Nothing riles the boss more than bad press. And in the last six months, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has drawn more than his share of flak from the world media. In April, The Economist had called Singh a “lame duck” whose “energy and authority” were on the decline. Then in July, The Independent first asked if Singh was “India’s savior or Sonia’s poodle”, and then Time called him an underachiever and suggested that “Prime Minister Singh should emerge from his private and political gloom”. Earlier this month, The Washington Post ran a report on Singh’s “dramatic fall from grace”, that said that his image of the “scrupulously honorable, humble and intellectual technocrat” had given way to that of a “dithering, ineffectual bureaucrat presiding over a deeply corrupt government”. This was the final straw. Pankaj Pachauri, the prime minister’s media advisor, shot off a formal protest to Washington Post, saying that the article was “one-sided”, that its author, Simon Denyer, never got in touch with him for comments, and that some of the quotes were rehashed from an earlier report in The Caravan. A war of words ensued. The social media overflowed with opinion.
Pachauri, a former anchor with a Hindi news channel who became the prime minister’s media advisor on January 19 this year, declined comment for this article. To be fair to Pachauri, he has come on board when the economy has slowed down, growth forecasts have turned gloomy, foreign investors have raised serious doubts about India’s future, and Coalgate has surfaced. Compare the current media onslaught on Prime Minister Singh with the days of the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal in 2008, or after the United Progressive Alliance’s return to power in 2009, when headline after headline said “Singh is King”. Clearly, it’s not a job for the fainthearted. “If you do something good, you don’t get praise; but if you do something wrong, almost everyone is on your back,” says an insider who has worked with Singh. Pachauri is the third advisor Singh has had in eight years after Sanjaya Baru (a former editor of Business Standard) who was the incumbent from 2004 to 2008 and Harish Khare, from 2008 to early 2012.
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The prime minister is the face of the government. The party in power gains or loses popularity depending on the perceived performance of its prime minister. This makes the advisor’s job crucial. In current times, the advisor’s job is not just managing media relations but also shaping perceptions about the prime minister — what Baru calls “brand management”. When Singh held his first press conference in 2004, Baru was adamant that he should sit alone on the dais and field questions directly. “It showed that he was clued into what was happening and was not a weak prime minister as was projected at that time,” says he. Of course, prior to the conference, about 75 “likely” questions were drafted and Singh was briefed on each one of them. Of the 50 questions asked, 49 were on the “likely” list.
The prime minister picks the advisor directly or he goes by the advice of his senior colleagues. Pachauri’s name, it is said, was recommended by Information & Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni. For long, prime ministers have entrusted the job to journalists — amongst Pachauri’s predecessors have been media heavyweights like HY Sharada Prasad, BG Verghese, Prem Shankar Jha and HK Dua. The unsaid logic is that it helps the prime minister build bridges with the media — journalists would think twice before taking on their own brethren. It cuts the other way too — the advisor’s main task, says Ashok Tandon, a former journalist who was the media advisor to Atal Behari Vajpayee for six years (1998 to 2004), “is to be the eyes and ears of the prime minister”.
The media advisor’s office is located on the first floor of South Block, very close to the prime minister’s office. He gets a small staff for assistance, which may be inadequate considering the proliferation of publications and news channels and their incessant demands. The advisor can always take help from the Press Information Bureau, but it is no secret that PIB bureaucrats view him as an outsider and relations between the two are frosty. “Rarely is advice sought from us,” says a PIB officer who doesn’t want to be named. “PIB is [for the advisor] more like an information bank and [is used] for monitoring coverage [in the media].”
There are other points of friction as well. On the prime minister’s overseas trips, for instance, who handles the media — the foreign office or the advisor? What happens when there is a conflict between the prime minister and his senior cabinet colleagues? Or, as in Pachauri’s case, when there are two centres of power — the prime minister and the party chief?
At the same time, all journalists want access to the prime minister — the hundreds of thousands spread across India. It’s a delicate balancing act; the advisor’s job is to choose the right communication without offending anybody.
In 2010, when Khare was the advisor, Singh addressed a press conference — only his second in six years — and, it is said, Information & Broadcasting Minister Soni was first invited for the conference but was later told that there wasn’t space in the room to accommodate her — a decision that irked many in the Congress.
After a couple of months, Singh entrusted two senior ministers, Kapil Sibal and P Chidambaram, both successful lawyers, to handle the media. Khare refused to comment on what happened during his tenure.
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It’s a 24x7 job (“My wife used to get hassled as my phone was always ringing,” says Tandon) that needs a cool head. On one occasion, he recalls, Vajpayee was agitated about a series of reports on the Kandahar hijacking and wanted to call up the editor (and perhaps exchange hot words with him). Tandon says he convinced Vajpayee that this would be inappropriate (as it would have resulted in a series of negative reports and editorials) and “managed” the media on his own. On another occasion, the prime minister’s office was getting a lot of flak over the Gujarat riots and Vajpayee was incensed with the Delhi media. To keep the communication with the media going, and keeping Vajpayee’s sensitivities in mind, Tandon turned the focus on the non-Delhi media.
Tandon’s task was easy, when compared to Pachauri’s, perhaps because those were the days of “India Shining” and Vajpayee was the undisputed leader of the government as well as the National Democratic Alliance. But there were controversies too. In 2002, Time published an article on Vajpayee with the headline “Asleep at the Wheel” and questioned whether he was mentally and physically fit to lead a nuclear-armed country. Tandon says that article was in “poor taste” but Vajpayee wasn’t too offended. What he doesn’t say is that the prime minister’s office sent a rejoinder to the magazine.
The job requires the advisor to have a 360-degree view of what the prime minister says and does. He needs to weigh the ramifications on domestic politics, foreign relations, coalitions, business sentiment and, perhaps, the stock markets as well. In March 2005, Pervez Musharraf, then president of Pakistan, announced in Islamabad that he wished to travel to India to watch a cricket match. Baru, in a column in Business Standard in March 2011, disclosed that “New Delhi was stumped into silence for several days. The instinctual response of many was to view this as a typical Musharraf googly”. The Agra fiasco was still looming large over everybody’s mind — surely Musharraf didn’t have just cricket on his mind — yet Singh couldn’t be seen as spurning a friendship overture. One piece of advice was to hold the match in Kochi, but the view was that the media would come in hordes even if it was held in Port Blair. Finally, Singh announced in Parliament that he had decided to invite Musharraf to Delhi to watch a cricket match.
The high watermark of Singh’s first term in office was the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal. Baru is writing a book on it. (Unlike Pachauri, who reports to Pulok Chatterjee, the principal secretary to the prime minister, Baru reported directly to Singh.)
In The Book I Won’t Be Writing and Other Essays, Sharada Prasad, Indira Gandhi’s media advisor, begins a chapter titled, “Advise and Advisers”, with these lines: “Some advisers endure, others don’t. Chance plays a part in this; sometimes character.” Perhaps these lines hold truer than ever for the media advisors under Singh.
