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

by Sanjaya Baru

  When the Lok Sabha reconvened, Dr Singh hoped he would get a chance to speak. But that right and courtesy was denied to him by an Opposition that heckled and disrupted the session. He had spent considerable time over the previous week working on his speech. Montek, Narayanan and I worked on various parts of it with the PM himself adding sentences. Referring to the betrayal of the Left, which had originally agreed to support the initiative he had taken and then backed out, he wanted to say:

  All I had asked our Left colleagues was ‘please allow us to go through the negotiating process and I will come to Parliament before operationalizing the nuclear agreement’. This simple courtesy, which is essential for the orderly functioning of any government worth the name, particularly with regard to the conduct of foreign policy, they were not willing to grant me. They wanted a veto over every single step of the negotiations, which is not acceptable. They wanted me to behave as their bonded slave.

  He had agreed to conclude on an uncharacteristically personal note:

  I have often said that I am a politician by accident. I have held many diverse responsibilities. I have been a teacher, I have been an official of the Government of India, I have been a member of this greatest of Parliaments, but I have never forgotten my life as a young boy in a distant village. Every day that I have been prime minister of India I have tried to remember that the first ten years of my life were spent in a village with no drinking water supply, no electricity, no hospital, no roads and nothing that we today associate with modern living. I had to walk miles to school, I had to study in the dim light of a kerosene oil lamp. This nation gave me the opportunity to ensure that such would not be the life of our children in the foreseeable future. Sir, my conscience is clear that on every day that I have occupied this high office, I have tried to fulfil the dream of that young boy from that distant village.

  But the speech was never delivered, merely tabled and circulated to the media. That afternoon Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee, who belonged to the CPI(M), revealed in public what we all knew in private. He expressed his anger at the political games Prakash Karat had been playing and at the wrecking of a coalition that he [Somnath] had helped construct. A short while earlier, he had refused to accept the CPI(M)’s demand that he quit as Lok Sabha Speaker because his party had withdrawn support to the UPA. Chatterjee had been elected Speaker as part of the Left’s understanding to support UPA. On 22 July he went on to chair a meeting of political parties in Parliament to resolve the crisis created by the so-called ‘cash-for-votes’ scandal and reconvened the Lok Sabha to put the confidence motion to vote. The next day, the CPI(M) politburo met and expelled Chatterjee from the party’s membership. Chatterjee remained unfazed. He had not only disapproved of Karat’s tactics, but had also openly supported the prime minister and his initiative.

  Somnath had personal regard for Dr Singh. Their friendship was cemented by their years together in the Rajya Sabha. But Dr Singh would always recall the fact that Somnath’s father, Nirmal Chandra Chatterjee, a lawyer and a public intellectual and once-president of the Akhil Bharatiya Hindu Mahasabha, had awarded him a scroll of honour for securing the first rank at Amritsar’s Hindu College way back in 1950. It was the same Somnath who had held up a copy of the Economic Times on budget day in 1992 to charge the then finance minister with leaking budget secrets to the IMF. Now, more than fifteen years later, he presided over Dr Singh’s toughest day in Parliament and declared his victory. At the end of a long day, made longer by the fact that several MPs had preferred to cast their vote on paper, rather than use the Lok Sabha’s electronic voting system and those votes had to be physically counted, Somnath announced that 275 MPs had voted in support of the government, 256 had voted against it and ten had either abstained or were absent.

  An uproar greeted the victory. I sent a text message from my mobile phone to several journalists with just three words on it: ‘Singh is King’. Late that night, when I reached home and switched on the TV, every channel was running that jingle from that movie with visuals of a tired prime minister standing in front of TV cameras holding his hand up in a V-sign.

  13

  A Victory Denied

  ‘There cannot be two centres of power. That creates confusion. I have to accept that the party president is the centre of power.’

  Manmohan Singh, 2009

  It was early evening on Saturday, 6 September 2008. I was in Singapore travelling to the university campus where I taught, when my mobile phone rang. It was Jaideep Sarkar, the PM’s private secretary.

