Manmohan Singh, Sonia Gandhi

The UPA-Left relationship isn’t the only dynamic put to test by the Indo-US nuclear deal; there’s another, probably more critical, bond whose endurance is at stake as brinkmanship returns to centre-stage in New Delhi: the Sonia-Manmohan two-legged act that has pulled along these past years despite the doomsayers, despite all manner of strain from within and without.

CPM general secretary Prakash Karat flung a dare as sharp as he could today at the duo: do the deal and we undo our support. It’s not just the UPA government he may have challenged; in the process he may be subjecting the ruling diarchy to its toughest probe.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is bent on the deal, a plume he is loath to be robbed of. He has adorned it with all manner of superlatives — epochal, historic, the best thing that could happen to the country’s future. For him, personally, it would be a copyrighted claim for generations — the man who took India across the rubicon and into the big league of nations.

His boss, Sonia Gandhi, is evidently trapped in a long moment of indecision — the deal’s good, she avers, defying her Left allies, but is it good enough to risk bitterness with allies and what many believe to be mistimed polls? An even tougher question: what’s worth sacrificing a Prime Minister she’s only had reason to admire and laud these past years?

At his anticlimactic anointment in the summer of 2004, Manmohan became king of a surrogate kingdom. A leader sans followers, an authority sans authority, personal or political, a baffled innocence cast into the perilous jungle of coalitions lodged in an even more perilous quagmire called the Congress. In a creed that puts premium on power at the expense of all else, Manmohan stood among the few never noticed lusting after the Chair.

Could such a man make a good Prime Minister? Did he have what it takes to handle power? Nobody knew. Manmohan was a man of qualities but not quite those he would need to take him through this unlikely late-life ride.

The Prime Minister’s office is no dressing room of virtues. Vice, quite often, as Machiavelli reminded us long ago, is an essential virtue of rulers. The art of manipulation and manoeuvring. The temper to manage contradictions. The sagacity to employ faith and to employ suspicion. The talent to marry firmness with flexibility. Sleight of hand. Glibness of tongue.

The courage, most of all, to run against the tide, which can only come from innate sense of authority. Which the man enjoyed only by proxy. He was, as he himself said, an “inadequate substitute” to Sonia, a man who enjoyed no rights over his ability to assert. Could such a man run the most powerful, and tricky, office of the country? Nobody knew.

The pitfalls were obvious and many. At the best of times, the prime ministership of India is a crown ridden with thorns. A huge country, a myriad contradictions, a million problems and no easy solutions.

And with a new government, there were newer, higher expectations. Coalitions can be unruly beasts, the Congress can be a snakepit. The stable Manmohan came from was known for its refinements, not for the art of seeing through a rough ride.

There were those who thought Manmohan would be a weakling and a dummy owing to his lack of a personal political base, a Prime Minister without clout liable to be manipulated by allies from within the government and overshadowed by Sonia from without.

Here’s where Sonia stepped into the new prime ministership. She, in fact, has been as much part of the story of Manmohan’s prime ministership as the Prime Minister himself, as much the hand trying to craft and keep in place a new code of governance necessitated by her high-moral renunciation of executive power.

The template of the role she’s set herself is embedded in her decision to give up the prime ministership when it was hers for the taking. She’s there to guide and assist the man she picked as Prime Minister, not to undermine or override him. Through much of the UPA’s stint in power, a near-tantalising balance between the head of government and the head of party has been on show, with no hint of public discord, much to the chagrin of Manmohan’s adversaries within and outside the party.

Sonia has succeeded in not appearing overbearing, Manmohan has succeeded in projecting himself as a businesslike Prime Minister who isn’t obliged to display sycophancy.

“To be fair to the party leader,” said a Congressman, “Sonia has not demanded that of Manmohan Singh. She picked him to be Prime Minister because she holds him in high regard and is letting him do the job she has assigned him — govern, while she takes care of political management.”

Contrary to the established house-style of the Congress, Sonia does not expect the Prime Minister to be rushing to her with every decision he needs to make. His presence is seldom demanded at 10 Janpath. She may give court conspirators a patient hearing, but she has kept her own counsel as far as her chosen Prime Minister is concerned, giving him no room or reason to feel insecure about being upstaged by internal intrigue. On the contrary, she has been his assurance against them.

