The Accidental Prime Minister

318 Pages·2014·0.75 MB·English

by  R Ajith Kumar

THE ACCIDENTAL PRIME MINISTER

THE ACCIDENTAL
PRIME MINISTER
THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF
M A N M O H A N S I N G H
S A N J A Y A B A R U
VIKING
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First published in Viking by Penguin Books India 2014
Copyright © Sanjaya Baru 2014
All rights reserved
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as
reported by him which have been verifi ed to the extent possible, and the publishers are not
in any way liable for the same.
ISBN 9780670086740
Typeset in Bembo by R. Ajith Kumar, New Delhi
Printed at Thomson Press India Ltd, New Delhi
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be
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be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or
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prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above-mentioned publisher
of this book.
In memory of my mentors
H.Y. Sharada Prasad
and
K. Subrahmanyam

Contents
Introduction The Book I Chose to Write ix
1 The Call from PMO 1
2 Getting to Know Dr Singh 12
3 Manmohan’s PMO 29
4 Managing the Coalition 62
5 Responsibility without Power 90
6 Brand Manmohan 105
7 Manmohan’s Camelot 127
8 ‘Promises to Keep’ 138
9 The Manmohan Singh Doctrine 160
10 Making Borders Irrelevant 178
11 Ending Nuclear Apartheid 198
12 Singh Is King 235
13 A Victory Denied 256
Epilogue Manmohan’s Legacy 271
Acknowledgements 287
Index 289

Introduction
The Book I Chose to Write
None of my predecessors in the Prime Minister’s Offi ce (PMO) has
ever written a full account of his time there. Editors, some far more
distinguished than I, who served various prime ministers as media
advisers, such as Kuldip Nayar, B.G. Verghese, Prem Shankar Jha and
H.K. Dua, did not do so, nor did offi cials who performed those duties,
such as G. Parthasarathy, Ram Mohan Rao and P.V.R.K. Prasad. Parts of
Nayar’s and Verghese’s memoirs do, of course, cover that period of their
careers, and Prasad has written a series of columns in the Telugu press
on his tenure in South Block, but no one has devoted an entire book
to his years at the PMO, refl ecting on his boss’s personality and policies.
This reticence is peculiar to India. In both the United States and
Britain, several press secretaries to Presidents and prime ministers
respectively, have written freely about their jobs and their bosses.
In India, my most distinguished and longest-serving predecessor,
H.Y. Sharada Prasad, set a very different tone. An unfailingly discreet
and low-profi le man, he was Indira Gandhi’s information adviser,
speech-writer and confi dant for almost all her sixteen years as prime
minister, yet had to be coaxed, over several years, before he agreed to
write a few newspaper columns about his time at the PMO.
I fi rst met the legendary Sharada Prasad in 1981 when he was at
the height of his career, serving an all-powerful Indira Gandhi who
had been re-elected prime minister in 1980 with a landslide vote after
being rejected in the General Elections of 1977. I was visiting Delhi
ix
x Introduction
a few weeks after my marriage and my wife, Rama, was keen that I
should meet family friend ‘Shourie mama’, as she had addressed him
since her childhood, and his wife, Kamalamma. I met Kamalamma
at their home near Delhi’s verdant Lodi Gardens, but Sharada Prasad
himself was hard to meet, simply because he was never home. Finally,
we met in his offi ce.
One could then still enter the PMO through its main gate facing
Rashtrapati Bhavan and walk up the grand staircase, instead of
entering, as visitors now do, by a modest and inelegant side entrance.
So I climbed those stairs, and met him in the same room that I would
come to occupy more than two decades later. It was four times larger
than the editor’s room in the various newspaper offi ces in which I had
worked, and faced the imposing west wing of North Block, home of
the ministry of fi nance.
I spent a few minutes with Sharada Prasad, noting how humble
and low profi le a man he appeared in this imperial setting. Since I
was, for him, Rama’s husband and nothing more, the conversation,
naturally, centred around Rama and her parents. I was too overawed by
my surroundings to say much. I met him again only after I moved to
Delhi to join the Economic Times (ET ) in 1990, when he came home
for our daughter’s fi rst birthday party. In 1993, after I moved from ET
to the Times of India, I invited him to write a column for the paper.
He declined, saying he did not feel like commenting on contemporary
issues. Undeterred, I asked him, repeatedly, to write about his time in
the PMO, but he always had the same cryptic reply: ‘I do not know
everything that happened in the PMO. Not only do I not know all
sides of the truth, I do not even know how many sides the truth has.’
Finally, in the late 1990s, he began writing a column for the Asian
Age about his time with Indira Gandhi. He then put these columns
together into a collection titled The Book That I Won’t Be Writing and
Other Essays. ‘Putting it all down,’ wrote Sharada Prasad, commenting
on why those once in power write memoirs, ‘is a substitute for the
authority they once commanded by virtue of their position but now
miss.’ He then went on to explain why he resisted this temptation.
‘Suppose you have no urge to project yourself or play the justifi er of