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Graphic: M. Iqbal Shaikh
Dr Singh's three key aides in the PMO happened to be, by mere happenstance, Malayalees and all Nairs to boot: J.N. 'Mani' Dixit, the new national security adviser (NSA), T.K.A. Nair, the prime minister's principal secretary, and M.K. Narayanan, the special adviser for internal security.
Mani Dixit was, without doubt, the dominant personality among the three. His stature ensured that T.K.A. Nair was not quite the 'principal' secretary that many of his predecessors had been.
Nair was not Dr Singh's first choice for the all-important post of principal secretary. He had hoped to induct N.N. Vohra, a fellow refugee from west Punjab. Both had taught in Punjab University and (both) went to Oxford. (Sonia Gandhi had another retired IAS officer in mind for the job. However, he declined Sonia's invitation to rejoin the government.)...
Nair's name was strongly backed by a friend of Dr Singh's family, Rashpal Malhotra, chairman of the Chandigarh-based Centre for Research on Rural and Industrial Development (CRRID). Dr Singh himself was the chairman of the CRRID and Nair a member of its governing board.
Apart from his stint in the Gujral PMO, Nair had neither held the rank of secretary in any of the powerful ministries on home, finance and defence — in short, he was a bureaucratic lightweight. He rarely gave expression to a clear or bold opinion on file, always signing off with a 'please discuss' and preferring to give oral instructions to junior officials such as joint secretaries and deputy secretaries. They would then be required to put those instructions on file as their own advice. It was classic bureaucratic risk aversion aimed at never getting into any controversy or trouble.
Nair depended a great deal on Pulok Chatterjee, a joint secretary who had worked with both Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia, for advice on important policy decisions. Pulok, like Nair, suffered from the handicap that his own service had never regarded him as one of its bright sparks. A serving IAS officer, he had never worked in any important ministry. He was inducted into Rajiv's PMO as a deputy secretary after having served as a district official in Amethi.
Pulok, who was inducted into the Manmohan Singh PMO at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, had regular, almost daily, meetings with Sonia at which he was said to brief her on the key policy issues of the day and seek her instructions on important files to be cleared by the PM.
Indeed, Pulok was the single most important point of regular contact between the PM and Sonia. He was also the PMO's main point of contact with the National Advisory Council (NAC), a high-profile advisory body chaired by Sonia Gandhi, with social activists as members. It was sometimes dubbed the Shadow Cabinet.
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Power people: Manmohan Singh
When not at these meetings, the affable, pipe-smoking, and understated Pulok remained mostly confined to his room in South Block, rarely travelling outside Delhi. During my time in the PMO, the only occasion on which I found him keen on accompanying the PM was when Dr Singh went to Cuba. With leftist leanings, Pulok was never too enthusiastic about Dr Singh's focus on improving relations with the US. Whenever Dr Singh and Sonia had to speak from the same platform, Pulok and I would exchange their draft speeches so that they remained in step in their public utterances.
Apart from teaming up with Pulok, Nair also sought to make himself politically relevant to the PM by projecting himself as the PM's link with the Left. He had been a member of the CPI(M)'s Students Federation of India (SFI) during his college days in Kerala. He revived these ties by becoming close to the senior CPI(M) leader Harkishan Singh Surjeet, who hailed from Punjab, Nair's parent state in the IAS.
Proximity to Surjeet served Nair well, earning him a place in Gujral's PMO. Apart from being fellow Punjabis, Gujral and Surjeet were close friends. During his second stint in the PMO, Nair was able to use his association with Surjeet and with CPI(M) leaders from Kerala, especially S.R. Pillai, a member of the CPI(M) politburo, to help Dr Singh manage the Left.
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Sonia Gandhi
Even with its combined strength, I felt that the Nair-Pulok duo was not a patch on the magisterial Brajesh Mishra who ran 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...
My nickname for him, while talking to friends, was 'Ed', for J. Edgar Hoover, the powerful boss of the FBI of whom even US presidents were wary. Dr Singh too was wary of Narayanan's reputation and would, on occasion, warn me to be cautious while carrying out sensitive assignments for him that he did not want anyone to know about.
Mani Dixit entered the NSA's office as if he were destined for the job. Of the three seniormost officers in the PMO, he was clearly the PM's favourite. The two shared a common worldview, acquired during their respective stints in Narasimha Rao's government. More recently, as fellow members of the Congress party, Dr Singh and he had worked together to draft a foreign policy paper for the party for the new 'post-Cold War world'. Mani was both an 'ideas man' and a boss who expected delivery from subordinates...
Mani was, without doubt, one of India's finest diplomats and strategists. Subrahmanyam, India's pre-eminent strategic affairs guru, once said to me that he was probably the best foreign secretary in post-Nehruvian India. He made his mark early, and was chosen by Indira Gandhi for the challenging assignment of setting up the Indian mission in a newly liberated Bangladesh when he was just thirty-five years old. As Dr Singh's NSA, Mani swiftly picked up every issue that Mishra had been dealing with and sought to take it forward — dialogue with the US, dubbed the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership, with Pervez Musharraf on Pakistan and the border talks with China.
