‘Even if we don’t support you, you must stay strong on your path’: Manmohan, Vajpayee and an unlikely bond

Vajpayee tore into Singh’s first Budget speech in Parliament, and it is said that Singh was so hurt that he decided to resign. After then PM P V Narasimha Rao told Vajpayee that Singh was contemplating resignation, Vajpayee personally told Singh that his severe criticism was political and not personal. Singh changed his mind, and a bond developed between the two leaders.

Remembering Vajpayee, after he passed away in 2018, Singh said in an interview to The Hindu that the BJP leader displayed Nehruvian traits.

“Vajpayee ji was truly a great Indian and a great Prime Minister, and his idea of India… was close to Nehru’s vision of India, and that’s the legacy I feel should be preserved,” Singh said in the interview. “I think in politics, people should not be judged by what they say, but what they do, and in terms of actions, the approaches of these two great men were not very different.”

When Singh became the Finance Minister, he was an experienced economist but a relatively new politician who had to bear the brunt of concerted Opposition attacks on liberalisation, a response to the 1991 foreign exchange crisis.

In his speech announcing the reforms, Singh said that India’s time had come, and he was ready to face every onslaught to ensure the country took what he saw was the right path. He said he was willing to take all criticism, ending with Bismil Ajimabadi’s couplet ‘Sarfaroshi Ki Tamanna’. Vajpayee was quick to counter him. He said the Finance Minister wanted to fight the Opposition with sarfaroshi ki tamanna (a desire for sacrifice), leading to laughter ringing in the House, and added that the need was to fight the crisis rather than each other.

Singh said he consulted Vajpayee and Advani, believing they had sympathies for his liberalisation policies. Vajpayee comforted him when he faced a barrage of criticism from the Opposition. “Dr Singh, one ought to have a thick skin. Even if we don’t support you, you must stay strong on your path,” Singh recalled Vajpayee as saying.

After becoming the PM, Singh also saw through a continuity in foreign policy where Vajpayee had left it. Just as he reached out to the United States for the Indo-US civil nuclear deal – endangering his government when the Left parties withdrew support – Vajpayee had also tried to bring the US around to India’s views after the Americans imposed sanctions in the wake of the Pokhran-2 nuclear tests.

Vajpayee’s attempt at making peace with Pakistan – he went on a bus journey to Pakistan, but the Kargil war damaged the relations – was something that Singh regarded as a good step, just like Vajpayee’s attempt to lend a healing touch to Kashmir with his slogan ‘Insaniyat, Jamhooriyat, Kashmiriyat (humanity, democracy, Kashmiri culture)’.

When faced with severe criticism from both the Left and the BJP over the nuclear deal in 2008, Singh made a poignant appeal to an ailing Vajpayee – who had by then retired from politics on health grounds – to help him, calling him the legendary Bhishma Pitamah, evoking the epic relations between Arjuna and Bhishma when they were fighting on opposite sides during the Mahabharat war.

“The most courageous steps to build peace were taken by Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif and Atal Bihari Vajpayee,” Singh said in Parliament while replying to the Motion of Thanks to the President’s address in March 2008.

Within three to four years of Singh taking charge as PM, Vajpayee’s health deteriorated, and he stopped appearing in public after December 25, 2007, when he last met journalists on his birthday but was not in a position to say anything apart from “namaskar”.

The remaining seven years of Singh’s time as PM deprived him of policy interactions with Vajpayee, and he had to interact with L K Advani, Sushma Swaraj and Arun Jaitley instead, whenever there developed an impasse between the government and the Opposition.