  ‘NSG waiver is done!’ he said. The PM was thrilled and Narayanan was ecstatic, he added, describing the celebratory mood that had swept RCR after this important breakthrough in the India-US nuclear agreement.

  At noon that day in Vienna, the NSG had finally voted to lift the embargo on nuclear trade with India. Dr Singh had made the history that we all hoped he would make. Its news had reached Dr Singh while he was drinking his afternoon tea in Delhi. I had been keeping close track of events from Singapore, with Jaideep keeping me informed. I knew much drama and hard bargaining by various NSG member countries had gone into the final outcome. President Bush had delivered on his promise by finally twisting China’s arm to get it to vote in favour of India. I placed the mobile phone back in my pocket and looked out of the bus at Singapore’s greenery. Tears welled up in my eyes.

  My thoughts went back to all those battles in Parliament, the arguments within government, the negotiations with the US, my own negotiations with the media and arguments with colleagues and politicians. For three years, I was a part of it all. When the deed was done, I was far away on an alien university campus.

  I called my friends, Jaishankar, who was now India’s high commissioner in Singapore, and Raja Mohan, an important analyst and media commentator on the deal, who was, like me, a professor at a Singapore university. Jaishankar, the son of my guru K. Subrahmanyam, Raja and I had all been in Washington DC on 18 July 2005, the day when it all began to come together, with the US implicitly acknowledging India’s status as a nuclear weapons power. We had been in the thick of it all for three years, each in his own way. Even after moving to Singapore Jaishankar was retained by the PM as a negotiator, Raja continued to write his columns and I had continued my speech- writing for Dr Singh, writing and emailing speeches between cooking at home and teaching at the university. We decided to meet the next day and raise a toast.

  I alighted from the bus at Bukit Timah and went for a walk in the botanical gardens, with my mind in the buzz of New Delhi. I had asked Jaideep to convey my compliments to the PM and I knew he would. But I wanted to speak to him, hear his voice and get a sense of his excitement. I could have asked Jaideep to connect me to him, but I knew both he and the PM would be busy and that he would say he would do it later, in the evening. I decided to use my ‘hotline’— Muralidharan, the PM’s personal assistant—to get to the PM right away.

  Murali was always somewhere close to Dr Singh and whenever I needed to get to the PM without delay, bypassing his two private secretaries, I would call on his mobile. Murali would just walk across to Dr Singh and hand his phone over to him. That is what I did as I walked through Singapore’s beautiful botanical gardens and Murali did exactly what I had expected him to do. Dr Singh was on the line.

  ‘Hello?’ he said in his soft voice.

  ‘Sir, congratulations! You have done it!’ I said.

  ‘We have done it!’ he replied in a tone of rare excitement. When he asked if I was in Delhi, I told him I was calling from Singapore.

  ‘So when are you coming back?’ he asked.

  ‘Sir, I am in the middle of a semester here. I will be in Delhi in December. I will see you then.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said and then, to my utter surprise, added, ‘You come back now, whenever you can. I have not yet appointed anyone in your place.’ I was nonplussed. Why was he asking me to return immediately? He knew I was teaching and as a former professor ought to have known that I would not be able to
leave a teaching job mid-semester. More to the point, I wondered why he associated the successful conclusion of the nuclear deal with my return. Was it that he felt he was now politically stronger, perhaps even likely to not just last out his full term but even secure a second one? Why did he say ‘come back now’?

  It was true that the PM had not appointed a media adviser in my place, but had relied on resources within the government. When I left in August, Gopalakrishnan of the PMO had been given the additional charge of handling the media, and in December, Deepak Sandhu, the government’s principal information officer, had replaced him. We had agreed that I would continue to help him with his speeches. He had anyway said to me, more than once, that all he needed was a speech- writer and he did not want any projection in the media. Was he now thinking differently, I wondered? With the nuclear deal done, was he now prepared to give me more freedom to function as a media adviser? Did he want to politically empower himself?

