"So what would you ask Gandhiji if you were to meet him today?" I asked Manmohan Singh at the Mahatma's Wardha ashram where he had been dragged by the force of circumstance. A record number of debt-saddled farmers were busy taking their lives, consuming genocidal volumes of government-subsidised pesticides, midway through the monsoon session of Parliament, when the rains had failed, instigating lawmakers to demand billions of dollars in loan writeoffs. Yet again!
Steering his governmemt two years into his first term as Prime Minister, as an unelected head of the Union government, furnishing a false affidavit of domicile in Assam, for a backdoor entry into the Upper House, Manmohan was taken aback when I threw the dice at him.
Up north in New Delhi, my Editor too had been taken aback when I unexpectedly offered him "the interview" with the Prime Minister, the first and, what would eventually be the last, to an Indian newspaper, in Singh's decade-long tenure at Race Course Road, in the heart of the city.
"This is my parting gift to you, and to the newspaper I worked for 11 years," I had told my boss, in the monsoon of 2006, insisting that the same be published a day after I stepped out of Times House. RJ did not know how to handle my offer, neither my exit from ET, nor Singh landing on his laptop (pun intended, considering the early days yet, of 'godi media'). It was eventually destined for a grand messup involving too many c(r)ooks after the 'chef' had departed, following the Rs 32,000 farewell dinner on my last evening at work. The momentum of the momentous moment was too hot to handle for a boss tasked to manipulate human resources deployment than to manage prized journalistic content.
"I did not expect this question," Singh replied, flummoxed, under the perplexing gaze of his media handler, the only other person in the hut at Gandhi's secluded retreat, once funded by industrialist Jamnalal Bajaj.
"So, where do you go from here?" I asked Singh, and Singh too asked me the same, almost in unison, the Prime Minister having been apprised that this was to be his first interview, and my last.
"I don't know," Singh told me, and I told Singh the same, almost in unison, once again, in the wake of his national, and my personal, calamity, at the unexpected turn of events at work.
At the end of our hour-long pow-wow, abruptly cut short by the handler, Singh admitted he didn't know where he was headed to. So did I.
He saw no solution to the immediate problem of farmers exiting their fields for the hereafter; I hadn't found a solution either to my immediate problem of exiting the green pasture that had sustained me for a decade.
"Perhaps, we must roll out Reforms 2.0. A second Green Revolution," Manmohan thought aloud, mindful, I am sure, of Gandhi's prophetic sermon, long junked, that the seeds of India's economic prosperity must be sowed in its villages. Perhaps, I must revolutionise journalism, I too wondered, in silence, for the want of a prophecy or a prophet.
Two years later, I was to meet the PM again, in the heart of Delhi, at 7 Race Course Road. I had brought along Len Apcar , the Hong Kong-based Editor of the International Herald Tribune, NYT's global edition, surmounting the roadblock that had been set up by Singh's handler who had earlier handled the Wardha pow-wow.
"He has set up the PM's meeting with Rupert Murdoch, but is waving me off," I alerted my friend, Surinder Singla, a former finance minister in Punjab, and Singh's go-to person in the state, who immediately dialled his Punjab connection to TKA Nair, Singh's principal secretary, to get me in, an hour ahead of the WSJ boss, leaving the handler pale-faced.
"So where are we headed with Reforms 2.0?" I asked the Prime Minister, now in his second consecutive stint at office, picking up from where we had parted in Wardha.
Singh had already taken note of Financial Chroncile, India's newest business daily, partnering NYT, with a touching note on our daring and pathbreaking venture: " It is noteworthy that a business paper is being launched from the capital at a time when the economy is experiencing major challenges. These are challenging times for policymakers, businesses and investors. At this crucial juncture, reporting on business issues objectively and with brevity is the need of the hour. I am confident that Financial Chronicle would play a positive and constructive role with responsible reportage and contribute to informed and intellectual debate in the country.”
Without doubt, a reforms push was a much-needed move forward in this season of global meltdown. This was good enough reason for the validity of my question: "So, where are we headed on Reforms 2.0?"
"It's nowhere in the works. There is no way we can make headway," Singh replied, grim-faced. Vote bank politics, recalcitrant electoral partners, and the unseen hand of his minders at 10 Janpath had paralysed him at work, pumelled, as he was, by one scam after another.
"Nothing of this is on record," his handler grunted as we parted company, trying to make a point, but we had got our "story". Nothing would be moving from here on, now on, other than the greasy wheels of power and patronage.
Len was doubly delighted to have beaten Murdoch in the race to RCR, a point he had to drive home by leaving behind a NYT-embossed wrist watch, as gift for the baron, at Singh's front office.
