The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (18 page)

When I briefed him he burst out angrily, ‘Tell Prannoy to stop reporting these lies.’

I called Prannoy Roy, the head of NDTV, and had just begun speaking to him when the PM asked for my mobile phone and spoke to Prannoy himself, scolding him like he was chiding a student who had erred, saying, ‘This is not correct. You cannot report like this.’ Indeed, the relationship between him and Prannoy was not that of a prime minister and a senior media editor but more like that of a former boss and a one-time junior. This was because Prannoy had worked as an economic adviser in the ministry of finance under Dr Singh. After a few minutes, Prannoy called me back.

‘Are you still with him?’ he asked.

I stepped out of the room and told him that I was now alone.

‘Boy, I have not been scolded like that since school! He sounded like a headmaster, not a prime minister,’ complained Prannoy.

After the meeting with his aides was over, Dr Singh called Natwar and inquired about his health and let him know that he looked forward to meeting him on his return.

I could see why Dr Singh was livid with Prannoy and gentle with Natwar. By then, he had Natwar on his side and his support was needed for the major initiative he was about to launch in the summer of 2005 with the US, and he could not afford a sulking foreign minister. When Natwar did get involved in the controversy generated by a United Nations commission report on entities that had profited from Iraq’s oil-for-food programme during Saddam Hussein’s time, Dr Singh did seek Natwar’s immediate resignation but responded, many thought, leniently to Natwar’s request that he be allowed to remain in office till the charges had been verified. Finally, when Natwar did leave, Dr Singh retained the external affairs portfolio, signalling the importance he attached to keeping the foreign affairs portfolio under his control.

Natwar came in handy in dealing with the tricky issue of India’s vote at the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) against Iran’s nuclear programme. The IAEA vote on Iran’s nuclear programme became a political hot potato. The US wanted India to prove its non- proliferation credentials by supporting its stance. It was also the view of all the signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), of which India was not a signatory, that Iran stand by its NPT commitments. In itself this was a simple demand. However, in India anti-US elements projected it as a surrender of sovereignty to the US, and an act which would displease a friend, Iran, and Shia Muslims in India. Given the political sensitivity around what ought to have been a routine vote, Dr Singh wanted all his senior colleagues, including Sonia, on board.

Natwar called the PM from New York one night saying the Indian ambassador at the IAEA was awaiting instructions on how to vote. Dr Singh was in Chandigarh and chose to keep his opinion to himself. He instructed Natwar to find out what other members of the CSS felt. Natwar then called Pranab, Chidambaram and Shivraj Patil and all three suggested that India should vote along with other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Finally, Natwar called Sonia and ensured she was also on board. Natwar then called the PM back and reported this. Dr Singh asked him what he himself felt. Natwar said he agreed with the others. ‘Then do so accordingly,’ was the PM’s instruction.

Even while working with the PM on this issue, Natwar wanted to keep his non-aligned, left-of-centre credentials intact, and therefore tried to give the impression to the media that he was not really on board. A story appeared in the
Asian
Age,
under Seema Mustafa’s byline, that it was the PM who had instructed Natwar, against the latter’s wishes, to vote against Iran. I had to write a letter to the editor protesting against this distortion of facts. When the letter did not appear in print the next day, I issued a press release to all media. Taking a public stand on such matters helped. It put ministers on notice that if they briefed the press wrongly, the PMO would not hesitate to state facts as they were, even if this embarrassed the minister concerned.

In defending Dr Singh’s policies I found myself getting into many such arguments with Congressmen. Once on a flight with the PM on an Air Force aircraft, Mani Shankar Aiyar was holding forth on the problems of the nuclear deal. Aiyar was not a supporter and had even said to some journalists that if the PM threatened to resign on the issue he should be allowed to go. On this flight he was openly critical of the US and said he was a proud communist who would rather have the old Soviet Union back than befriend the US.

I had to tell the outspoken Congressman that if he were a minister in Stalin’s Cabinet then the official who would have been my equivalent, Stalin’s media adviser, would simply have opened the door of the aircraft and pushed him out. I reminded him that he felt secure criticizing the PM on the PM’s official aircraft because Dr Singh was a gentleman, not a dictator, nor a party boss!

This, indeed, was at once Dr Singh’s strength and weakness. His soft touch and his unwillingness to confront and discipline his detractors in the party encouraged many of them to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. On the other hand, his willingness to give them political space despite their mischief and worse disarmed them and often made them look foolish.

Dr Singh rarely chided his ministers. His strategy was to simply do other people’s work when they were not doing it themselves. If he was not happy with Shivraj Patil’s handling of internal security, he would rather step in and do the home minister’s job himself than reprimand him. On one occasion, after a terrorist attack the PM summoned a meeting to get himself briefed. The home secretary and IB chief reached 7 RCR in good time but Patil was delayed. We quipped that he must be changing his clothes. Instead of waiting for Patil to arrive, the PM insisted that the meeting begin. If he was unhappy about the way Kamal Nath was handling trade talks at the World Trade Organization, he would summon the commerce secretary and instruct him on how to handle a particular issue, rather than seek ways to win Nath over. Stepping in to do a minister’s job for them was his characteristic way of expressing displeasure at the minister’s work, but it wasn’t necessarily an effective one.

