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

by Sanjaya Baru

  We are in the process of finalizing a historic agreement with the United States which will enhance our prospects of increasing the production of nuclear power. There are doubts and misgivings in many minds about this agreement. . . . The Civil Nuclear Agreement is an effort to open closed doors so that we can obtain nuclear fuel and technology from other countries, such as USA, Russia and France . . .

  Having explained it thus for the nth time from a written text, he then chose to add extempore:

  The agreement concerns only the civil side of the nuclear energy programme and will have no bearing on our strategic programme. It remains intact without international interference and won’t affect our sense of judgement on foreign policy. You need to understand this reality and explain it to our people.

  Coming after him, Sonia too referred in positive terms to the nuclear deal and added, ‘Working in a coalition does not mean that the Congress should lose its political space forever.’ This enthused the votaries of the deal. Journalists following the issue would ask me if the deal was ‘not yet dead’. Some would even sit in my room and take bets on the topic. But, at the time I was still not sure if what Sonia had said signalled a change in her own position, or whether this was her way of not letting the PM down in public, even while pressing him to give up in private. That Dr Singh went once again into prolonged silence on the issue suggested to me that it might be the latter.

  It was only four months later, in his reply to the debate on the motion of thanks to the President for her address to Parliament, on 5 March 2008, that he made a reference to the deal. This time, however, I knew he was once again serious about moving forward because we had just crossed an important turning point in the interminable discussions on the deal.

  On 20 February 2008, John Kerry, a US senator and chairman, at the time, of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, landed in New Delhi along with his Congressional colleagues Joseph Biden (later to become the US vice president) and Chuck Hagel. They were in India to discuss the situation in Afghanistan but the conversation quickly moved on to the fate of the nuclear deal. Dr Singh briefed them on the state of play and said he was still trying to evolve a domestic political consensus that would enable him to complete the negotiations with the US. The three offered some candid advice.

  They stressed that it was imperative that India complete all necessary steps to conclude the nuclear deal by end-July to ensure that the US Congress approved it before the presidential election. ‘Otherwise,’ warned Kerry, ‘it will be very difficult for Congress to ratify it. If it is not ratified by Congress by July-end, there is no prospect.’ In order to be able to have time for the agreement to be passed in the senate, said Kerry, it should be brought to it by end-May. ‘So I think,’ he added, ‘somewhere in the next few weeks the decision has got to happen.’

  Kerry advised that the agreement process should be completed in the US Congress with a Republican President still in office and a Republican majority in the senate. The forthcoming US elections, he predicted, would bring the Democratic party to power and the Democrats, all three agreed, would find it very difficult to support the nuclear deal. Interestingly, Kerry and Biden were Democrats and Hagel was then a Republican. In late February 2008, it was still not clear whether Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton would get the Democratic party nomination. They were still competing in the primaries. The US media had been reporting that if Barack Obama won the candidacy, Biden would be his secretary of state and if Clinton came out on top then Kerry would be her secretary of state. Of course, in the end, Biden became Obama’s vice president, Kerry succeeded Clinton as Obama’s secretary of state and Hagel became secretary of defence in Obama’s second term.

  While all three focused on the requirements of the US legislative timetable, Kerry went a step further and drew Dr Singh’s attention to the enormous influence exerted within the Democratic party by non-proliferationists (K. Subrahmanyam had famously dubbed them ‘the Ayatollahs of nuclear non-proliferation’). Kerry warned Dr Singh that a future Democratic President would not be able to do for India what President George Bush was clearly willing and ready to do. He made it clear that neither Obama nor Hillary Clinton would challenge the anti-deal non-proliferation lobby and its rigid anti-India stance in their party. In the event, neither Obama nor Clinton voted in favour of the 123 Agreement in the senate.