Meetings of the UPA are held at the Prime Minister’s 7 Race Course Road residence (as are the regular Friday confabulations between the two).

From what one insider said, there is “no sense that the Prime Minister is having to labour under an overbearing party boss. There is seldom any hint the party is trying to interfere in day-to-day governance. The Prime Minister gets his political inputs from the party leader, but that is how it should be. A lot of the attrition on economic policy between the government and the Left, for instance, is personally ironed out by Sonia Gandhi who is in everyday touch with senior CPM and CPI leaders.”

As one Congress leader said: “Sonia Gandhi trusts Manmohan Singh completely and Manmohan Singh draws all his political clout from her. Once he draws the line, everybody knows Sonia Gandhi is in agreement. So dissent does not get out of hand.”

For his part, Manmohan has forged on like a man of innocent convictions — do the right thing, keep it simple, make work its own virtue. The rest, leave to God or to Sonia.

He was firm on not acquiring Satish Sharma, courtling of the Gandhis, as cabinet colleague. She didn’t push. He took the decision to sack the Shibu Soren government running against party managers. Sonia stood by him.

He went against the party and had the course reversed in Goa in 2005. She stood by him.

He decided to allow full FDI in telecommunications in the face of stiff resistance from senior cabinet colleagues who were widely believed to be lobbying for domestic players. Sonia stood by him.

He put the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus on the fast track despite objections from the ministry of external affairs. Sonia stood by him.

He took controversial foreign policy decisions — the nuke pact with Washington and the Iran vote — and earned the wrath of Left allies. Sonia backed him. He wanted Natwar Singh out after the scam taint. Sonia backed him.

Manmohan has his just critics, especially when it comes to economic policy and outlook. He is the eager globaliser in a country that might require other, more urgent, remedies. He was slow to move and slower to give on the Employment Guarantee Act, for instance. But there, Sonia was able to push him. And he gave.

Diarchies have a way of falling apart, or in between. But this one has been more a tandem, less a diarchy. It is the trust Sonia unstintedly reposes in him that has contributed hugely to Manmohan getting more comfortable and authoritative in office as he has gone along.

But then, it is equally true that Manmohan is one of those rare people in politics who evoke trust. Not many do, in that neck of the woods.

There are those who take a slightly detached and positive view of recent events. Social scientist Yogendra Yadav of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), for one, believes the division of labour between the administrative (Manmohan and his PMO) and the political (Sonia and the Congress) is principally a good idea to work on.

“Splitting political functions on these lines can actually be healthy. A lot of people choose to see mess in what has happened in recent weeks. I would like to remark on the fact that the mess has also been corrected. The Prime Minister actually undid moves or decisions for which there was no or little public legitimacy. This shows there is a new sensitivity to what is right and what is wrong. This would not have happened in Mrs (Indira) Gandhi’s days. If only this division can be institutionalised, it could be a good thing,” Yadav said.

Hard-boiled Congressmen may differ and fault Manmohan for not being able to “create an impact” as Prime Minister. “It is the country’s most powerful political office and in a democracy, it needs to project itself as one to the people,” said one. “Manmohan Singh has not become a Prime Minister who seems like his own man, has not been able to create a connect with the masses, he has remained a technocrat; that’s not the kind of Prime Minister people are used to.”

But that’s an image trap. Manmohan hasn’t been sent there to be his own man. He knows that better than most. He is there as nominee of the dowager-turned-political saint, whose authority he will exercise.

The moment he becomes his “own man” too much, he loses his USP; the Congress is packed with men and women more experienced and more adept at the art of politics and politicking than Manmohan. But in Sonia’s Congress that’s no qualification — that’s precisely the reason they didn’t make the grade and Manmohan did.

Political management problems for Dr Singh? But that’s not been his task or headache. The Congress has had to reconcile to the hope — and reality — that what the nominee cannot manage, or isn’t meant to, the great nominator will. Like the protracted tussle with the Left on the nuclear deal.

When an interview the Prime Minister gave to The Telegraph last August sparked off what looked like an endgame between the UPA and the Left, the Sonia-Manmohan compact ensured the crisis didn’t gallop ahead of them.

This time, the row over the nuclear deal has reached a flashpoint, it’s put that compact to test again. But if mid- 2007 was too early to go for polls, mid-2008 may be too late to change Prime Ministers. Manmohan gave in then, it’s probably Sonia’s turn to hold the tandem.