The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (12 page)

If that was the upside of Dr Singh’s long waking hours, the downside—for his media adviser—would be the occasional late night call when I was either at a party or sleeping. On one occasion, he called to tell me, ‘TV says Madhu Dandavate has passed away,’ referring to a veteran, retired socialist politician, and then added, ‘Please issue a condolence message right away.’

‘I do not know if he is an overrated economist, but I know he is an underrated politician!’

 

Digvijaya Singh on NDTV, 2012

 

A couple of years before Sonia Gandhi took charge of the Congress, the communist ideologue Mohit Sen wrote a persuasive column in the
Times
of
India
underlining the historic role Sonia would be called upon to play and urging her to do so. The first woman president of the Indian National Congress, he argued, was also a European woman, Annie Besant. The party, he stressed, should once again be led by another. When Mohit’s column landed on my table—I was then the editorial page editor of the
Times
of
India
—I was amused and surprised. Mohit was an ‘uncle’, a close friend of my father from their time together in Hyderabad, and the person from whom I received my first lessons in Marxism. I called Mohit and told him that his suggestion that Sonia should take charge of the Congress was an outlandish idea. As the political party of India’s freedom struggle, surely it had to have a future independent of the Nehru-Gandhi family? How could he suggest that Sonia become the party’s president merely because she was Rajiv’s widow? I told him people would laugh at him for his political naivete and suggested the column be junked. He was most offended and threatened to go elsewhere if I refused to publish his piece. Finally, I agreed to use it because of my affection and regard for him.

Mohit’s column was the first credible public call for Sonia’s induction into public life. Mohit had already drawn close to Sonia and he later also warmed towards Dr Singh. He had been a critic of Dr Singh’s economic policies in the early 1990s, but within the next decade came around to accepting the view that Dr Singh would make a good PM, though he saw nothing wrong in Sonia herself taking up that post. It was Dr Singh who released Mohit’s autobiography at the India International Centre. When Mohit died in 2003, Sonia’s condolence message referred to him as a ‘father figure’ in her life. After Mohit’s death, Dr Singh took on that role. Perhaps he was not precisely a ‘father figure’ to Sonia, but there was certainly something avuncular about his relationship with her.

I assumed that Mohit, as an Indira loyalist, had a special regard for her heirs. But his opinion that Sonia should enter politics was also based on his conviction that without a Nehru-Gandhi family member at the top, the Congress party would splinter and wither away. This view was also encouraged by members of the Delhi durbar—a ‘power elite’, to use sociologist C.Wright Mill’s term, comprising civil servants, diplomats, editors, intellectuals and business leaders who had worked with or been close to the regimes of Nehru, Indira and Rajiv. Some of them inhabited the many trusts and institutions that the Nehru-Gandhi family controlled. They had all profited in one way or another, over the years, from their loyalty to the Congress’s ‘first family’.

In opposition to this view was the one held by a Congressman like Narasimha Rao who, while ironically titling his semi-autobiographical book
The
Insider,
believed he was an ‘outsider’ among Delhi’s Nehru- Gandhi ‘power elite’. Rao believed that a political organization that was more than a century old, the party of India’s freedom movement, inspired and led by a Gandhi, a mahatma who was no relative of these Gandhis, ought to imagine for itself a life beyond the Nehru-Gandhi family. Many small regional parties might have become feudal, even despotic, ‘family-led’ parties, but how could a grand old political organization like the Indian National Congress link its future only to the fortunes of one political family? This view had few takers among family loyalists, who took charge of the party after the unceremonious ouster of Sitaram Kesari, the man Narasimha Rao chose as his successor and who in turn placed the party’s crown in Sonia’s hands.

When Sonia Gandhi decided to join active politics and take charge of the Congress party, becoming its president in 1998, few thought through how her elevation would affect the relationship between the party and a future Congress government. While her loyalists argued there was nothing to resolve here, since she would become prime minister, her detractors in the party said they were willing to accept her as party president but not as a future PM because of her Italian origin. It was this issue that led Sharad Pawar and others to exit the party in 1999 and form the NCP.

It was against this background that the arrangement that came into place in 2004 would be viewed and tested. Would Sonia really remain only party president and leave the government for Dr Singh to handle? Having led the Congress back to power, especially in the face of scepticism about her abilities to win an election and the open revolt of party warlords like Pawar, would she rest content allowing someone else to wield that power? What should Dr Singh’s strategy be? Should he assume that while Sonia was the leader of the Congress, he was the head of a coalition government, with non-Congress constituents, including a rebel like Pawar, and carve out his own political space and retain administrative control of government? Or should he be running every day to 10 Janpath, Sonia’s residence-cum-office, to take her instructions? Some chief ministers had done that with their party bosses. Jyoti Basu, in his early days as chief minister (CM) of West Bengal, had a daily meeting with his party boss Pramode Dasgupta at the party headquarters. Manohar Joshi, the Shiv Sena CM of Maharashtra, did the same with his party supremo Bal Thackeray.

