The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (19 page)

All coalition PMs found their power limited by political compulsions, but none of them exercised as little power while taking on as much responsibility as Dr Singh. With the benefit of hindsight I would say that Dr Singh has to take some of the blame for this. If he had stuck to the dictum he quoted to me, ‘Never yield space’ and ensured that the PM and the PMO played their due role in decision-making, Cabinet formation and political communication, he may not have felt as disempowered as he came to be.

The politically fatal combination of responsibility without power and governance without authority meant that Dr Singh was unable, even when he was aware, of checking corruption in his ministry without disturbing the political arrangement over which he nominally presided. Political power resided with the heads of parties of the coalition and, as PM, he could not dismiss ministers at will. He could, perhaps, have done more to discipline his ministers. One way in which this could have been done would have been to appoint upright and effective officers as secretaries under corrupt ministers. Here too the PM often failed to assert his authority, appointing as secretary a person that the minister concerned preferred.

The consequence of all of this was to bring the PM into disrepute despite his own impressive record and reputation for personal probity and integrity. Still, I never imagined that charges of corruption of the kind that came to haunt him, in the manner they did, in years to come would so sully his reputation. For a long time the media was willing to give him the benefit of doubt on his role in questionable decisions by accepting the view that his lack of political authority prevented him from disciplining his wayward ministers. But when the issue of corruption took centre stage in public discourse, the question that was relentlessly asked was why had the PM not prevented what was going on. That he had ‘yielded so much space’ to other centres of power, so that he had little of his own to act, was not viewed as an adequate defence.

‘There is no foundation to the insinuation that there are two power centres. I am the prime minister.’

 

Manmohan Singh, first national press conference
4 September 2004

 

Manmohan Singh began his tenure with a problem. Even though many coalition prime ministers before him had come to that office as the result of a political compromise between various power brokers of different parties and factions, Dr Singh was the first one to be seen as being ‘nominated’ by one person. Moreover, while he was not the first PM to be a member of the Rajya Sabha at the time of taking office, he was certainly the first to not seek a Lok Sabha seat after being elected PM. While there was no legal impediment to remaining a prime minister indirectly elected to Parliament through its Upper House, the Rajya Sabha, most prime ministers were directly elected by ‘the people’ to the Lok Sabha, the House of the People, which is the normal practice in all parliamentary systems.

I assumed at first that Dr Singh saw an election to the Lok Sabha as a risky venture, given his experience of 1999. This time around the stakes were infinitely higher: he was not just a Congress leader, but a prime minister. So perhaps, I thought, it was a case of better safe than sorry. However, Dr Singh’s decision—or was it Sonia’s, I was never too sure—that the prime minister not contest in the General Elections of 2009 suggested, with hindsight, that it was not just risk-aversion that led Dr Singh to not seek re-election to Parliament through the Lok Sabha in 2004. This, I concluded, was to be the nature of the arrangement. In 2004 he was, without doubt, an ‘accidental prime minister’ and, it would appear, neither he nor Sonia wanted to alter the arrangement in UPA-2. In an early conversation with him, I asked if he was considering seeking a seat in the Lok Sabha and his answer was that it was for the party to decide. I never raised the question again in UPA-1, though I insistently advised him in early 2009 that he seek a Lok Sabha seat in the approaching General Elections. Regrettably, he did not take that advice.

Despite the obvious existence of two centres of power, I took the view that the office of the prime minister is sacrosanct in the Indian system of governance and there should be no doubt in people’s minds who the ‘leader’ of the ‘country’ was. Sonia was the leader of the Congress and had been designated chairperson of the UPA. However, I believed that as head of government Manmohan Singh was the coalition’s leader, and that is how I would project him to the public.

I had observed, as a journalist, how both Narasimha Rao and Vajpayee had asserted their authority as PM. One began as the head of a minority government and the other as the head of a coalition. Both had factions and coalition partners to contend with. Both knew the limits of their power. Yet, both managed to project themselves as prime ministers in their own right. They jealously guarded their turf. How was I to project this image of the PM without bringing him into the party’s line of fire? This was my challenge as Dr Singh’s ‘brand manager’.

UPA’s first Parliament session began on a rocky note. From the prime minister’s point of view, it was a sad note. For the first time in parliamentary history, a newly elected prime minister was neither allowed to introduce his council of ministers to Parliament nor given the privilege of replying to the debate on the motion of thanks to the President for his address to Parliament.

