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

by Sanjaya Baru

  A round-table is a dialogue. No one preaches and no one just listens. This is a dialogue of equals who promise to work together. Today’s meeting is a significant event. It will, however, achieve historical importance if we are able to unleash a process by which we can arrive at a workable blueprint that can help to create a new chapter in Kashmir’s history. Not by compromising on one’s ideals, but in a spirit of mutual tolerance, understanding and accommodation.

  This entire process is a good example of how Dr Singh used ‘outsiders’ of repute, like K. Subrahmanyam, Prem Jha, Amitabh Mattoo, Haseeb Drabhu and others to break the mould and seek an ‘out-of- the-box’ solution to a problem to which the governmental system was unable to find a solution. In seeking to push the idea of a civil nuclear energy agreement with the United States that would liberate India from trade denial regimes in strategic technologies, Dr Singh invested even more time and effort into engaging the minds of India’s top strategic affairs, nuclear policy and international relations experts. Over three years, from mid-2005 to mid-2008, 7 RCR played host to a large number of analysts and experts with differing views whose opinions shaped Dr Singh’s own thinking and Indian official policy.

  Many retired nuclear scientists came out of the woodwork wanting to be ‘consulted’ and to be seen as part of the historic process. One such senior scientist even sent me his biodata and urged me to get him appointed as an adviser to the PM. When this did not happen, he became a severe critic of the nuclear deal.

  The only major organized effort was, not surprisingly, left to K. Subrahmanyam to lead. Dr Singh appointed a task force that was asked to study emerging trends and long-term implications of the global strategy of the United States as it had evolved during the Bush era and draw relevant lessons for Indian economic and foreign policy. The task force report titled ‘The Challenge: India and the New American Global Strategy’ was commissioned in 2005 and submitted to the PM in 2006. The Subrahmanyam task force had among its members scientists P. Rama Rao and M.S. Ananth, economists R.K. Pachauri and Arvind Virmani, strategic affairs analysts Uday Bhaskar and Amitabh Mattoo. Regrettably, it remains a classified document even though Subrahmanyam wanted it made public.

  Social policy, however, was the one area in which the voice of the activist overpowered the voice of the specialist. There were a few experts like development economists Jean Dreze and Mihir Shah, the former a member of the NAC in UPA-1 and the latter a member of the Planning Commission in UPA-2, who combined activism with serious research. However, most others involved in making social policy, including most members of the NAC, were more activists than experts, and far removed from being administrators. Dr Singh tried to infuse rigour into the process of social-sector policymaking, and sometimes found his efforts misinterpreted. For example, Dr Singh was never opposed to the rural employment guarantee programme but sought rigorous analysis of the options available to see how the government could maximize the benefits while minimizing the expenditure. This was construed by activists as opposition to the scheme itself.

  This insistence on securing an analytical underpinning for the government’s policy initiatives sometimes made Dr Singh a frustrated head of government, because everything that a government does in a democracy cannot be justified by the principles of rigour and consistency. While, on the one hand, activists disparaged him for not being populist enough, on the other, many of Dr Singh’s more academically oriented friends found fault with him for the intellectual compromises he had to make as a politician. This prompted the jibe that Dr Singh was in fact ‘a first-rate politician but a second-rate economist’. But Dr Singh had been in public life long enough to know, as he often put it, that ‘one has to first succeed as a politician before being viewed a statesman’.

  For the same reason, I, too, would not overstate the role of’expertise’ and of the ‘technocracy’ in policymaking. In a democracy, that too with a fractious and ideologically disparate coalition like the UPA at the helm, public policy was inevitably a product of political interest and private lobbying. But subject experts and committees certainly informed Dr Singh’s thinking and gave him the space he needed to negotiate his way through political hurdles in pursuit of policies dear to him, both domestic and foreign.

  8

  ‘Promises to Keep’

  ‘We want India to shine. But India must shine for all.’

  First national press conference

  4 September 2004

  Even before he was named head of the UPA government, Dr Singh was asked by Sonia to address the media and calm the stock market down. The BSE Sensex had gone into a tailspin after it was announced that the Congress would form a government with the support of the Left. It was left to Dr Singh to calm investors’ nerves. Fortunately, his track record in the 1990s reassured investors at home and abroad. The Vajpayee government had ended its term on a high note, with upwards of 8 per cent growth in the final year, fuelled by a massive expansion of investment in infrastructure, and bequeathed to its successor an economy in reasonably good shape. It was economic optimism that prompted the NDA finance minister Jaswant Singh’s famous ‘India Shining’ campaign, aimed at promoting India internationally as an investment destination. Growth rates were going up, inflation was low, a surplus in the capital account was being registered for the first time in years. The last indicator was a vote of confidence from a global community that viewed the BJP with scepticism when it conducted nuclear tests in 1998. The challenge for the UPA was to address the grievances of farmers, especially in southern India, reassure investors and make the growth process socially ‘inclusive’.

