Himanshu Roy’s ‘PMO: Prime Minister’s Office through the Years’ puts a blurred lens on top office

This is a book with both an overt purpose and a covert one. The overt objective is to examine the steady growth in the power and influence of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) since Independence, until it now dwarfs every other government institution, including the Cabinet and the Cabinet Secretariat. The covert purpose, however, is to denigrate the Nehru-Gandhi family rule and eulogise Narendra Modi’s years in office.

Himanshu Roy notes that in the British system of parliamentary democracy — which India, once it gained Independence, largely copied — decisions are not taken by the Prime Minister alone but by the Cabinet. They are then implemented through the Cabinet Secretariat, which in Britain is the administrative kingpin. He calls this the ‘Cabinet form of government’, in contrast to the ‘prime ministerial form’, which has come to prevail in India, where the PMO matters far more, where prime ministers often take decisions based on inputs from PMO officials and present their Cabinets with already initiated fait accompli policies to merely endorse.

In the Indian version of democracy, PMO officials — or even the PM himself — frequently directly give orders to other ministry officials bypassing the minister, and these orders are sacrosanct. Unelected PMO officials even engage in political work which rightfully should be the domain of party functionaries.

Who is responsible for this emasculation of the Cabinet and the Cabinet Secretariat? Why, Jawaharlal Nehru, of course! According to Roy, it was Nehru’s imperious and domineering nature, his penchant for interfering in everything that sabotaged democracy in India from the start. “The intention was not to function in the Cabinet style or the collective mode; on the contrary, it was to put himself (Nehru) in the position of the Viceroy, at best an elected viceroy like the American president, with his Cabinet colleagues as his aides who were to report to him,” he writes.

And Modi? Is he the epitome of humility and collective functioning? Roy sidesteps the question, claiming Modi has done his best with the system he inherited. “Modi’s PMO is the most digitalised, responsive and transparent office in comparison to those of his predecessors,” he maintains. (Digitalised! Is there any head of any of the 200 odd countries on the globe whose office is yet to be digitalised?) “Modi has been careful in perception management. He does not bank on his officers for political roles. The public visibility of officers in the PMO has been low; their powers are defined… The kinds of persons he chooses, who remain invisible and work with precision and timing, make Modi a master strategist,” he gushes.

In defaming Nehru, Roy has cherry-picked his facts well, studiously ignoring the dozen or more favourable biographies on him that highlight instances of his democratic commitment, while copiously quoting the likes of former civil servant (and later minister) HM Patel and the fiery socialist Madhu Limaye. Given his indictment in the Mundhra scandal of the late 1950s, Patel’s antipathy to Nehru is only to be expected. For Roy, quoting Limaye too drips with irony, considering that Limaye hounded Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani while they were ministers in the Janata government of 1977-79, lambasting their dual membership of both the Janata Party and the RSS, insisting they either leave the RSS or quit as ministers, which eventually led to the government’s collapse.

Roy also excoriates Shastri, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi for completing the work of PMO aggrandisement that Nehru began, but far less vehemently. If his vision were less coloured, he could have speculated on why (as he himself points out) in Canada and Australia too — which, like India, duplicated Britain’s parliamentary system — there has been a distinct move towards the prime ministerial form of government. Perhaps the trend has less to do with an individual’s predilection and is more a response to the political needs of our times?

— The reviewer is the author of ‘The Disruptor: How VP Singh Shook India’

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