  The three senior American leaders were only confirming what Dr Singh always knew, that if there was any chance of India getting the nuclear deal, it was only because President Bush wanted to do this for India. It was not because Bush had any special love for India. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US the spectre of jihadi terrorism had come to haunt the US, and led American leaders to understand what their Indian counterparts had been telling them about the need to fight this threat. Moreover, the inexorable rise of China was beginning to alter not just the Asian balance of power but also the global balance of power. Helping a democracy like India become stronger would enable it to deal both with the threat of Islamic radicalism and the rise of China. The US had a stake in this outcome. And, critically, Bush was willing to ignore the non-proliferationists’ objections. Other US leaders were not as willing.

  It was crystal clear to everyone involved in the negotiations that without President Bush’s personal commitment, they would not even have reached this stage. Securing a ‘sound and honourable 123 Agreement’ was as much a tribute to Indian negotiating skills as it was to President’s Bush’s desire to be fair in his dealings with India, a country he saw as being on ‘his side’. When critics of Bush in India poked fun at him saying he had an American cowboy’s view of the world—that there are ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ (‘axis of evil’ as he called them), I would ask why one should criticize a man who thought we, Indians, were the good guys.

  As Biden, Hagel and Kerry walked out of their meeting with Dr Singh, I suggested to Kerry that he brief the media waiting outside 7 RCR and let them know what the PM had been told. He readily agreed and did just that. Biden chipped in and added, ‘A number of senators are prepared to vote [for the 123 Agreement] though they don’t think it is as good as it should have been.’ Their reluctance on substance, said Biden, ‘was overcome by their belief in the India-US relationship.’ Kerry went to the extent of certifying to the media that he did not think India was a ‘proliferator’.

  That conversation set Dr Singh thinking. After September 2007, when negotiations appeared to be on a policy treadmill—only motion but no movement forward—Dr Singh gave the impression of having given up hope of concluding the deal. In March 2008 when he once again initiated a dialogue with supporters of the deal he was pleasantly surprised to find Brajesh Mishra finally willing to back him.

  Mishra had been the first to jump the gun, so to speak, and attack the deal on the very day it was unveiled, 18 July 2005. His initial opposition cost the government dear because he was the national security adviser who had initiated the NSSP, the precursor to the agreement that Dr Singh was seeking. Many in the foreign service took their cue from him and became internal saboteurs of the deal. Several interlocutors spoke to Mishra on the PM’s behalf and finally Dr Singh himself reached out to Mishra. Until February 2008 Mishra was not ready to publicly endorse the deal. After the Kerry visit, it would seem, he finally came on board, endorsing the deal as being in India’s national interest. I encouraged Karan Thapar to interview him and make this public.

  Mishra told Thapar that if the government were to now back off and not clinch the deal with the US it would be a ‘serious loss of face’ for India. He said that he had been briefed by ‘various representatives of the Government of India at a fairly high level and some scientists’ and he was now ‘convinced that there is not going to be any major impact on the strategic programme through the deal . . . this deal doesn’t stop us from continuing our strategic programme.’ When asked by Thapar if the time was opportune for India to sign on, Mishra said ‘Now, now, now.’

  Dr Singh was pleased an
d made a point of raising the matter in Parliament. He told the Lok Sabha, ‘Sir, I was very happy some days ago that the former national security adviser Shri Brajesh Mishra came out openly in defence of the nuclear cooperation agreement.’

  The second shot was fired by Subrahmanyam. He wrote a column that the India Abroad News Service (IANS) put out on 16 March 2008 titled ‘Will the Nuclear Deal Finally Go Ahead?’ In fact, Subrahmanyam challenged the Congress party to pursue an ‘independent foreign policy’, one that was independent of the Left! Resorting, uncharacteristically, to political commentary, he remarked that ‘the strategy of the Left’ was to denigrate the Congress, and make it less acceptable to the Left’s potential ‘third front’ allies so as to revive the non-Congress, non-BJP experiment that the Left had backed in the mid-1990s.

  Many journalists followed his line of argument, with the result that the media overwhelmingly came out in support of Dr Singh taking further steps to pursue the nuclear deal. With the exception of The Hindu and the Asian Age/Deccan Chronicle (two interlinked newspapers with a common editor) and a few Urdu newspapers, most major English, Hindi and other Indian-language newspapers and television channels supported the prime minister. Public-opinion polls conducted by India Today, Outlook, CNN-IBN and the Times of India showed a clear majority supporting the PM and the nuclear deal.