Editors, for some reason, were in awe of Manmohan, otherwise a simple man. It was probably because they felt intellectually dwarfed by this highly-erudite technocrat, of few words, an odd-man out in the hurly-burly of India's scam-infested 'welfare' economy. This was possibly the reason why my other Editor, at ET, pouted and pondered when I told him that Singh would be trounced in the only election he ever contested, by an intellectually less appealing former academic don, and one of BJP's many patriarchs, Prof Vijay Kumar Malhotra, for the elite South Delhi Lok Sabha seat, the second wealthiest constituency in the country after South Mumbai.
That was way back in 1999. Nobody was certain of a BJP win, and the Congress less sure of a comeback, after the collapse of The Third Front coalition. So, everyone thought there was no better mascot than Mammohan to ride the 'reforms' bandwagon to power.
"How can you be so certain?" my Editor, asked when I returned to my cubicle, after driving my Gypsy day long behind Singh's open-hood Gypsy with a Delhi Police Gypsy in tow, in what had turned to be a three-Gypsy cavalcade through South Delhi's traffic-dense thoroughfares.
"My report speaks for itself," I politely stood up to my boss.
"Let's give him a fifty-fifty chance. I will rework the last para," ASG insisted, squeamishly. The rest, as they say, was history.
But that history-in-the-making had been coming for some years now.
"You are a great economist, and a good man," I had told Singh at our first interview, back in time, in 1993, where I was listed last in the pecking order of empanelled journalist-editors, for a post-Budget one-on-one with then finance minister Singh, still in the glare of global media spotlight for his path-breaking national rescue mission of 1991.
"What do your economic reforms mean to that peon sitting on a stool outside your room? Will it make a difference to his life? Will the benefits trickle down?" I asked, ensconsed in a comfortable sofa, in his plush North Block office, sipping tea served a while ago by that minion in khakee.
"I did not expect this question," Singh replied, raising a brow, visibly uncomfortable. It was not so much because I had asked an unanswerable question, but because my boss, Thak, at The Pioneer, had taken umbrage, and stormed in and out of the FM's room for being denied an interview for the third-year running. Instead, his would-be-should-be 'minion' had been slotted for a conversation in an age when the Editor still called the shots. Thak was now plotting revenge on a grand scale, and Singh, expectedly, was wary. Eventually, Thak's sabotage would be scuppered, but that's an entirely different story.
"But, you must show solidarity with your minion," I provoked Singh again, making common cause with his peon. "You are so middle-class in your demeanour, not quite the politician one would expect you to be," I challenged the FM.
"What else do you expect me to be?" Singh countered, politely. "I am in politics now. So, I AM a politician, and that's that," he said, emphasising his station.
Golden words. Coming as it did, from a man, who only a year earlier, had been naive enough to pick up the phone when, as a beat reporter, I had dialled his direct number at North Block... to clarify a point of ministerial oversight in the ongoing Harshad Mehta saga. That story made it to Page One with a lead headline, and the byline missing, because Editor K at BS, where I laboured then, found it too good to be true, that it actually was, but too precious to hold over for yet another night to bed.
Between New Delhi and Wardha and back in New Delhi, between 1991 and 2014, Singh had walked a long distance. But I can bet through the years that I made acquaintance with him, as journalist, that Singh never cut the grade as the politician he had ventured out to be. I saw that at the G-20 Summit at Cannes, in 2011, where President Sarkozy offered him a cold handshake for letting the Rafael deal lapse. I could sense it in the G-20 Summit in St Petersburg, in 2013, where he offered a third-world "kitty-party" savings scheme for the world's richest economies to tide over the long term effects of the 2008 meltdown. I witnessed it up front when his Finance Minister, P Chidambaram, lugged 'suitcases' in the PM's special aircraft to Durban for the 2013 BRICS summit, only to return, weightless, "business class" by commercial carrier. PC got exposed years later for stowing away slush money to South Africa.
No matter how hard he tried, Manmohan Singh never lived up to be the politician, a role into which he was thrust, both by destiny and the dynasty he served in his long, eventful and untarnished career during which his handlers, minders, masters and minions covered their own crisp white linen with glorious stain. From muck.
Singh was the saint who faint-heartedly soldiered on.
Which is why the best Manmohan I fondly recall is the wise old Plan panel maven in an odd red twisted turban who visited my journalism class, a little less than four decades ago, in 1987, to silently dish out diplomas to wide-eyed would-be hacks dreaming of taking on the world... with negligible insight into the real world of politicians and prime ministers in-wait.
So long, Good Man!
So long, Manmohan!
#ManmohanSingh
Dr.Manmohan Singh - Fan Club