‘Principal secretary to the PM was a bureaucratic lightweight’

THE RISK-AVERSE TKA NAIR COULD NEVER BE TO MANMOHAN SINGH WHAT BRAJESH MISHRA WAS TO ATAL BIHARI VAJPAYEE

The power and importance of the principal secretary to the PM has always been dependent on the latter’s political clout, apart from the officer’s own standing within the civil service. As the bureaucratic link between the PM and senior ministers and secretaries to government, the principal secretary commands authority and influences policy. Most principal secretaries have been extremely capable men, well regarded by their peers and respected by their subordinates, like P.N. Haksar in Indira Gandhi’s PMO, P.C. Alexander in Rajiv’s, A.N. Varma in P.V. Narasimha Rao’s, Satish Chandran in Gowda’s, N.N. Vohra in Gujral’s and Brajesh Mishra in Vajpayee’s. However, every now and then, a nondescript official of limited talent has also adorned that job.

Since Manmohan Singh’s PMO also included a special adviser, a novelty created to accommodate M.K. Narayanan, part of the NSA’s turf, namely the area of internal security, was hived off to him.

J.N. ‘Mani’ Dixit was, without doubt, the dominant personality among the three (Narayanan, T.K.A. Nair and Dixit). His stature ensured that T.K.A. Nair was not quite the ‘principal’ secretary that many of his predecessors had been. Of course, Nair’s immediate predecessor, the largerthan-life Brajesh Mishra, was more than just a principal secretary. I once jokingly remarked to Dr Singh that in Vajpayee’s time the principal secretary functioned as if he were the PM, while in his case it was being said that the PM functioned like a principal secretary. This was a comment on Dr Singh’s attention to detail, his involvement in the nitty-gritty of administration, his chairing of long and tedious meetings with officials, which Vajpayee rarely did. He ignored the remark, knowing well that it was also a taunt, drawing attention to the fact that Sonia was the political boss.

Nair was not Dr Singh’s first choice for the all-important post of principal secretary. He had hoped to induct Vohra, who had given me news of my job. Not only was he a fellow refugee from west Punjab, now Pakistan, but both had taught in Punjab University and Vohra also went to Oxford, though some years after Dr Singh. Vohra even cancelled a scheduled visit to London to be able to join the PMO. Sonia Gandhi had another retired IAS officer, a Tamilian whose name I am not at liberty to disclose, in mind for the job. He had worked with Rajiv Gandhi and was regarded as a capable and honest official. However, he declined Sonia’s invitation to rejoin government on a matter of principle—he had promised his father that he would never seek a government job after retirement.

With these two distinguished officers ruled out, Dr Singh turned to Nair, a retired IAS officer who had worked briefly as secretary to the PM in Gujral’s PMO and had also served as Punjab’s chief secretary, the top bureaucrat in the state. 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 Raisina Hill— home, finance and defence—nor in any key economic ministry. He had only done so in the less powerful ministries of rural development and environment and forests. In short, he was a bureaucratic lightweight.

Always impeccably attired, Nair, smallbuilt and short, lacked the presence of a Brajesh Mishra, whose striking demeanour commanded attention. 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, his constituency in Uttar Pradesh, where he had caught Rajiv’s eye. After Rajiv’s death, he chose to work for the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation where he did some worthwhile social development work. But this meant that he was not just outside government but completely identified with the Gandhi family. When Pulok returned to government, it was to work on the personal staff of Sonia Gandhi when she was leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha.

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...

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.

‘National Security Adviser became the effective boss of IB and R&AW’ PM DECLINED TO TAKE DAILY BRIEFINGS FROM INTELLIGENCE CHIEFS It was clear to me that Dr Singh shared a bond with him (Mani Dixit) 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 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, humourously, 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.

If those stories were true, Dr Singh was clearly the exception to that rule. He not only resisted the temptation to spy on his colleagues, but gave up even the opportunity to be offered such information by declining to take a daily briefing from the intelligence chiefs. He was the first prime minister not to do so. The chiefs of both the IB and the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) were told to report to the NSA instead. I didn’t think the intelligence chiefs would deliver their best if they reported to an intermediary instead of the prime minister himself, and repeatedly implored him to take a direct daily briefing from them. Every now and then he would, but the NSA became their effective boss in the UPA PMO.

Narayanan, when he succeeded Dixit as