  In setting out the new government’s agenda through his first Independence Day address, Dr Singh emphasized that the government’s ‘plans and priorities’ had been defined by three statements—the NCMP, the President’s address to Parliament and the finance minister’s budget speech. The reference to all three statements was significant. It was meant to emphasize the fact that the policy agenda of the government was not defined by the NCMP alone, but also by what the President said in Parliament (this was a speech written by the PMO, which in this case meant me) and what the finance minister said in his budget speech.

  What the PM was implicitly telling the nation was that the NCMP would not become a straitjacket but would be interpreted through the government’s policy statements. The NCMP had been hurriedly drafted by Sitaram Yechury and Jairam Ramesh to enable the Left to work with the Congress. It was not a carefully thought through manifesto. Dr Singh was, understandably, not fully satisfied with the NCMP. He thought the Congress had made too many concessions to the Left in its desperation to secure support. He was concerned that both the Left and many in the Congress would expect delivery on all promises, and that this might be a tough task for the government. The party seemed to have taken the easy way out, saying ‘yes’ to words in print and imagining that the government would not be constrained by them in action.

  Having lived through the nightmare of 1991—92, namely the economic mess that confronted the Narasimha Rao government, and having handled earlier economic crises, one of Dr Singh’s favourite English proverbs was ‘money does not grow on trees’. He believed the NCMP’s fiscal commitments, and there were many promises of subsidies and new schemes, would prove to be unsustainable. This belief lay behind the more cautious tone of what was possible and doable in the President’s address and the finance minister’s budget speech. Also, by emphasizing the relevance of the budget speech to government policy he was giving the government the option to define policy from time to time, rather than be constrained by commitments made on paper on an eager night.

  This did not mean Dr Singh did not believe in the fundamental principles underlining the NCMP. Indeed he did. He had long conceded that as finance minister he had not done enough for health and education and that these would be his priorities as PM. He also recognized that the NDA’s defeat, especially that of Chandrababu Naidu and his Telugu Desam Party in Andhra Pradesh, was because of the neg
lect of agriculture and rural development, and that the UPA had to focus on this. He was among the first to criticize the BJP’s ‘India Shining’ campaign when it was rolled out in the run-up to the 2004 elections. For several months before that Sonia and he sat through long discussions with social scientists and civil-society activists to try and understand the issues they saw as priorities for policy action.

  The view often purveyed by Dr Singh’s critics and Sonia’s admirers that he was a late convert to her way of thinking about social policy was just not true. The concerns expressed in the NCMP were uppermost in Dr Singh’s mind and were reflected in his first Independence Day address where he spoke of a ‘New Deal for Rural India’ and the ‘Saat Sutra’ (seven priorities) of the UPA, namely agriculture, water, education, health care, employment, urban renewal and infrastructure. This address was crafted entirely by him.

  ‘These seven priorities are the pillars of the development bridge we must cross to ensure higher economic growth and more equitable social and economic development,’ Dr Singh told the country from the ramparts of the Red Fort.

  The ‘Saat Sutra’ set the policy framework for the government and yielded what came to be known as the UPA’s ‘flagship programmes’— Bharat Nirman, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, National Rural Health Mission, Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the expanded Midday Meal Programme.

  While the NAC played an important role in developing the government’s thinking on some of these programmes, the PMO too played a key role in drawing up the required legislation and in working out how these programmes would be implemented. The perception that all the UPA’s progressive social policies came out of the NAC, while the PMO was only preoccupied with economic growth and liberalization was false. This was a caricature that many in the Congress party, the Left and in the media liked to draw. Much as I wanted him to, Dr Singh was never keen on politically challenging such propaganda. His usual response, whenever I suggested we should respond to such comments, would be, ‘Let my actions speak for me.’

  Bharat Nirman, the flagship rural infrastructure development programme, for example, was entirely conceived in the PMO at the initiative of the late R. Gopalakrishnan, a joint secretary in the PMO. Gopalakrishnan had ground-level experience in development from his tenure in Madhya Pradesh where he had served as secretary to Digvijaya Singh through his two terms as chief minister of the state. A highly motivated, intellectually curious and energetic civil servant, he would never allow himself to be constrained by bureaucratic red tape and rigidity.

  He was inspired by business guru C.K. Prahalad’s thesis about the business potential of those at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’. He believed that public investment in rural development would generate a virtuous cycle of win-win outcomes, provided such spending generated new incomes and new employment. Bharat Nirman was conceptualized as a ‘business plan for rural infrastructure’ rather than as a new subsidy programme. The programme sought to bring together existing schemes for rural housing, rural roads, rural electrification, drinking water and irrigation, and rural telecommunications.

  When Gopalakrishnan made his initial PowerPoint presentations to the PM on the scheme, there was enormous excitement in the room. This was the kind of growth-oriented and employment-generating programme that Dr Singh liked. When Gopalakrishnan suggested the name Bharat Nirman for this clutch of programmes, Dr Singh readily agreed with a smile.

  Young officers in the PMO like V. Vidyavathi and Amit Agarwal were also equally committed to the UPA’s development agenda. The PM’s PS, Subbu, had also worked with Digvijaya Singh’s government in Madhya Pradesh, before opting for Chhattisgarh when the state was divided, and had taken keen interest in the work of NGOs in rural development in both states, as well as in Manipur where he had briefly served. Vidyavathi belonged to the Karnataka cadre of the IAS and Agarwal to the Chhattisgarh cadre. This was the core team that monitored the implementation of the NCMP.

