The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (11 page)

He picked up the phone and asked his PS to get Nair on the line. That evening Narayanan’s appointment was announced. Next morning, as I made my way to my designated seat at the Republic Day parade on Rajpath, I could see many service officers lift a hand smartly to salute the new NSA. Narayanan was in his steel-grey bandhgala. Smart, bright and happy. He took every salute given to him, then walked across the carpet and busily shook hands with several Cabinet ministers.

I was never sure if Dr Singh’s final decision to appoint Narayanan was his alone or jointly taken with Sonia or was in fact Sonia’s. An incident three days later made me believe that Narayanan himself may have felt he owed his job to Sonia. At the Beating Retreat ceremony at Vijay Chowk on Rajpath, I found myself seated just behind Narayanan. He suddenly stood up and walked straight to the very front where Sonia Gandhi sat. Standing in front of her, in full view of the Cabinet, senior officials and diplomats, and the thousands gathered around Vijay Chowk, he chose to publicly display, it seemed, his gratitude to her. Bending forward a bit, he brought his hands together and did a respectful namaste!

 

 

Narayanan’s appointment did not alter Nair’s status. While Mani’s intellectual and administrative prowess gave him a stature that Nair never had, Narayanan’s long record as the Congress party’s favourite intelligence czar and his impressive control over the IB ensured that he too stood taller than the principal secretary. If Mani was the cynosure of all eyes within the IFS, Narayanan enjoyed the same kind of reverence within the IPS. Nair never had that stature within the IAS. He sought to build a constituency for himself both by burnishing his leftist credentials and by reaching out to fellow Malayalees within the civil service. The one field in which he enjoyed some professional standing was within the public sector, from his time as secretary of the public enterprises selection board. He was a strong advocate of the public sector and remained loyal to the cause of strengthening state-owned enterprises. Apart from using his equation with Pulok to bolster his position, Nair also benefitted from having the assistance of some very competent joint secretaries in the PMO: Sanjay Mitra, an IAS officer of the West Bengal cadre, who had served as Jyoti Basu’s secretary; R. Gopalakrishnan, who had served as Digvijaya Singh’s secretary in the chief minister’s office in Madhya Pradesh and was also related to the Kerala communist leader, the late E.M.S. Namboodiripad; and Vini Mahajan, a Malayalee from the Punjab cadre, like Nair. They were all very capable officers and constituted the administrative bulwark of the PMO.

A key member of Manmohan’s team in UPA-1 was his private secretary, B.VR. Subrahmanyam or Subbu, as we called him. Narayanan paid Subbu and me the highest compliment a Malayalee possibly could when he once said to us, ‘I always thought Tamil Brahmins were the cleverest chaps, but you Telugu Brahmins have proved to be cleverer!’ Subbu was a 1987-batch officer of the IAS, originally from the Madhya Pradesh cadre, and then assigned to Chhattisgarh. As a highly talented officer with good academic credentials and a keen understanding of politics, he proved an invaluable asset for Dr Singh in UPA-1. Subbu’s personal interest in astrology meant that he became the resident PMO expert for fixing dates and times for the PM’s important engagements.

While Subbu’s astrological guidance never determined the PM’s dates of travel or the timing of his major official appointments, he did manage to convince Dr Singh to adhere to his advice on ‘auspicious’ dates and times when it came to certain personal decisions like the date of an operation or the filing of his nomination for re-election to the Rajya Sabha and the family’s moving into 3 RCR, the private, residential part of the official residence, after its renovation.

However, it was the PM, never much of a believer in astrology, who had the last laugh. In 2007, when his government appeared particularly wobbly with the CPI(M) issuing its first threat to withdraw support to it, some political reporters from the Hindi media informed me that BJP leader L.K. Advani was offering prayers and conducting a havan to ensure the ouster of the Singh government. I reported this story to the PM. He burst out laughing, something he rarely did. ‘He will never succeed,’ he said emphatically, ‘if his priests are going by my official date of birth!’

Dr Singh’s date and time of birth in the village of Gah was never recorded. With his mother dead and his father away at the time, Dr Singh was admitted to school by his grandmother who gave whatever date came to her mind. That date, 26 September, has since become his official birth date. Hindu astrology, however, is based on the time and date of birth, which also determines the birth star of an individual. At the time of offering prayers in a temple or conducting an auspicious ceremony like a wedding or a havan, Hindu priests ask the person concerned for his birth star and subsequent incantations refer to it.

Clearly, Advani’s prayers for Dr Singh’s ouster went unheeded because the basic data used was incorrect! However, in a political environment where astrology was not irrelevant, Dr Singh was no doubt fortunate to have on his staff a religiously orthodox and learned person like Subbu, who knew his Vedas, Shastras and astrology well. Very quickly Subbu and I became a team and worked in tandem.

The PM’s second PS, Vikram Doraiswamy, from the foreign service, was a bright and energetic officer, but a stickler for protocol, like most diplomats. Subbu and he were an effective pair and played an important role in ensuring that the Manmohan PMO worked efficiently and smoothly. While Vikram had the good fortune of having to deal with the talented Mani Dixit, Subbu had to compensate on many occasions for the foibles and shortcomings of Nair. Subbu left the PMO around the same time that I did, but Dr Singh continued to be well served by the very competent and reliable successors, Jaideep Sarkar and Indu Chaturvedi.