  With the media’s backing, the PM gained confidence and began pushing the envelope. On 24 March, while laying the foundation stone of the Bawana power project in Delhi, he once again spoke publicly of the need to develop India’s nuclear energy potential. At the PMO, we were busy collecting data from the Nuclear Power Corporation to show that capacity utilization in all nuclear power plants was gradually declining because of the shortage of uranium. This was even threatening the functioning of a few nuclear power plants. The DAE had claimed in the past that India need not worry about imported uranium because of the availability of domestic supply in the North-East. However, environmental groups had been blocking uranium mining in that region. With no domestic production of uranium worth the name, the lack of imports was starving nuclear plants.

  Such hard facts helped the government win public opinion, but the Left continued to resist allowing the government to go to the IAEA to negotiate a safeguards agreement. It even threatened to boycott the meetings of the UPA-Left committee and some Left leaders began issuing statements that they might have to reconsider their support to the UPA. Not surprisingly, this curbed Dr Singh’s enthusiasm and led to a few telltale silences on his part. He did not bring up the subject when he spoke at the UPA’s annual anniversary celebration, on 22 May 2008, when presenting the annual Report to the People. With Left leaders present in full strength at the anniversary dinner at 7 RCR, journalists attending the event assumed that the deal was once again dead, drawing attention to the fact that the PM made no reference to it in his speech.

  But the prime minister was not, in fact, giving up on the deal. A fortnight later, a sharp rise in oil prices forced the government to effect a steep hike in petrol, diesel, kerosene and LPG prices. Dr Singh decided to address the nation on 4 June. In a televised address he explained in detail why the government was being forced to undertake an across- the-board hike in energy prices and then boldly ended his address saying, ‘We have to develop alternative sources of energy, whatever be the source. We cannot remain captive to uncertain markets and unsure sources of supply. We have to develop renewable sources of energy, including nuclear energy.’

  The next day, the Left Front threatened to quit if the government did not roll back the price hike and announced that it would meet on 23 June to ‘evaluate the political situation and the relations with the UPA government’.

  On 9 June, Dr Singh inaugurated an international conference on disarmament on the theme ‘Towards a World Free of Nuclear Weapons’, to mark the twentieth anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi’s address on that subject to the UN General Assembly. His speech, written by a PMO official, repeated the government’s stock views on the subject. It seemed to me that Dr Singh was paying ritual obeisance to disarmament before making one last-ditch attempt at securing India’s status as a nuclear weapons power.

  Two days later, on 11 June, Dr Singh spoke from the heart. In an extempore address lasting almost an hour to a group of Indian Foreign Service probationers, he spoke eloquently about his views on Indian foreign and strategic policy. Since we had installed a recording system at Panchavati, the meeting rooms at 7 RCR, it was possible to record and transcribe the full text of the PM’s speech and place it on the PMO’s website. He spoke about every major issue confronting Indian foreign policy, including climate change, a relatively recent challenge, hard power and soft power, non-alignment and coalition-building, relations with neighbours and big powers.

  ‘The world is not a morality play,’ Dr Singh told the young diplomats. ‘The world’s political and economic system is a power play and those who have greater power use it to their advantage. Our effort has been, through collective strategies, to work with various coalitions of developing countries, sometimes with coalitions of like-minded developed countries, to create an environment where (the) power factor does not work to our disadvantage.’

