Singh was never King

Crusader or conspirator?

Author: PC Parakh

Publisher: Manas Publications, Rs 595

The Accidental Prime Minister

Author: Sanjaya Baru

Publisher: Penguin, Rs 599

Two devastating accounts, one by PC Parakh and the other by Sanjaya Baru, have hit where it hurts Manmohan Singh and his party high command the most: The failure of the Prime Minister to assert his authority when it was most needed and the interference in governance by party president Sonia Gandhi, writes RAJESH SINGH

When the Congress won the 2009 Lok Sabha election with incumbent Prime Minister Manmohan Singh at the helm, the slogan which caught the country’s fancy was: “Singh is King”. It was modelled on the name of a popular but sub-standard Hindi film that had been recently released. Nevertheless, it reflected the mood of the time, and there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that Mr Singh was the man of the hour.

That seems ages ago. Today, as the Prime Minister prepares to take a bow after a controversial second term in office marred by gross leadership failure and a slew of corruption scandals, “Singh is wimp” would appear to be a more appropriate line. One month before he quits office, the reputation of the Prime Minister, his office and the Congress leadership has been blown to smithereens by revelations in two books, one penned by his former Media Adviser Sanjaya Baru and another by former Union Coal Secretary PC Parakh. The books have hit where it hurts Mr Singh and his party command the most: The failure of the Prime Minister to assert his authority when it was needed the most, and the interference in governance by party president Sonia Gandhi. Together, the two developments led not just to the ruination of Mr Singh’s carefully-crafted personal image but to the reiteration of the belief that a dual power centre had flourished — which eventually turned into a single power centre with Ms Gandhi in command and the Prime Minister as the titular head of the Government.

Both the Prime Minister’s Office and senior Congress leaders have been trying to douse the fire ever since the exposures came out. They have adopted a dual strategy: One to discredit the authors; and two, to question the motives and timing of the release of the books. The problem with this approach is that nobody, barring certain vested interests in and outside the regime, takes it seriously. Whatever the intentions of the authors and whatever the reasons behind the timing of the release may be, they do not dilute the arguments which the books make. It is the message which needs to be addressed, not the messenger or the date and time of his arrival with the message.

Baru’s The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh, and Parakh’s Crusader or Conspirator? Coalgate and Other Truths, are different accounts of different issues. But they cover common ground when it comes to the supine conduct of the Prime Minister on contentious matters and the questionable role that the Prime Minister’s Office and certain Union Ministers played in the course of reducing governance to a joke and the Prime Minister to a figure of ridicule. And, as all that happened, the Congress high command either looked the other way or collaborated surreptitiously in the effort to undermine Mr Singh’s authority.

Neither of the authors has much nice things to say about certain officials of the PMO, who, they claim, either did not rise to the occasion or were incapable of doing so. Baru observes, “even with its combined strength, I felt that the (TKA) Nair-Pulok (Chatterjee) duo was not a patch on the magisterial Brajesh Mishra who ran (Atal Bihari) Vajpayee’s PMO with great aplomb”. He adds that MK Narayanan got included as a special adviser on the insistence of Sonia Gandhi, after the Prime Minister picked JN Dixit as the National Security Adviser. That, perhaps, was among the first cases where the Congress President had, if indirectly, intervened in what was the Prime Minister’s domain. More were to come in the months ahead. As the former Media Adviser notes in the book, “For Dr Singh, managing the coalition (Government) was less challenging than managing his own party.”

Parakh is equally blunt in his account. Devoting an entire chapter to the shenanigans of the PMO on the issue of bringing transparency in the allocation of coal blocks and generally revamping the functioning of the Coal Ministry, he says that the PMO, along with Ministers concerned with the portfolio, continued to stall the process of open bidding. The PMO kept asking for revised proposals from the Coal Secretary in a clear attempt to torpedo the idea. The Prime Minister remained a silent observer. He writes, “…I concluded that there was no political will to proceed with the bidding route and the proposal had been put in the cold storage… If political will existed, an amendment could have been brought about by issuing an ordinance.”

It is interesting that both Mr Parakh and Mr Baru have a soft corner for the Prime Minister, and the sentiment is reflected on more than one occasion in their books. And yet, the two authors have been ruthless in exposing Mr Singh’s colossal failure to stand up when needed, establish his authority as the country’s Prime Minister and send across the message to his colleagues that, as Ministers, they owed accountability to him and not to their party boss. Baru offers many instances of this failure. He writes: “The creation of the NAC (National Advisory Council) in June 2004 was the first overt sign to me that Sonia’s ‘renunciation’ of power was more of a political tactic…” He adds that “while power was delegated, authority was not.” Singh either failed to read that first overt sign or decided to keep his counsel.

The former Media Adviser virtually says that the Prime Minister never received the kind of recognition which he ought to have in his position from senior Ministers such as Arjun Singh and AK Antony, who believed they owed their loyalty to Ms Gandhi. The Congress ‘core group’, of which many of these seniors were members, and which was led by Ms Gandhi, eventually became the “de facto Cabinet Committee on Political Affairs”.  As if this was not enough humiliation for the Prime Minister, Baru says that Pranab Mukherjee as the External Affairs Minister was rarely prompt in briefing the Prime Minister after returning from an official trip abroad, but that he lost no time in briefing Ms Gandhi.

All this and more must have led Singh to go into a state of despair. Baru writes of an occasion in 2007, when speculation was rife that under pressure from the Left, the Congress would replace Singh as the Prime Minister. “I found him seated alone in the living room of 7RCR, looking grim… ‘I cannot go on like this’, he remarked, as his eyes became moist. I felt he was holding back tears.”

But the Prime Minister did go on, being hobbled and humiliated all along, and that is what the jury (history) will take into account when it passes a verdict on his performance. (The people will, of course, do so sooner.) After all, as Baru observes on the situation that developed after the party returned to power in 2009, “Bit by bit, in the space of a few weeks, he was defanged. He thought he could induct the ministers he wanted into the team. Sonia nipped that hope in the bud by offering the finance portfolio to Pranab (Mukherjee), without even consulting him.”

Singh’s meekness, regardless of the efforts that his sympathisers are making to pass it off as his ‘goodness’, has not only destroyed his credibility but it has also led to several wrong policy-decisions or costly indecisions. We have already seen above how the Prime Minister had no effective control over many of his Ministers. But even when he had directly handed the Coal Ministry from mid-2004 onwards, the Prime Minister could not exercise his say. Parakh affirms in his book that Singh was keen on reforms and transparency but that he had little political will or authority to do so, and that led to the massive coal block scam of `1.86 lakh crore. The games that the Minister of State for Coal, the PMO and vested interests elsewhere played eventually succeeded.

Thus, as the Coal Minister himself and as the Prime Minister with a Coal Minister reporting to him, Singh could not push for the reforms that he had backed Parakh for. The Prime Minister could do nothing about Shibu Soren when the latter was the Coal Minister or about the junior Coal Minister Dasari Narayana Rao, who, according to the author, worked in tandem with other players to scuttle reforms such as open bidding of the blocks. It serves to reiterate the point Baru has made in his book that the Prime Minister had lost complete control over his Government and that many key policies were decided outside his area of influence.

In the dispensation of the Sonia Gandhi-led Congress, the meek may be blessed and can inherit the prime ministership. However, they also inherit much more, which would be unpalatable to a self-respecting individual.

The reviewer is the Opinion Editor of The Pioneer