The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (6 page)

In 1999, when the Congress party picked Dr Singh as the candidate for the south Delhi Lok Sabha constituency, I joined the Friends of Manmohan group set up by Isher Ahluwalia, G.S. Bhalla and other academics to campaign door to door for him. My daughter and I would walk around our neighbourhood distributing pamphlets. Sadly, Dr Singh lost that election by close to 30,000 votes to the BJP’s Vijay Kumar Malhotra, a considerably less distinguished political personality. His views on the massacre of some 3000 Sikhs in Delhi by Congress party activists and goons after Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984 became a subject of controversy. While he condemned the killings unequivocally, the fact that he blamed both the Congress and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) for them did not go down well with either. Nor was this argument appreciated by Sikh voters.

Delhi’s Sikh community had, in fact, been grateful to the RSS for protecting Sikh families from the wrath of mobs attacking them, often led by local Congressmen. Their anger was reserved wholly for the Congress. The Congress, on the other hand, was also upset with Dr Singh’s stance because it had pretended all along that the killing of Sikhs after Indira’s assassination was a spontaneous expression of popular anger rather than an organized pogrom. In attempting to take a principled position on the massacre without frontally attacking his own party, Dr Singh ended up satisfying nobody.

But Dr Singh’s family and close friends were convinced that his defeat was in part due to internal sabotage and blamed the local leaders of the Congress party for doing little to get him elected. Perhaps some Congressmen had already suspected by then that Sonia was grooming Dr Singh as a future head of government and hoped to nip this plan in the bud. In any event, the campaign, run mainly by his friends, did not succeed, and the race was lost. Dr Singh was never to contest another Lok Sabha election, preferring to enter Parliament through a less turbulent route, the Rajya Sabha. The Delhi defeat left a scar on the family’s memory. While Dr Singh never discussed this with me, his family members did, on several occasions, refer to this episode as an experience that left them with the bitter taste of betrayal.

 

 

Despite the fact that I got to know Dr Singh well over the years, he continued to remain an enigma. A man of few words, he almost never engaged in conversation of a private or intimate nature. While he found it easier to ‘talk shop’—policy or current affairs—he was rarely animated. When I began to work for him, I would often see him sitting quietly, even awkwardly, with visitors and betraying very little emotion. He had no gift for small talk. When obliged to interact with relatives during a visit to Kolkata or Amritsar, or with old friends in Geneva, it seemed Dr Singh did not quite know what to say to them, and it was left to Mrs Kaur to keep the conversation going. Amusingly, even with fellow economists who were his friends, like Jagdish Bhagwati or I.G. Patel, he would be happy to let them do most of the talking.

In a moment of frankness, Dr Singh narrated a typical tale of his diffidence to Mark Tully, the legendary BBC correspondent in India. When Tully interviewed him for
Cam,
the Cambridge University alumni magazine, Dr Singh told him that as a student at St John’s College he would get up early in the morning before his fellow students to finish bathing because he felt shy about going into the common bathing rooms with his turban off and his hair tied up. Since hot water was not available at that hour, Dr Singh chose to bathe in cold water, justifying this to his friends on health grounds, as a way of fighting the common cold.

His shyness, however, often made him appear lacking in warmth and emotion. Successful politicians are Janus-faced. They know when to be withdrawn and cold, and when to be warm and expressive. The wilier among them make the switch between these two personas in a flash. Dr Singh was not capable of such swift transformations. He may well have learnt the art of disarming his critics, but he could never create the illusion of intimacy that journalists crave in their interactions with the powerful. Worse, he seemed to find it hard to be genuinely expressive. I always wondered how much of this ‘shyness’ was a defence mechanism acquired during a difficult childhood when, after his mother’s death, he had to live with an uncle’s family because his father was rarely at home. Since his uncle and aunt had their own children to take care of, the young Manmohan was left to his own devices. Dr Singh had happy memories of his student and teaching life in Amritsar but I noticed that he rarely spoke about his childhood in Gah.

Working with him in the PMO, I discovered his introverted nature extended to his family as well. His daughters would say that they did not know their father’s mind on many issues because he kept his work and family life in two separate, largely watertight, compartments and rarely gave expression to his thoughts, his desires or frustrations when at home. As Mrs Kaur once put it to me, ‘He swallows everything, doesn’t spit anything out.’

At work, he spoke even less than at home. His public silences, for which the media would often chastise him, were only an extension of his private ones. In formal meetings with visiting heads of government, he had a prepared brief that he often memorized like a good student and followed. In Cabinet and official meetings, he became notorious for his silences. He would mostly listen and then say a few words, if he wished to offer a view. Mostly, however, his style was to allow everyone to have their say and then take a decision on file, rather than stating his own views explicitly. He was happy if he could provoke his interlocutors into talking so that he could himself sit back and listen. But he would ask questions, and those questions sometimes revealed his mind.