  It was a masterful survey of Indian foreign policy and offered a group of young diplomats a panoramic view from a prime minister’s vantage point. Then, at the very end of a long survey, he finally touched a subject that he had not spoken much about in recent weeks. Highlighting the significance of the nuclear deal for national security and India’s global standing, he boldly claimed:

  It protects our national interest, it protects our capacity to use nuclear power to protect our strategic interests. At the same time it opens up new opportunities for civilian cooperation and without that, I think, the trade in dual technologies—sensitive advanced technologies— cannot become a reality. But our domestic politics has prevented us from going ahead. I still continue to hope that we will make progress in the months that lie ahead. But it is very important for us to move forward to end this nuclear apartheid that the world has sought to impose on India. This agreement, if it materializes, if it sees the light of day, will open up new possibilities of cooperation, not only with the US but all other nuclear powers like Russia, France, who are very keen that once we have this deal through, India should become eligible for civil nuclear cooperation.

  It was clear that the PM was going to make one last effort. Interestingly, a day after Dr Singh’s remarks appeared in the media, Sonia Gandhi too spoke about the importance of nuclear energy while addressing a farmers’ rally in Assam, and located it in the context of rising oil prices. It seemed that something was bubbling below the surface.

  On Wednesday, 18 June, I was being driven to office around half past nine in the morning when I saw a couple of cars parked in the 7 RCR compound and police escort cars parked on the road outside. This was normal whenever the PM was having a meeting with anyone entitled to a police escort. The escort cars would always be parked outside the RCR compound. However, since I knew the PM’s official schedule that day, I wondered who he was with so early in the morning, and why the meeting was not shown on his daily programme sheet.

  I called Subbu on my mobile to ask what was happening. He told me that Sonia Gandhi had come calling on the PM and the two had later been joined by Pranab Mukherjee. The two of us agreed that something very important was being discussed, and Subbu promised to call and let me know when he found out what was going on. I sat in my room at South Block waiting for a call. I was jolted when Subbu finally called to say that Dr Singh was unwell and had cancelled all his appointments for the day. In Telugu, he mumbled to me that I should drive down to RCR.

  When I met him there, Subbu told me he did not know what had transpired at the meeting. But he did know that Dr Singh had spoken to Sonia the previous night, prior to her visit this morning. Given our knowledge of the tensions around the nuclear deal, we immediately assumed that the fat was finally in the fire. The boss had given his quit not
ice.

  There was no way anything could be confirmed because not only had the PM cancelled all his appointments, he was not even available to meet his own staff. Narayanan, Nair and I were told that the PM would not meet anyone in the PMO. I returned to South Block and spent the next few hours dealing with phone calls from the media. I blandly told suspicious reporters, who had heard the news of the day’s appointments being cancelled, that Dr Singh was indisposed.

  Late in the afternoon, Rajdeep Sardesai of CNN-IBN called me. He had heard from a ‘reliable’ source that Dr Singh had submitted his resignation, he said, and his channel was going to run with the story. Did I have any comments? I requested Rajdeep to hold on, assuring him that I would return with a comment. When I called Subbu, he suggested I call 3 RCR directly and ask to speak to the PM. I did so and Dr Singh came on the line. I told him what Rajdeep had said. Dr Singh kept quiet for a while and suggested I say nothing. I knew the deed had been done.

  I did not call Rajdeep back and did not take his calls either. Obviously guessing something was wrong, he ran with the story, citing ‘reliable sources’. However, he reported the resignation not as a certainty, but as a likely event. I switched my mobile off, knowing that I would be flooded with media inquiries.

  Within a few minutes, I was summoned by the PM.When I met him at home, he looked unusually relaxed. Clearly, the burden was now off his shoulders. Yes, he told me, he had spoken to Sonia the previous day and told her that his position had become untenable. He also explained what had led to his offer to resign. The Indian side had been all set to go to the IAEA to negotiate an India-specific safeguards agreement but the Left wanted the draft agreement to be shown to them before they authorized the government to go to the international body. This was impossible, said the PM. As a secret document, the draft agreement could not be shown to those not in government until the negotiations with the IAEA had ended. Moreover, India would be placed in an embarrassing position if, at this stage, the government chose to stay away from the IAEA, on account of the Left’s arm-twisting. The IAEA chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, had privately assured Indian officials that he would ensure a positive outcome for India. Thus Dr Singh had concluded that if the government did not go to the IAEA now, he had no option but to quit.