I would only find out what Dr Singh really thought of a minister when I sat down with him to discuss ideas for a Cabinet reshuffle. When I would suggest a minister’s name for a better portfolio or an elevation in rank he would, every now and then, say what he felt about the person. Sometimes, he would just make a face that conveyed disapproval. Over time, I realized that there were few members of his council of ministers that he truly valued as administrative assets. His constant refrain was that there was a paucity of administrative talent in the Congress and among the allies.

Whenever a reshuffle was being considered, Dr Singh would ask for lists of MPs, their resumes and any other relevant information. He would also like to be kept informed on changes in power equations in the states to understand the political weight of ministers belonging to different states and caste groups. Several people in the PMO, including Narayanan, Nair, Subbu and myself, would be asked for such information. His grasp of caste and social dynamics was good but not as sound as that of a regular politician. On occasion I would take a senior editor from an Indian-language publication from one or another state to him, and request him to brief the PM on local politics.

 

 

Much could have been done to improve governance and to make the PMO the instrument of governance reform, had Dr Singh had political authority or was willing to invest more effort. In June 2004, in his very first address to the nation, he had said, ‘No objective in this development agenda can be met if we do not reform the instrument in our hand with which we have to work, namely the government and public institutions. Clearly, this will be my main concern and challenge in the days to come.’ Failure to act on this assurance remained a major weakness of UPA-1.

Some initiatives were taken, like declaring 21 April as Civil Services Day, with the PM giving away awards to the best civil servants, who were identified through a nationwide effort. But there was no attempt to undertake major administrative reform. An administrative reforms committee, headed by Veerappa Moily, produced many voluminous reports but there was very little follow-up.

In the context of growing concern about the inadequacies of Indian diplomacy, I had suggested the PM constitute a high-level committee on the reform and modernization of the foreign service. He liked the idea but was not sure if he could secure the desired result without the active cooperation of the foreign minister. And he was never sure that Natwar, or Pranab after him, would go along with the kind of reforms he may have had in mind.

Ostensibly, the most important governance reform was supposed to be the Right to Information (RTI) Act that aimed to impose greater accountability on the government. It was an NAC initiative. Several senior and retired civil servants cautioned Dr Singh against the RTI, worrying that rather than expose corruption and sloth in government, it would sap initiative and encourage officers to pass the buck.

The jury is still out on whether or not RTI was a wise move and what its impact on governance has been. Has it made the government more transparent and accountable or has it made civil servants risk averse and unwilling to take difficult decisions? In UPA-1, when there was considerable euphoria over the RTI Act, few would have imagined that analysts would hold the RTI Act responsible for at least some of the so-called ‘policy paralysis’ that UPA-2 came to be charged with.

In the PMO, some officials shared my unfashionable scepticism about the efficacy of the RTI Act but Sonia was so committed to this initiative that no one seriously resisted it. I was not convinced that transparency, in terms of public access to internal government communication, was a necessary condition to making the government more responsive to people’s needs, and to good governance. By this token, few organizations, including most NGOs and the media as an institution, were ‘transparent’ even though they were more ‘responsive’. The glare of public scrutiny would not scare corrupt and inefficient officers, who would always find new means of playing old tricks, but it would certainly discourage honest officers from stating in writing views that might later be used to question their motives. I felt Dr Singh was sympathetic to my view though he never explicitly said so.

 

 

At the heart of the governance reform failure lay the weakening of the PMO. Dr Singh’s deliberately low-profile style was compounded by the relative inexperience of Principal Secretary Nair, who lacked the confidence of some of his distinguished predecessors, and had not been able to build up the kind of networks they had developed. Despite these weaknesses, and its limited political power and influence within government, internally, the PMO functioned efficiently. Pulok and his assistant Amit Agarwal listed every promise made in the NCMP and created a spreadsheet on which responsibilities were assigned to individual ministries. The PMO would seek a status report from each ministry from time to time and report back to the PM. This was the first time such a review system was devised and systematically implemented.

The sense of purpose this regular monitoring imparted to the PMO team was palpable, but it also meant that Dr Singh would himself chair long meetings to review the NCMP, getting into too much micro- management. Moreover, monitoring what others were doing was one thing, getting others to do what the PM wanted, quite another.

At the time I did not realize how the limits to the PM’s political authority and the PMO’s institutional weakness in fact meant that there was very little control of the PM and his office over the misdemeanours of ministers. Whenever I heard a tale about ministerial corruption that was credible enough to bear repeating, I would relate this to Dr Singh. He would always listen with attention. Most of the tales related to ministers belonging to parties that were allies in the coalition, but a good many also related to Congress ministers. It was clear that Dr Singh wanted to know what was happening. I assumed this information would help the PM to remain alert, especially when signing files, and that he would perhaps pull up the minister concerned.