By the time Dr Singh went to New York in September 2004, Mani's progress on several foreign policy fronts enabled Dr Singh to have very good meetings with President George Bush and President Musharraf as well as a series of bilateral meetings with Blair, Koizumi, Mbeki, Lula and others. But Mani's assertive personality meant that, while he was admired and feared by his younger colleagues in the foreign service, he often rubbed both the new foreign minister, K. Natwar Singh, and Narayanan the wrong way.
Between Narayanan and Mani, there was both a clash of personalities and sharp differences of opinion. Mani was a pragmatist and a realist, Narayanan a hawk whose aggression was both a product of his years in intelligence and a means, it appeared to me, of asserting his authority over the foreign service. In India's bureaucratic pecking order, officers of the Indian Police Service (IPS) are regarded as lesser mortals by the high-flyers of the foreign service, the IFS, and the real wielders of power, the IAS.
Mani and Narayanan, just two years apart in age, would often explode into angry arguments in the presence of the PM. On one occasion, Narayanan shouted at Mani: 'You are a diplomat who knows a lot about the world but knows nothing about India.' Mani countered by asking Narayanan what he thought he knew about the country, considering he had never done 'a good police officer's job'.
This was a reference to the fact that Narayanan, while belonging to the IPS, had spent most of his career in the IB and had never done any important 'field' job. These outbursts were partly a reflection of a turf war between the two, with Narayanan seeking greater control over the intelligence agencies than Mani wanted him to have.
Dr Singh would sit through such altercations with a worried look. But on one occasion, it got a bit too much for even a man as patient as him. While Mani and Narayanan were arguing vociferously in his presence, each accusing the other of overstepping his bounds, Dr Singh at first kept quiet, then got up abruptly, looking visibly irritated. That was a signal that the meeting was over and we could all leave. Nair, Mani and MK trooped out, while I walked with the PM to the antechamber where he read his files and letters.
He seemed disturbed by this sharp exchange in his presence, so I tried to cheer him up. I pointed out that it was good that different points of view were being aired.
Singhspeak
'Sitting here, I know I will be isolated from the outside world. I want you to be my eyes and ears. Tell me what you think I should know, without fear or favour.'
To Baru, asking him to join his PMO
'And do what?'
On being urged to spend his Sunday in Goa after the end of official work on Saturday
'But, comrades, I am told that the FTA (free trade agreement) would benefit farmers in the fraternal, socialist Republic of Vietnam.'
To Left leaders opposing the FTA
'This is not correct. You cannot report like this.'
To Prannoy Roy, the head of NDTV, about a report that Natwar Singh was going to be dropped from the Cabinet
'I am the Prime Minister.'
When Baru asked him if a particular proposal had Sonia Gandhi's approval
Dramatis personae
M.K. Narayanan, now governor of West Bengal, 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. MK, or Mike, as his contemporaries called him, was the intelligence czar who had headed the Intelligence Bureau (IB) 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, in 1957. 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.
J.N. 'Mani' Dixit, the national security adviser. The PM and he shared a common worldview, acquired during their respective stints in Narasimha Rao's government. More recently, as fellow members of the Congress party, Dr Singh and he had worked together to draft a foreign policy paper for the party for the new 'post-Cold War world'. But Mani often rubbed both the new foreign minister, K. Natwar Singh, and Narayanan the wrong way. Mani and Narayanan, just two years apart in age, would often explode into angry arguments in the presence of the PM.
T.K.A. Nair, the Prime Minister's principal secretary, was overshadowed by Dixit. Nair (left) had not held the rank of secretary in any of the powerful ministries, home, finance and defence. He projected himself as the PM's link with the Left.
Pulok Chatterjee, a joint secretary who had worked with both Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia, was inducted into Rajiv's PMO as a deputy secretary after having served as a district official in Amethi. Brought to the Manmohan Singh PMO at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, he had regular meetings with Sonia at which he was said to brief her on the key policy issues of the day and seek her instructions on important files to be cleared by the PM.
Turf wars
Singh vs Sonia Gandhi: The two had a good working equation. But he was deeply disappointed when Gandhi said in an interview that the survival of the government took precedence over the nuclear deal (which was opposed by the Left parties). 'She has let me down,' he said.
Dixit vs Singh: Former foreign secretary Mani Dixit and foreign minister K. Natwar Singh often clashed. Singh believed that Dixit interfered in foreign policy.
Patil vs Narayanan: The media speculated on conflicts between home minister Shivraj Patil and M.K. Narayanan, a former IB man.
Baru vs Dixit: Though the author and Dixit got along well, the NSA was bothered that Baru often briefed the media on the PM's views on foreign affairs.