  Despite these unresolved questions in my mind, I felt heartened by Dr Singh’s invitation and agreed to accept it. I assured him that I would return as soon as I possibly could but, given my personal commitments, it was unlikely that I would be back before the elections. Returning to his victory in Vienna, I made bold to suggest that he was now free to do what he wanted on the policy front. I pointed out that the successful culmination of the negotiations on the nuclear deal had politically empowered him and that he should use the space he had gained to make his own decisions. This was the time, I stressed, to challenge his critics and assert his authority.

  ‘Let me see,’ he said in his plaintive tone, and the call ended.

  When I called on him during a visit to Delhi in December, much was weighing on his mind. Grappling as he was with the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attack of 26 November and with the ongoing global economic crisis following the recent collapse of Lehmann Brothers, he appeared tired and preoccupied. I could see how both crises had impacted his health. He did not say much, made routine inquiries about my family and asked me more than once if I was happy in Singapore. He recalled his conversations with Lee KuanYew, Singapore’s founder- statesman, and spoke of how he had learnt a lot about China and its leadership from those conversations.

  I was not surprised when, within days of my return to Singapore, the news of his aggravated heart problem reached me. In late January, he had to be hospitalized for a major surgery. Murali kept me informed about his recovery. On learning that he had been discharged and was now resting at home, I decided to fly down to Delhi to look him up. Landing in Delhi on a February morning I called Jaideep and Indu. I was told Dr Singh was at 5 RCR, which had been turned into a mini-hospital, still under constant medical care, and no visitors had yet been allowed to see him. It turned out later that these restrictions had been put in place because of anxiety about his recovery, which had been slower than expected.

  I decided I would call on Mrs Kaur, go back to Singapore, and return only when Dr Singh was able to receive visitors. I called Murali and sought time with her. Returning my call, Mrs Kaur asked me to come and see her. When I arrived at 3 RCR I was asked to go to 5 RCR where Mrs Kaur met me at the portico and took me in. A team of doctors was sitting in the visitors’ room. I removed my shoes, washed my hands and went in. Dr Singh was asleep.

  ‘Sanjay Baru is here,’ Mrs Kaur whispered into his ear. His eyes opened and he smiled, and then shut them again. She asked him gently if he would like to have a cup of tea. He opened his eyes again and looked at me. She said, ‘Yes, I will get him some tea. You also have some tea.’

  Encouraged by the fact that he had not shut his eyes again, Mrs Kaur helped him to sit up in bed and tucked a pillow behind him. She then ordered tea. He asked for a biscuit and soon, his favourite Marie biscuit arrived with his tea. He sat silently while she helped him sip his tea. He then asked how I was and inquired after Rama, Tanvika and my father. We spoke for a few minutes when Srinath Reddy, the leader of the PM’s team of doctors, and a friend from my school and college days in Hyderabad, walked in. Srinath indicated that I should now leave the room and let Dr Singh rest.

  As we walked out, Srinath whispered to me that apart from the PM’s family, the NSA and a couple of others, no one had yet met Dr Singh after the operation. Murali, who was with us, said I should not let anyone know I had seen him because both President Pratibha Patil and Sonia Gandhi were waiting to meet him and had not yet been given time. They might take it amiss if it got about that I had jumped the queue. I reassured Murali that no one, apart from my immediate family, even knew I was in India, and I was now on my way to the airport to take a flight back to Singapore.

  Srinath said, ‘He is still very frail and weak. We were worried that he was not fighting back. He is not eating enough and needs to get up and walk. So when Mrs Kaur heard you were here, she wondered whether meeting you might help revive his spirits. I can see it has. He has not spoken for an entire day. Whatever he said to you were his first words today.’

  As I drove back to the airport I rewound his words in my mind.

  I remembered what Dr Singh said at a farewell lunch he had hosted for me at 7 RCR. I had been flattered to be told that he wanted a proper banquet organized for me. He had invited Montek, Rangarajan, all the senior PMO officials, including Prithviraj Chavan, Narayanan and Nair, the Cabinet secretary K.M. Chandrashekhar, the foreign secretary Shivshankar Menon, the finance secretary Duvvuri Subbarao and two guests from outside the government whom I had wanted there—my guru K. Subrahmanyam and the former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Bimal Jalan.