Officials come and go but the one person who has remained by Dr Singh’s side through his entire tenure is Muralidharan, Dr Singh’s ‘Man Friday’ and his personal assistant. Dr Singh inherited Murali from Murali’s previous boss, the Kerala MP M.M. Jacob, when he became leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha. Murali was a member of the Congress party in Kerala and had a good understanding of the way the party functioned. Murali was never far away from the PM, in the office and at home. In the best tradition of Malayalee personal assistants, who form a formidable network across sarkari Delhi, he was a remarkably effective, efficient and loyal assistant, who knew when to get everyone out of a room to ensure the PM ate his lunch, took his insulin shot or got some rest. Murali never misused his access and extended unquestioned loyalty to Dr Singh. He was a good judge of the PM’s moods and was able to lighten the boss’s burden whenever he felt Dr Singh was tired or angry. Murali remained my direct link to the PM long after I left the PMO.

 

 

The prime ministerial compound that went by the name 7 RCR actually contained five addresses, 1,3,5,7 and 9 RCR. While 1 was a helipad and 9 was the home of the SPG, 3, 5 and 7 RCR were more or less identical bungalows with the large lawns common to all ministerial homes in Lutyens’ Delhi. All the three bungalows were linked through a path that cut through the walls separating one from the other. All movement within this enclosed space was closely monitored by the SPG. Dr Singh’s family members and Sonia Gandhi, also an SPG protectee, were exempted from the security drill of alighting near 9 RCR and being driven by the SPG to the other bungalows. They had the privilege of driving straight in in their SPG-protected vehicles, as did heads of government calling upon the prime minister.

It was 7 RCR that housed the PMO, with a small set of half a dozen officers staffing his personal section, responsible for all the appointments and correspondence of the PM. 7 RCR was also the venue for meeting official visitors, including foreign dignitaries. During Vajpayee’s time a conference room, Panchavati, had also been constructed. Next door, at 5 RCR, there was a small reception room for secretarial staff whom the PM could summon at odd hours from his home. 3 RCR was where the prime minister and his family lived.

Returning to government after eight years in the Opposition benches, Dr Singh took his job seriously. He rose early and, after a morning walk, exercise and a light breakfast, usually walked down from 3 RCR to 7 RCR between quarter to nine and nine o’clock. For those who had worked in the Vajpayee PMO, this was all very new. Vajpayee had slowed down towards the end of his term and his working day would begin late and end early. Dr Singh worked from nine in the morning to nine in the evening, with an hour’s siesta after lunch.

Meals were frugal, mostly vegetarian, with some fish occasionally, and chapatti rather than paratha, with Mrs Kaur strictly monitoring what the PM ate, and when. At 7 RCR, the staff had inherited a snacks menu from Vajpayee’s time that included samosas and kachoris. When the news reached Mrs Kaur that Dr Singh had been biting into a samosa or two during meetings, she had the samosa replaced by the healthier dhokla. Dr Singh’s standard energy source at work was tea with Marie biscuits. Before Dr Singh’s very first breakfast meeting with editors, Vikram Doraiswamy asked the PM what he should order for breakfast and was told ‘the usual’. Having worked in the Vajpayee PMO where ‘the usual’ was a sumptuous meal, Vikram ordered a full English breakfast with cereal, fruits and eggs as well as a hearty south Indian breakfast of idli, dosa and upma. The editors had barely tucked into their first course of a three-course breakfast when Dr Singh finished his fruit and toast and ordered tea. I had to nudge my friends from the media to continue eating and not feel restrained by Dr Singh’s frugality.

A PM working from South Block was also a new routine in the PMO. Vajpayee worked mostly from 7 RCR. Dr Singh, on the other hand, normally worked in the morning in South Block, went home for lunch at half past one and returned either to 7 RCR or South Block by four, and worked till dinnertime. At South Block, the prime minister’s large, high-ceilinged room had windows to the south that always remained closed and a private anteroom with a door behind the PM’s chair, covered by a wooden panel. Though an unpretentiously furnished room, with just a bare table and sofas for visitors, its teak walls would have heard the voice of every PM this country has had. His working space at 7 RCR, in the prime ministerial compound, was used only from Rajiv Gandhi’s time. It was less grand than his office at South Block, but with lawns and peacocks to gaze at, had a prettier view.

Dr Singh followed the routine that he set for himself day after day, and year after year. He never took a vacation, apart from a few snatched hours between meetings and the departure of his plane, when he was abroad. He would use that time to be with family or just read a book. Once, in May 2006, he was scheduled to go to Goa to inaugurate the new campus of the Birla Institute of Technology and Sciences. It was a Saturday and the plan was for him to land in Goa in the morning, and return to Delhi by evening. I suggested to his daughter, Daman, that we spend Saturday night in Goa and return on Sunday evening. She didn’t think her father would agree. What would justify an extra day in Goa when there was no work? I decided to try my luck and suggested the plan to him.

‘Why?’ he asked me. I said this would allow his entourage to spend Saturday night and Sunday morning on the beach.

‘And do what?’ he asked, vetoing the idea.

The media loved writing about Dr Singh’s frugal lifestyle and long working days, comparing them with Vajpayee’s more leisurely style of functioning, and I was happy to feed them such stories. But Dr Singh’s ‘early to rise and late to sleep’ schedule had its pluses and minuses. On the plus side, his habit of tuning in to the BBC early in the morning helped the Government of India respond with alacrity to the tsunami in December 2004. Long before any disaster management, national security or intelligence agency woke up to alert government agencies, the PM was up and heard the news of the tsunami. On that morning, our phone first rang with a call from Rama’s father in Chennai, who had gone to the beach for his early morning walk and returned after finding the water level to be unusually high. Immediately after that came the call from Subbu, prompted by Dr Singh who had heard the news on the BBC and was contacting one official after another. Woken up by the PM, Cabinet Secretary B.K. Chaturvedi then summoned a meeting of the crisis management team.