12 April 2014, 01:52 PM IST
Manmohan Singh's former media advisor Sanjaya Baru's tell-all account of his days at the PMO does utmost disservice to the one person the author purports to champion: the good Dr Singh himself. The book even robs him of credit for Dr Singh's foremost act of political brilliance, one which elicited the celebratory headline, 'Singh is King' when it was made public: tying up support from the Samajwadi Party when the Left walked out of the UPA's support base in a huff over the Indo-US nuclear deal. The book gives the impression that a convalescing Amar Singh took the initiative for this move from his hospital bed in the US.
The timing of the book, coming as it does while crucial elections to the Lok Sabha are underway, rather than any of its contents per se, does damage to the Prime Minister and his political party, the Congress. Therefore, it helps the BJP and its prime ministerial nominee, Narendra Modi. One party will see the book as a stab in the back, the other will, one hopes for Baru's sake, count it as a service rendered. But then, Baru will be the first one to appreciate the Bhagawat Gita dictum that one has control only over one's actions, never over their consequences. After all, Baru chose to name his column Sanjayovacha (meaning, Said Sanjaya), in conscious allusion to the Gita, in which Sanjaya faithfully recounts the happenings on the Mahabharata battlefield to the blind king, Dhritarashtra.
What, ultimately, is the theme of the book? It says Dr Singh was never in full charge of the government, that the real centre of power was Sonia Gandhi. The details of how Pulok Chatterjee functioned, how senior Congressmen inside and outside the council of ministers conducted themselves, how Dr Singh's own personal choice for a particular appointment was overruled, etc only flesh out this thesis.
And the thesis is one hundred per cent right. What is not is the implicit assumption that Sonia Gandhi should not have played the role she did, that Dr Singh should have run the government as if he were the leader of the political party that the people of India had given their mandate to govern.
Delegated authority is the essence of Dr Singh's prime ministership. The popular leader answerable to the people for the quality of governance is the leader of the ruling party — Congress president Sonia Gandhi. She herself did not become prime minister because of a particular political circumstance. Her foreign origin would have added to the schism and acrimony that already marred the polity after six years of NDA rule. She chose to avoid that incremental dose of disharmony and chose someone else for the office of the PM.
Gandhi was neither making a personal sacrifice nor reeling before the terrifying prospect of seeing a shaven Sushma Swaraj ride a donkey wearing sackcloth and ashes, something the leader of the Opposition had threatened to do, should the foreigner become prime minister. Gandhi was doing what was good for the country, choosing not to make the polity more fraught than it was.
In choosing Dr Singh, Gandhi presumably had two considerations. One, he would have the ability to exercise his delegated authority well, vis-a-vis running the government of this complex nation. Two, he would have the integrity to not exercise his authority to transcend the limits of delegation and build a power base of his own. He should, in other words, be ready to pass on the mantle to the Gandhi scion when he was ready.
On both counts, Dr Singh proved the right choice. Of course, this was not an easy task for Dr Singh. He had to bear the slings and arrows of his outrageous colleagues, each convinced he was more deserving than Singh to hold the august office and smarting that Sonia had overlooked his claim. Honest Dr Singh had to put up with the dishonest ways in which Indian politics is funded — almost exclusively by the proceeds of corruption in the case of all major parties save the Aam Aadmi Party. He had to put up with the bullying tactics of allies and coalition partners. He had to subjugate his own ego, put up with the humiliation of so much compromise so as to serve the larger goal of making the first coalition government headed by the Congress at the Centre complete its term. He did all this, including blackmailing his party into backing the nuclear deal.
In the process, India has transformed as a nation, globalising, growing, urbanising, shifting labour from low-productivity farming to higher productivity industry and services and creating the basis for financial inclusion via Aadhaar and a comprehensive skill-development institutional infrastructure.
But Manmohan Singh failed on one major count. He failed to speak up for his government's policy on the allocation of spectrum, when the Comptroller and Auditor General came up with its ridiculous charge that the First-come-first-served policy for grant of licences with bundled spectrum had robbed the exchequer of Rs 176,000 crore. The policy of keeping spectrum costs low was absolutely sound and led to phenomenal growth and spread of cheap telecom across India. What was flawed was Raja's method of implementing the policy: he ended up creating a priority list of his own choice regardless of the chronology of when applicants came knocking. Despite being in a position to understand this, and to explain that faster telecom spread had contributed to faster economic growth and superior tax collections — something not factored in by the CAG while estimating loss to the exchequer — the PM contributed to the degeneration, in public perception, of one of mankind's greatest successes with adoption of mass communications into just a scam.
Similarly, the PM's taciturn approach to both other scam allegations and sterling achievements of his government in social development and infrastructure expansion has contributed to the notion that the UPA government's tenure was a lost decade for India.
We have no real insight into the actual relations between Manmohan Singh and party chief Sonia Gandhi, except for their public conduct vis-a-vis each other. What we have seen is extreme courtesy on both sides. Gandhi has backed Singh on every controversy, except the one on tainted politicians, in which Rahul Gandhi behaved like an immature schoolboy throwing a tantrum. Singh has thanked Sonia on every occasion, except for his farewell speech in the Lok Sabha, when he thanked Sharad Pawar, Shinde and Sushma Swaraj but omitted Sonia Gandhi's name.
On this intriguing omission, of course, Baru has nothing to offer. What he does describe are the details of delegated authority at work on predictable lines, without reference to how such delegated authority came about and whether it was good for the nation or not.
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