  The seating had been like at an official banquet, with the PM and myself facing each other, and others placed around us according to rank and protocol. At the end of a long meal, during which many of us recounted the ups and downs of our time in the PMO, Dr Singh thanked me for the work I had done and said that he would miss me.

  Turning to those around the table he said, ‘We have been partners.’

  It was an emotionally charged afternoon, reflective of our complex relationship. When I had started out with him as his media adviser, I had been a professional journalist who knew him well, but was not intimate with him. Mani Dixit was unquestionably the man closest to him in his PMO. But after Mani’s death, I had filled some of that vacuum. I had become the recipient of his confidences, asked to run confidential errands, and I had been by his side through the nuclear deal. My job had become a 24x7 obsession, somewhat to my wife’s ire; the only domestic chore I recall performing during that time was dropping my daughter to the bus stop every morning. Though we rarely spoke of it, I knew Dr Singh had defended me time and again when others in the Congress party had called for my dismissal. He may have been disappointed by my decision to leave but never showed it. Rather, he was understanding of my personal compulsions, like a family elder would be. It was a bond cemented by the ups and downs of an eventful tenure. Yet, I was touched and surprised to hear him openly say that we had been ‘partners’.

  After lunch, when I sought his permission to leave, he stepped forward and hugged me with both arms.

  ‘In Punjab it’s called a jhappi,’ said Montek as the two of us walked towards the car park.

  I went back to Delhi in late March to meet him after the elections were announced. Both Dr Singh, with his illness now behind him, and Mrs Kaur looked more relaxed than the last time I had seen them. We were seated in the living room at 3 RCR and the table, as always, had a few books on it that they would have been reading. The conversation, as always, began with ritual inquiries about my family.

  I suggested to him that now that elections had been called, he should contest a seat in the Lok Sabha. If the party returned to power, he would be PM again, but this time, I argued, he should be in the Lok Sabha. Even if the party lost, he would at least have the satisfaction of ending his political career by winning a seat in the House of the People. Ever since his defeat in the South Delhi constituency in 1999, which his family and friends suspected had partly been caused by int
ernal sabotage by Congressmen, this had been a touchy topic.

  Dr Singh did not react. Mrs Kaur smiled and looked at him quizzically. I persisted, suggesting that he contest from Assam and from Amritsar. He owed it to the people of Assam, the state he had represented in the Rajya Sabha since 1991, to contest from there, and he owed it to himself to contest from Amritsar, Mrs Kaur’s home town and the city closest to his heart. He would win in both places, I assured him, and he could then decide which seat to retain.

  ‘My health will not permit campaigning,’ he said, and added, ‘anyway it is for the party to decide.’

  I did not yield. I argued that he need not worry about campaigning. He could record a few DVDs and his campaign managers would take them around. If Mrs Kaur campaigned for him, that would be more than enough, I said to him. ‘Ma’am will be a huge draw both in Assam and Amritsar. The crowds will come to see her and she can easily address them and seek their votes on your behalf.’

  Both laughed. ‘Haan! Why not? I can address public meetings,’ she said, exuding confidence, and clearly liking the idea.

  I decided to strike while the iron was hot and went on. ‘Do not agree to continue as PM if they expect you to remain in the Rajya Sabha. Why should you leave it for the party to decide? Make this a condition. Insist that you want to contest in the Lok Sabha elections. In 2004, you were the accidental PM. In 2009, you have every right to return to office on the basis of your record. You have given the party five years of power. You have managed the coalition, handled the nuclear deal crisis. The economy has done well despite all the problems with the Left. You have saved it from a crisis.’

  I reminded Dr Singh that his party was asking for votes in his name and seeking a second term for him. ‘Let me warn you, Sir,’ I said, ‘if the Congress loses they will put the blame on you. They will say your policies cost them the victory. So, in case they win you should be able to claim the victory for yourself. Please contest the Lok Sabha elections.’