Read Online The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh by Sanjaya Baru - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sanjaya Baru
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Vajpayee’s PMO with great aplomb. Even though he was a diplomat by training, Mishra, the son of a former Congress chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, had politics in his genes and knew exactly what stratagems to adopt to strengthen the authority of the PM in a coalition government. His other great qualification, one that both Nair and Pulok lacked, was that he was a risk-taker. On critical occasions, Mishra was willing to push the envelope and take things forward on behalf of the PM. He established that reputation by taking the decision, along with Vajpayee, to conduct nuclear tests in May 1998 and declare India a nuclear weapons state. Mishra’s stature consolidated and expanded Vajpayee’s clout within the government. Though he had belonged to the Indian Foreign Service (IFS), he was widely respected by the rival IAS. In the Manmohan PMO, on the other hand, Nair’s risk-averse personality only compounded Dr Singh’s careful approach and contributed to a further dilution of the PM’s authority.
The third Malayalee, M.K. Narayanan, claimed that he was offered the post of national security adviser by Sonia Gandhi, but had instead proposed Mani Dixit’s name for the job because he had to tend to his ailing mother, who lived in Chennai. He claimed it was he who drove to Mani’s home in Gurgaon to tell him he was being offered the job, and to urge him to take it. Mani, on the other hand, believed Sonia may have pushed for Narayanan but Dr Singh wanted him in the job and that Narayanan was inducted as a special adviser as a compromise.
I tended to believe Mani’s version. It was clear to me that Dr Singh shared a bond with him that was never there between him and Narayanan. It seemed plausible that the latter had been inducted as the third leg of PMO leadership as a concession to Sonia. MK, or Mike, as his contemporaries called him, was the intelligence czar who had headed the Intelligence Bureau (IB), India’s internal intelligence agency, under both Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao. He earned his spurs by playing a role in the unseating of the first-ever democratically elected communist party government in the world, E.M.S. Namboodiripad’s ministry in Kerala, way back in 1957. He was director, IB, when Rajiv was assassinated. Narayanan’s favourite line was, ‘I have a file on you.’ He used it, humorously, with ministers, officials, journalists and others he met, leaving them, however, with the uneasy feeling that he wasn’t really joking. Indeed, Narayanan himself gave currency to the tales that circulated about his proclivity to snoop on everyone. He seemed to derive great pleasure in letting me know that he kept a tab on the credit-card spending of influential editors. On long flights in the PM’s aircraft, he would regale us with stories about how various prime ministers had summoned him for information on their colleagues.
If those stories were true, Dr Singh was clearly the exception to that rule. He not only resisted this temptation to spy on his colleagues, but gave up even the opportunity to be offered such information by declining to take a daily briefing from the intelligence chiefs. He was the first prime minister not to do so. The chiefs of both the IB and the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) were told to report to the NSA instead. I didn’t think the intelligence chiefs would deliver their best if they reported to an intermediary instead of the prime minister himself, and repeatedly implored him to take a direct daily briefing from them. Every now and then he would, but the NSA became their effective boss in the UPA PMO.
Narayanan, when he succeeded Dixit as NSA, used this power to its limits, and not without controversy—he was accused by R&AW officers of being partial to the IB. But his control over the system also derived from his professional competence and the respect he commanded even from junior officers for his non-hierarchical style of functioning. He would deal directly with them, not
The third Malayalee, M.K. Narayanan, claimed that he was offered the post of national security adviser by Sonia Gandhi, but had instead proposed Mani Dixit’s name for the job because he had to tend to his ailing mother, who lived in Chennai. He claimed it was he who drove to Mani’s home in Gurgaon to tell him he was being offered the job, and to urge him to take it. Mani, on the other hand, believed Sonia may have pushed for Narayanan but Dr Singh wanted him in the job and that Narayanan was inducted as a special adviser as a compromise.
I tended to believe Mani’s version. It was clear to me that Dr Singh shared a bond with him that was never there between him and Narayanan. It seemed plausible that the latter had been inducted as the third leg of PMO leadership as a concession to Sonia. MK, or Mike, as his contemporaries called him, was the intelligence czar who had headed the Intelligence Bureau (IB), India’s internal intelligence agency, under both Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao. He earned his spurs by playing a role in the unseating of the first-ever democratically elected communist party government in the world, E.M.S. Namboodiripad’s ministry in Kerala, way back in 1957. He was director, IB, when Rajiv was assassinated. Narayanan’s favourite line was, ‘I have a file on you.’ He used it, humorously, with ministers, officials, journalists and others he met, leaving them, however, with the uneasy feeling that he wasn’t really joking. Indeed, Narayanan himself gave currency to the tales that circulated about his proclivity to snoop on everyone. He seemed to derive great pleasure in letting me know that he kept a tab on the credit-card spending of influential editors. On long flights in the PM’s aircraft, he would regale us with stories about how various prime ministers had summoned him for information on their colleagues.
If those stories were true, Dr Singh was clearly the exception to that rule. He not only resisted this temptation to spy on his colleagues, but gave up even the opportunity to be offered such information by declining to take a daily briefing from the intelligence chiefs. He was the first prime minister not to do so. The chiefs of both the IB and the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) were told to report to the NSA instead. I didn’t think the intelligence chiefs would deliver their best if they reported to an intermediary instead of the prime minister himself, and repeatedly implored him to take a direct daily briefing from them. Every now and then he would, but the NSA became their effective boss in the UPA PMO.
Narayanan, when he succeeded Dixit as NSA, used this power to its limits, and not without controversy—he was accused by R&AW officers of being partial to the IB. But his control over the system also derived from his professional competence and the respect he commanded even from junior officers for his non-hierarchical style of functioning. He would deal directly with them, not
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