Handling the delicate equation with Sonia was Dr Singh’s first and biggest political challenge. How a CM is perceived at the state level is different from the way a PM is perceived at the national and international levels. The prime minister is a national leader and the international face of a country. He negotiates with other heads of government and must be seen to be his own man. Moreover, Dr Singh was PM because the UPA coalition as a whole was willing to accept him. In 1999 Mulayam SinghYadav had refused to support Sonia when she claimed she had the numbers to form a government. So I, at any rate, saw my job as one of establishing Dr Singh’s credibility as PM, while ensuring that the relationship with Sonia and the party was on an even keel.

 

 

The first tricky situation presented itself in early August 2004. The PM’s SPG asked me if I would participate in the dress rehearsal for Dr Singh’s first Independence Day address from the ramparts of the Red Fort. This involved travelling in the PM’s motorcade from RCR to Red Fort, stopping to place imaginary wreaths at Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial at Rajghat and the memorials of members of the Nehru-Gandhi family, and then spending forty minutes on the ramparts of the fort, from where the PM would address the nation, before returning to RCR.

As I walked around the ramparts, accompanied by a defence ministry official, I curiously examined the name cards placed on chairs set out for guests at the event. The first seat in the first row, adjacent to the podium from where the PM would speak, was reserved for Mrs Kaur. After that, the seating was in accordance with the defence ministry’s protocol and order of precedence, as issued in the
Gazette
of
India,
which meant senior Cabinet ministers, leader of the Opposition, chief justice of the Supreme Court and other holders of high office. Sonia Gandhi’s name was nowhere to be found in the front row. When I asked the official where Sonia would be seated, he looked at the protocol list in his hand and pointed to a chair in the middle of the fourth or fifth row. She was to be seated next to Najma Heptullah, former Congresswoman and deputy chairperson of the Rajya Sabha, who had crossed floors and joined the BJP!

I was aghast. Such an arrangement would embarrass the PM and, I imagined, make Sonia livid. I then recalled noticing that Sonia was always seated in the front row at Rashtrapati Bhavan events, perhaps on the first seat along the aisle. I immediately called Muthu Kumar, an official in the PMO’s media department, and asked him to check with the President’s secretariat how it managed to seat Sonia in the front row when her status as an MP, albeit one who was also chairperson of the NAC with Cabinet rank, merited only a fourth- or fifth-row chair.

Muthu discovered that Rashtrapati Bhavan had made a minor alteration in the seating procedure during President Shankar Dayal Sharma’s time. Sharma, India’s President from 1992 to 1997, had authorized that the spouse of a former prime minister would get the same protocol status as a former PM. The reasoning was that if a former PM had been accompanied by his spouse at a Rashtrapati Bhavan event, the two would have been seated together. This issue had not arisen for previous prime ministers because Nehru, Indira, Morarji Desai and Narasimha Rao had all been pre-deceased by their spouses and the spouses of other deceased PMs were clearly not in the habit of attending state functions. Sonia was the first widowed spouse of a PM in public life.

This episode drew early attention to the purely protocol dimension of Sonia’s new status vis-a-vis the PM. While Sonia did have Cabinet rank as chairperson of the NAC, which was set up on 4 June 2004 shortly after UPA-1 assumed power, and was ‘entitled to the same salary, pay, allowances and other facilities to which a member of the Union Council of Ministers is entitled’, she had to be given a rank that put her next only to the PM and his wife and not further down the order of precedence.

While the protocol issues raised by Sonia’s status were new to the party president-prime minister equation, the relationship problem itself was neither new nor peculiar to India. Defining the relationship between party president (or general secretary in the case of communist parties) and the head of government has bedevilled many regimes around the world for a long time. In non-democratic systems like the erstwhile Soviet Union and contemporary China the protocol and division of real power between the communist party general secretary and the head of government is a complex issue. In democracies, it becomes even more complicated when the popularly elected head of government is different from the leader of the party in power.

In India the problem raised its head on day one. As the first post- Independence Congress party president, Acharya Kripalani demanded that he be taken into confidence on the policies of the government headed by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Nehru rejected this demand, taking the view that while the party could be briefed on broad policy issues, it would not be possible for ministers sworn to secrecy and holding constitutional office to share the contents of government files with the party president. Nehru invited Kripalani to join the government as a minister without portfolio and secure this entitlement, drawing a sharp distinction between party and government. Ministers, he argued, functioned under a constitutional oath and were subject to the Official Secrets Act. No minister, not even the prime minister, could show a file to someone outside the government, not even to the Congress president.

Kripalani did not accept Nehru’s view or his invitation to join the government, and quit as Congress president. Nehru then took over the party presidency in 1950, combining the two posts for the first time, and continued in this manner until 1954, when U.N. Dhebar became party president. While Indira Gandhi, who had served as party president in 1959, managed a working relationship with Congress presidents during her tenure as PM, including Kamaraj, Jagjivan Ram and Shankar Dayal Sharma, she took over as party president after her defeat in 1977 and retained that post when she returned to office as PM in 1980. Rajiv Gandhi followed suit, keeping the Congress presidency till his death in 1991.