When Morarji Desai became the PM in 1977, he partially rolled back the ‘powers’ of the PMS, which had acquired the status of a ‘super cabinet’, ‘mini government’, etc. He began by changing its nomenclature to Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), which was intended to downgrade its status. The interference of the PMO in the different ministries was minimized. The importance of the cabinet was substantively restored, and its decisions were largely unanimous; the PM had become, once again, the first among equals. The system of ‘joint responsibility’ and ‘prior cabinet clearance’ was made functional.
However, the PMO remained an office that was begun by Nehru. This legal status was not abolished; its new advisory role of initiating new policies, as stated by Tandon, continued. It did not return to its old role of providing only secretarial assistance. But its engagement with the party affairs, with which Indira Gandhi had empowered it, stopped.
In subsequent years, the functions of the PMO remained the same despite the change in prime ministers. Only minor changes were witnessed; one, for example, was the change of nomenclature of the PPS to secretary to principal secretary (PS). Nehru had the PPS, Shastri had the secretary, and from Indira Gandhi onwards it became the PS; Vajpayee created a new post of National Security Advisor, while Shastri and others had a media advisor. Then there was the principal advisor, economic advisor, and so on. The different PMs thus had their teams with bureaucratic ranks. This was not there in the British system, and Margaret Thatcher only initiated appointing advisors in 1979.
The second change became visible when coalition governments were formed as a result of coalition politics—this is when a single party is unable to secure a majority in the Lok Sabha and is forced to form a coalition government with other parties, either before the parliamentary election or as a result of it. The result was a change in the political position and status of the prime ministers, which was reflected in the status of the PMO. If the party of the PM was in absolute majority in the Lok Sabha, their PMO had a larger presence. But this is only a broad theorization. There are many minor variations, such as the personality of the prime ministers and their political weight within and outside the party, which would impact the acceptance of the PMO.
Also, within the PMO, the status of the principal secretaries, their acceptance among the officers while serving, and the mandate from the PM impact its domain, the most recent example being the distribution of the work between the PS, the National Security Advisor, and the principal advisor to the PM in the first Modi government. But one fact has remained irreversible: since 1964, the PMO’s role towards the PM has remained unchanged; from secretarial assistance to ensuring policy application, from policy formulation to intervention in the ministries, it has consistently advised the prime ministers.
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PMO Bureaucracy
The procedure of working in the PMO is different compared to the other ministries. When the files are called for or received from different ministries, no notes are written on the files in the PMO, unlike the procedures in the other government departments. Rather, a new parallel file or a photocopy of the ministries’ file is created; it is matched with the old file already kept in the PMO. This file that is kept in the PMO is called the ghost/shadow file, on which the decisions taken in the PMO are written.
Once the decision is taken, the original files of the ministries are returned with the directives and decisions written on them; if the PM’s signature is required on the file before sending it to the president for his signature, it is processed accordingly, and a photocopy of it is put into the ghost file of the PMO. In this way, the PMO also acts as the office of record with an in-built institutional memory. But it may be added here for clarification that the office has no legal authority and accountability like the other departments of the ministries. The different sections in the PMO act for the sake of convenience and efficiency of its functioning, which is to assist the PM. The assistance includes offering information and advice required by him in the decision-making and its application. The officers cannot direct their counterparts in the ministries. The departments in the ministries and the cabinet secretariat are, legally, the supreme unit.
The different ministries of the government and the state of the union, apart from the ministries directly under the purview of the PM, are entrusted to different sections of the PMO for scrutiny, supervision and coordination, something that was once strongly contested by Patel against Nehru in 1947.
This excerpt from Himanshu Roy’s ‘PMO: Prime Minister’s Office Through the Years’ has been published with permission from Rupa Publications.