 that he seek a Lok Sabha seat in the approaching General Elections. Regrettably, he did not take that advice.
Despite the obvious existence of two centres of power, I took the view that the office of the prime minister is sacrosanct in the Indian system of governance and there should be no doubt in people’s minds who the ‘leader’ of the ‘country’ was. Sonia was the leader of the Congress and had been designated chairperson of the UPA. However, I believed that as head of government Manmohan Singh was the coalition’s leader, and that is how I would project him to the public.
I had observed, as a journalist, how both Narasimha Rao and Vajpayee had asserted their authority as PM. One began as the head of a minority government and the other as the head of a coalition. Both had factions and coalition partners to contend with. Both knew the limits of their power. Yet, both managed to project themselves as prime ministers in their own right. They jealously guarded their turf. How was I to project this image of the PM without bringing him into the party’s line of fire? This was my challenge as Dr Singh’s ‘brand manager’.
UPA’s first Parliament session began on a rocky note. From the prime minister’s point of view, it was a sad note. For the first time in parliamentary history, a newly elected prime minister was neither allowed to introduce his council of ministers to Parliament nor given the privilege of replying to the debate on the motion of thanks to the President for his address to Parliament.
The very first session of a new Parliament was rudely disrupted in this manner because the main Opposition party, the BJP, was still not reconciled to its surprise defeat in the General Elections. It made an issue of the induction into the Union Cabinet of Shibu Soren, leader of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), and a few others who were facing criminal charges. When, on 10 June, the last day of the opening session of the new Parliament, Speaker Somnath Chatterjee invited the PM to speak, and the Opposition did not allow it, Dr Singh was disturbed. He was both angry and deeply unhappy that the BJP remained in denial about its defeat and was refusing to extend to the new PM the basic courtesy of letting him speak in Parliament. Finally, a most unsatisfactory compromise was arrived at by which the BJP agreed to allow the PM to seek the House’s approval of the motion of thanks. A visibly disturbed Dr Singh finally stood up and made his statement in a voice touched by sadness:
Mr Speaker Sir, I learn that there is an understanding among the political parties on both sides that the Motion of Thanks on the President’s Address be put to vote straightaway and passed unanimously. Therefore, Sir, I request you to put the Motion to vote. I take this opportunity to thank all the honourable Members of the Lok Sabha.
Dr Singh returned home upset at the turn of events. It was then decided that the statement he had intended to make in Parliament be read out as an address to the nation on television. Mani Dixit and I were asked to redraft it as an ‘Address to the Nation’. The template for the address was the NCMP. After listing the new government’s agenda, I added a paragraph that said, ‘No objective in this development agenda can be met if we do not reform the instrument in our hand with which we have to work, namely the government and public institutions. Clearly, this will be my main concern and challenge in the days to come.’ It is a paragraph that many have pointed to over the years as the one that gave them great hope and the one agenda item on which the PM failed to deliver.
On foreign policy and national security, the address reaffirmed UPA’s commitment to the ‘no first use’ nuclear doctrine enunciated by the Vajpayee government, with the proviso that India would continue to wor
k for universal nuclear disarmament. The speech also included an early hint that the UPA would continue the dialogue with the United States on removing barriers on high-technology trade. It was with this objective in mind, and in the context of India declaring itself a nuclear weapons power, that the Vajpayee government had started a dialogue with the US on Next Steps in Strategic Partnership. Dixit and the PM were clear in their minds that they would take this dialogue forward.
Once the draft was approved, I advised the PM to practise delivering the speech on television, using a teleprompter. This would not be like reading out a budget speech, I pointed out. There is an intimacy to a TV broadcast. He would be talking to families across the country sitting in their living rooms and bedrooms. Even the best public speaker could fail to connect with a TV audience if he did not understand the medium.
Dr Singh readily agreed to practice sessions. We installed a TV camera in 7 RCR and every afternoon, after his lunch and siesta, he would devote an hour to reading the speech out in front of the camera. At the end of the working day, before he went home to 3 RCR for dinner, I would play the recording back to show him the defects so that he could improve his style. His voice was far too soft and he did not have the debater’s knack for emphasizing important words. He would not pause after making an important point but move on to the next sentence.