The very first session of a new Parliament was rudely disrupted in this manner because the main Opposition party, the BJP, was still not reconciled to its surprise defeat in the General Elections. It made an issue of the induction into the Union Cabinet of Shibu Soren, leader of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), and a few others who were facing criminal charges. When, on 10 June, the last day of the opening session of the new Parliament, Speaker Somnath Chatterjee invited the PM to speak, and the Opposition did not allow it, Dr Singh was disturbed. He was both angry and deeply unhappy that the BJP remained in denial about its defeat and was refusing to extend to the new PM the basic courtesy of letting him speak in Parliament. Finally, a most unsatisfactory compromise was arrived at by which the BJP agreed to allow the PM to seek the House’s approval of the motion of thanks. A visibly disturbed Dr Singh finally stood up and made his statement in a voice touched by sadness:

Mr Speaker Sir, I learn that there is an understanding among the political parties on both sides that the Motion of Thanks on the President’s Address be put to vote straightaway and passed unanimously. Therefore, Sir, I request you to put the Motion to vote. I take this opportunity to thank all the honourable Members of the Lok Sabha.

 

Dr Singh returned home upset at the turn of events. It was then decided that the statement he had intended to make in Parliament be read out as an address to the nation on television. Mani Dixit and I were asked to redraft it as an ‘Address to the Nation’. The template for the address was the NCMP. After listing the new government’s agenda, I added a paragraph that 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.’ It is a paragraph that many have pointed to over the years as the one that gave them great hope and the one agenda item on which the PM failed to deliver.

On foreign policy and national security, the address reaffirmed UPA’s commitment to the ‘no first use’ nuclear doctrine enunciated by the Vajpayee government, with the proviso that India would continue to work for universal nuclear disarmament. The speech also included an early hint that the UPA would continue the dialogue with the United States on removing barriers on high-technology trade. It was with this objective in mind, and in the context of India declaring itself a nuclear weapons power, that the Vajpayee government had started a dialogue with the US on Next Steps in Strategic Partnership. Dixit and the PM were clear in their minds that they would take this dialogue forward.

Once the draft was approved, I advised the PM to practise delivering the speech on television, using a teleprompter. This would not be like reading out a budget speech, I pointed out. There is an intimacy to a TV broadcast. He would be talking to families across the country sitting in their living rooms and bedrooms. Even the best public speaker could fail to connect with a TV audience if he did not understand the medium.

Dr Singh readily agreed to practice sessions. We installed a TV camera in 7 RCR and every afternoon, after his lunch and siesta, he would devote an hour to reading the speech out in front of the camera. At the end of the working day, before he went home to 3 RCR for dinner, I would play the recording back to show him the defects so that he could improve his style. His voice was far too soft and he did not have the debater’s knack for emphasizing important words. He would not pause after making an important point but move on to the next sentence.

Later, while preparing him for his address to the US Congress I had to indicate in the written text where he should expect applause from the audience and, therefore, pause before moving to the next sentence. Important sentences would be underlined so that he knew where to be more emphatic, though he rarely managed to be so. Whenever he recorded a TV interview or just a statement for telecast I would decide camera angles and also insist on re-recording if the PM made any mistake. Once the recording was done I would ensure that only the final approved version was available for telecast.

His first televised address to the nation required three days of practice and the speech was recorded on the morning of 24 June in the conference room at Panchavati, 7 RCR, and telecast that night. Next morning,
The
Hindu’s
lead story said: ‘Dr. Singh’s first public address was marked by an equanimous tone, thoughtful content, competent articulation and a tightly-written prose avoiding rhetorical flourishes, reflecting the Prime Minister’s own personality.’

The Hindi part of the speech was written in the Urdu script. Born and educated in western Punjab, now Pakistan, Dr Singh had never learnt to read Hindi. His mother tongue was Punjabi, written in the Gurmukhi script, while Urdu was his language of instruction at school. Dr Singh was not merely proficient in Urdu, he was also very well versed in Urdu literature and poetry.

Dr Singh deployed with skill his knowledge of Urdu poetry during his interventions in Parliament. He had a good repertory of appropriate quotes from such great poets as Ghalib, Faiz and Firaq. One of his favourite couplets, by the poet Muzaffar Razmi, which he quoted on more than one occasion, in Parliament and to Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, was: ‘
Ye
jabr
bhi
dekha
hai,
taareeq
ki
nazron
ne
/
Lamhon
ne
khata
ki
thi,
sadiyon
ne
saza
payi’
(Much injustice / has been seen in the saga of history / When for a mistake made in a moment we are punished for centuries).

Dr Singh’s Independence Day speech would always be written in Urdu, though some of his other Hindustani speeches were also written in Gurmukhi. While he would try from time to time to improve his delivery in public speaking and TV appearances, this never came naturally to him. Even a smile before TV cameras, a basic requirement for a politician, never came easily to him and I had to often get close to him, sometimes worrying the SPG guards, standing just a step away, to whisper in his ear, ‘Smile’.

When the PM had to appear on TV to condemn a terror attack or express his grief I would insist he not read from a prepared text and speak to the camera. Over time he had become adept at reading from a teleprompter, but he never evolved into a good public speaker, either at large gatherings or on television.