Prime minister Manmohan Singh unflinchingly makes two confessions to those calling on him since he took up the top job. One, that he never expected to be in this chair and was therefore never mentally prepared for it. Two, that his biggest surprise is to discover how large a part of the prime ministerial responsibilities is ceremonial. Then he also makes a very confident assertion, that now that he has got the position he never wanted, expected, or was mentally prepared for, he intended to do a good job of it.
As he gets down to it in earnest, Manmohan Singh will make one more discovery, actually he is too sharp not to have made it already, that what may have initially seemed as ceremonial is as essential a part of the prime minister’s job as the disposal of files on time. Also, unless you get this right, you really cannot deliver. Now Manmohan Singh is known to be a quiet, self-effacing man, who has built a whole career and reputation by trying to personally stay out of limelight. He is more at ease speaking in a classroom, cabinet meeting, or in the inner councils of his party, than in public. But howsoever he may hesitate, however much he may resent it, his new job will force him to change. The prime minister of India is one of the most political and public jobs in the world. You cannot do it as a backroom boy, howsoever sincere or incompetent. This is not like being the prime minister of Pakistan, but more about that later.
Happily, there are indications already that Manmohan Singh is changing. His first real speech (besides the very carefully worded address to the nation) was at the chief ministers’ conclave on rural development in New Delhi earlier this week. It came out quite clearly that he was no hands-off prime minister like Deve Gowda, an unsure one like Inder Kumar Gujral, sticking to the scripted party line as Atal Bihari Vajpayee would do on such occasions. Finally, here was no mere dummy, keeping the seat warm while the regent comes of age. He came up with original “Manmohanomic” ideas. His veiled threat to release central funds directly to the districts and panchayats, in case the states did not get their act together, made waves immediately. More significantly, this was not the standard Congress party line. It was also a message to UPA allies and the Left that the CMP did not mean cheap pickings without accountability, as also his own firm belief that over the years the Central government had become a cheque-spinning machine, and this had to change.
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The prime minister’s other public appearance in Andhra to comfort the farmers was even more “political” and to that extent, an even bigger first in his political career. Certainly, he could have been spared the spectacle of displaying for the cameras the oversized cardboard replica of the compensation cheques to suicide-scarred families, in the fashion of a Saurav Ganguly holding aloft his man of the match award. But he said, and did, the right things. More important, he “looked” right. Compassionate, concerned, very sincere but very political. Funnily, this is just one essential aspect of an elected leader’s craft. Two others, with hugely formidable reputations as communicators, Vajpayee and Chandrababu Naidu, had failed to do this in the recent past. Did you ever see family members of a suicide victim, or even someone who had suffered from a terrorist attack, being held so closely by a prime minister in the last couple of years?
This politicisation of the scholar is a good thing, but it must not stop here. Manmohan Singh may be right when he says he never expected the job. But he is too sharp not to know why he has got it. In the event of Sonia Gandhi declining to be prime minister, the Congress did not have another face half as acceptable to the allies as his. His own non-political background and abhorrence of palace intrigue and lack of personal ambition or greed are comforting for Sonia Gandhi. At the same time, if she and the Congress regard May 2004 merely as a semi-final, leading up to a crack at real power the next time around, it is crucial for them that the Manmohan Singh government is seen to be a success. This is where Singh is better placed than Vajpayee. His own party and allies need him desperately to succeed if they have to win power again. But, unlike Vajpayee, he does not carry the burden of getting himself, or them, re-elected in the next election. He can, therefore, see himself as a one-innings batsman in a limited overs match. Or, given that a mid-term poll will become a distinct likelihood after 2006, a limited overs match that may be contracted by rain. So, he has only one chance for a limited time and his teammates and the janta, all need him to succeed. He does not, like Vajpayee, have the luxury of leaving anything for his next term. It is a different matter, though, that when a fair history of these years is written, people may take a particularly unforgiving view of what Vajpayee left unfinished to do in a second term he took for granted.
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Trust General Musharraf to always come up with an interesting comparison. He asked earlier this week what was so odd about his “supporting” a technocrat prime minister who was a member of the Upper House and had worked with the World Bank? Why, at the same time that you criticise me, you hail in India the rise of Dr Manmohan Singh, who was all of the same. Now, it is never easy to argue with the general. Who is to convince him that no prime minister of India can be like one from Pakistan, where a general calls the shots. Or, that he is no Sonia Gandhi or rather, more importantly, that Sonia is no General Musharraf. No matter how self-effacing Manmohan Singh tries to be, the prime minister is India’s chief executive, and it is with him that the buck stops. And while there are problems, new supervisory and advisory bodies that seem to teem with extra-constitutional busybodies, at the end of the day it is his word that counts.
The only thing he now needs to do is to shrug off all diffidence and be prime ministerial, whether or not he had expected the job in the first place. Also, now that he is prime minister, he should embrace the politics and ceremony that goes with it willingly, because both are essential to the job and even more so because the prime minister of India, even if a technocrat, is not the same as the prime minister of Pakistan. He must get himself elected to Lok Sabha soon, be seen to be disciplining those cabinet colleagues who tend to run away with the ball and then make a big show of it.
Most important of all, he has to see the leverage, the extraordinary advantage the peculiar politics of his rise to prime ministership brings him. He has the credibility, clean image and the sincerity of Vajpayee, without his burden of leading his coalition in another election campaign and, yet, if his party has to have a future, he must succeed as prime minister. It is not such a bad equation after all.
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