Free The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh by Sanjaya Baru

bothering about rank and protocol and focusing on getting the job done. 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. During the Kargil war, Brajesh Mishra constituted a multidisciplinary advisory group from among the members of the NSAB that was tasked to offer ‘big picture’ strategic advice to a government preoccupied with managing the daily tactics of winning a war. As a member of that group, along with K. Subrahmanyam, N.N. Vohra and a couple of others, I saw Mani’s strategic brilliance at first hand.
    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 (NSSP), with Pervez Musharraf on Pakistan and the border talks with China.
    By the time Dr Singh went to NewYork 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.
    The tension between the NSA and the foreign minister was inherent in the arrangement. Even in the United States, ego and policy clashes between the NSA and the secretary of state are part of the national capital’s folklore. In India, prime ministers have always sought to remain in charge of foreign policy but foreign ministers have had greater control over day-to-day management of policy. The institutional powers of the NSA, and the fact that both Mishra and Dixit were from the foreign service and knew its ins and outs, meant that the PMO had begun to chip away at even day-to-day management, including postings. The tension this generated between Jaswant Singh and Brajesh Mishra was well known and I began to see it rising between Natwar and Dixit. The ego clash was greater for the fact that Natwar had been Mani’s senior in the foreign service.
    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