  When the idea of a rural employment guarantee scheme travelled to the PMO from the NAC and the rural development ministry, it was received enthusiastically by Dr Singh, who was familiar with Maharashtra’s early initiatives in this regard. Maharashtra had, from the time of Sharad Pawar’s tenure as chief minister, implemented the Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Scheme (MEGS). Though conceptualized in 1977, during Vasantdada Patil’s tenure as chief minister, MEGS was launched by Pawar in 1979. As the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission in the 1980s, Dr Singh had studied this scheme and had been impressed by it. Hence, he was in favour of implementing this programme at the national level and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was nothing more than a variant of MEGS.

  The so-called differences on the MGNREGA between the PMO and the finance ministry on the one hand, and the NAC on the other, related mainly to the financial implications of the programme with estimates of how much it would cost the exchequer varying from 1 to 3 per cent of national income. Neither Dr Singh nor Chidambaram wanted an open-ended fiscal commitment, since the benefits of the programme were to be based on self-selection. That is, only a person seeking employment under the MGNREGA would be offered it for the number of days and at a wage rate specified. This would mean that at the beginning of the year the government would not know how many would come forward to seek the benefit.

  The minister for rural development Dr Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, a one-time physics professor and a genial grassroots politician for whom Dr Singh had high regard and great affection, played an important role as a bridge between the fiscal conservatives and the populists. Raghuvansh Prasad looked rustic, with a scraggy unshaven appearance, always sporting a well-worn dhoti and not the starched, crisp white dhotis that most politicians normally wear. His English was scratchy; but his knowledge of the subject he was handling was superb.

  Unlike many other Cabinet ministers who left it to their secretaries to brief the PM on policy issues concerning their ministries, Raghuvansh Prasad would make his own presentations. He understood the PM’s fiscal concerns and worked towards a fiscally responsible programme. Raghuvansh Prasad was one person Dr Singh would have loved to induct into his council of ministers in 2009, but could not because of the parting of ways between the Congress and Lalu Prasad’s RJD, of which Raghuvansh Prasad was a senior leader. On several occasions I could sense his irritation with Congress party propagandists who claimed credit for the MGNREGA in the name of Sonia and later Rahul, but would never give Raghuvansh Prasad credit for his stellar work on it.

  The Congress party’s obsession with giving the entire credit for the MGNREGA to the Gandhi family reached a point where it may have actually embarrassed the family. When I tried to correct that impression, I found myself in a spot of trouble. On 26 September 2007, shortly after he was appointed one of the party’s general secretaries, Rahul Gandhi led a delegation of all the party general secretaries to greet Dr Singh on his birthday. After the courtesies and tea and dhokla were done with, the delegation settled down to a discussion on policy issues. At the end of the meeting, Sonia’s political secretary, Ahmed Patel, handed over a statement about the meeting, requesting me to release it to the press.

  The statement claimed that Rahul Gandhi had urged the PM to extend the scope of NREGA (this was before it was named after Mahatma Gandhi and consequently became MGNREGA) to all the 500-odd rural districts in the country. Until then, it was being implemented only in 200 of the most backward districts. I told Patel that it was not the practice of the PMO to issue press statements on behalf of those who visited the PM, and that I would draft a statement of my own stating that a delegation of party general secretaries led by Rahul had come to greet the PM on his birthday. As for the political content of the statement, it was better, I suggested, that it came in a separate statement from the party office.

  Later that evening, Shishir Gupta, a senior political journalist at the Indian Express, called me to find out if Dr Singh had accepted Rahul
’s suggestion and whether NREGA would now be extended to the entire country. I reminded Shishir that the prime minister had already stated his commitment to doing so in his Independence Day speech the previous month, and that the PMO was in discussions on this very point with the ministries of rural development and finance.

  That evening, all TV channels dutifully reported the Congress party’s statement that Rahul had asked the PM to extend NREGA to the entire country, and the next morning’s papers did the same. Only the Indian Express made the additional remark in its dispatch the next day that ‘Sources said that this issue had been on the PMO radar even before Rahul’s elevation to the party post. The Principal Secretary to the PM had already discussed the issue with officials from the Finance Ministry, Rural Development Ministry and Planning Commission almost two weeks ago.’

  Raghuvansh Prasad had, in fact, been the original enthusiast in favour of extending the employment programme to the entire country and he was amused when he found himself upstaged by a Congress party now claiming this was Rahul’s idea. But he sportingly went along with the Congress party’s spin, confining himself to telling a few reporters from his home state, Bihar, that it was he who had been pushing the finance ministry and the Planning Commission to extend the programme.

  I sent an SMS, half in jest, to a journalist who wanted to know more about the programme’s national roll-out, that this announcement was the PM’s birthday gift to the country. After all, if Sonia or Rahul had been PM, that is precisely how the party’s strategists would have spun out such an announcement on a leader’s birthday.