Over time, as he became bolder as PM, he devised a new strategy. If he agreed with the views of a person in a meeting, he would give that person more time to speak, while cutting short those whose views he did not share. Sometimes, he would ask a person to speak, knowing full well what his views were and that these were not shared by many around the table. That was a signal to others to fall in line. While he adopted all these strategies, he himself rarely spoke in an assertive manner. Over time, his silences and his overt shyness seemed to be more strategy than the habits they had probably been, to begin with.

When I entered the PMO, I was aware of Manmohan Singh’s shyness and knew that in order to be a successful media adviser communicating on his behalf to the media, I would have to improvise. It would be easy to be his ‘eyes and ears’, which is what he wanted me to be when I joined the PMO. The tough part would be to be his ‘voice’.

‘I want you to be my eyes and ears.

 

Tell me what you think I should know,

 

without fear or favour.’

 

Manmohan Singh, 30 May 2004

 

I went to meet Dr Singh on Monday at the prime minister’s sprawling official residence, 7 Race Course Road—7 RCR as it is popularly called—at the edge of Lutyens’ Delhi and bordering diplomatic enclave. After Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, the security around the PM’s official residence has become so elaborate that entering it is quite an ordeal. The Special Protection Group (SPG), an elite security unit protecting the PM, which was created in 1985 after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, allows in only such visitors whose names have been provided to them by the personal secretary to the PM. After driving through the first gate of the outer compound, visitors alight near the second gate. Only ministers, authorized officials and foreign dignitaries are allowed to drive through the second gate, and get into SPG vehicles that will take them a couple of hundred yards down the road to the PMO. Those less privileged must first walk into a visitors’ room, deposit their mobile phones and be screened by security. Only then are they ferried by the SPG in its fleet of Maruti cars to the Prime Minister’s Office.

Having done the ride, I was ushered straight in to meet Dr Singh. He was in the chair on the right side of the room on which PMs usually sit when they meet visitors, and welcomed me with a smile. I walked up and sat on a chair placed to his left.

‘I was not prepared for this role,’ he confessed. ‘This is a new experience and it will not be easy. We are a minority government. The Left has only agreed to support us from the outside. The Congress party has never run a coalition government. I will have to make a success of it. I need a press secretary. I know you, so I would be happy if you agreed to work here. I know it will mean a financial loss for you, but you will have to view this as an opportunity to serve the nation.’

I told him Vohra had already briefed me about his impending offer and, without further ado, accepted his invitation to work for him. Our conversation turned to matters of rank and nomenclature. I pointed out that two persons had handled the media in the PMO of the previous prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and both were called ‘officer on special duty’—OSD in bureaucratic parlance. However, when other editors had taken up the same assignment in the past, they had been called information advisers to the PM. I would prefer to be called media adviser, I said, explaining that with the advent of news television the word ‘media’ had replaced ‘press’, and ‘information’ sounded archaic. He agreed.

Finally I asked him what he expected of me. He reflected for a moment, then said, ‘Sitting here, I know I will be isolated from the outside world. I want you to be my eyes and ears. Tell me what you think I should know, without fear or favour.’

Those words remained embedded in my mind and every time I hesitated to convey an inconvenient truth or an embarrassing tale over those four years with him, I would recall them and feel emboldened. Even after leaving the PMO, I used the privilege bestowed on me by those words to tell him, impartially, what I felt he ought to know.

I told Dr Singh that Sharada Prasad, Indira Gandhi’s widely respected information adviser, was a family friend and that I would meet him and seek his guidance. He agreed. ‘Yes, Sharada is a good man. You should keep in touch with him and take his advice.’

Anxious to get his team in place quickly, he insisted I join immediately since the new Parliament was scheduled to convene that week. I agreed to begin work two days later.

Strangely, on a day when my life took a new turn, Rama was in distant Canada and Tanvika in Hyderabad. I had no one at home to go to. So I first called my parents to give them the news, and then Shekhar Gupta, CEO of the Express group, to which the
Financial
Express
belonged. Shekhar was attending a conference in Istanbul and was understandably dismayed at the prospect of my immediate exit. Yet he graciously said he would keep my chair at
FE
vacant since it was unlikely this new coalition experiment with the Left would work.

‘It is a thankless job, boss!’ he warned me. ‘This government will not last its term. You will be unemployed in a year’s time.’

Shekhar stuck to his promise of keeping the editor’s chair warm for me for nearly six months, before deciding that the Manmohan Singh government would last longer than many had imagined and that he needed a full-time editor to run the paper.

By Monday evening, the orders were issued and the news was splashed across TV screens. My life changed instantly and my mobile phone never ceased to ring.