In the run-up to the Commonwealth Games (

) in Delhi nearly three years ago, prime minister

Singh surprised some of his cabinet colleagues when he empowered 10 bureaucrats led by the cabinet secretary to take spot decisions without prior approval of the ministers concerned.

CWGManmohanNone questioned the PM’s wisdom, as the decision was meant to clip the wings of the Suresh Kalmadi-headed organising committee, which was run more like a closely -held private company. But the same decision created confusion in the Sheila Dikshit-run Delhi government, Jaipal Reddy’s urban development ministry and MS Gill’s sports ministry, the driving forces behind organising the mega sporting event.That was not the first time Singh — who has had two decades of experience as a bureaucrat before becoming India’s finance minister in 1991 — leaned more on his team of civil servants than on his ministers. In the run-up to the India-US nuclear deal at the fag end of the UPA’s first term in 2008, Singh banked on national security adviser MK Narayanan (now West Bengal governor) and former foreign secretary Shyam Saran more than his political colleagues.It was Narayanan who reportedly held a crucial meeting with then Samajwadi Party leader Amar Singh in a Delhi guesthouse to swing a political deal that helped the UPA win a trust vote in the Lok Sabha. “By nature and training Manmohan Singh is a bureaucrat. So, it’s natural that he trusts bureaucrats more than his political colleagues,” says TSR Subramanian, cabinet secretary in the latter half of the ’90s.Despite being in politics for 22 years, nine of them as prime minister, Singh can count on his fingers the men in politics he can rely upon. So when Congress president Sonia Gandhi wanted two ministers close to Singh, Ashwani Kumar and Pawan Bansal, out of the cabinet in the wake of charges of corruption, the PM wouldn’t have been chuffed.After all, it was Singh who was behind the meteoric rise of those two political lightweights from Punjab even as party veterans like Oscar Fernandes had to contend with a minister of state rank. Unsurprisingly, former law minister Kumar chose to thank only Singh and did not make any reference to Congress president Gandhi when he held a short press conference after tendering his resignation.Politically, the PM has been in the line of fire ever since the coal allocation scandal surfaced a little over a year ago. Only recently, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) disclosed in an affidavit to the apex court that one of the PMO’s joint secretaries Shatrughna Singh was present in a meeting amongst the CBI’s investigators to vet the status report of the coal block allocation scam. The Supreme Court, when coming down hard on the CBI and the PMO, minced no words when it said that “the heart of the report was changed on suggestions of government officials”.The party in the opposition, the BJP, is baying for the PM’s resignation as it was he who held the coal portfolio when the alleged corruption took place. BJP vice-president Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi says the PM has limited political knowledge despite being in politics for the past 22 years. “The PM could be a good economist. Maybe he is clean. But he has no control over his ministers who speak in different languages. He is helpless,” says Naqvi. Naqvi adds that the PM’s woes are compounded by bureaucrats and technocrats surrounding him who have “little understanding of the political ground reality”.Still, at a time when the gulf between the PM and the party seems to have considerably widened, Singh will be glad to be ring-fenced by a few good men who aren’t politicians. A couple of them almost got there, though. On occasions in the past, Singh’s economist friends and trusted aides Montek Singh Ahluwalia and C Rangarajan lost out in the race to become the finance minister.Their names for North Block’s top job cropped up at least twice during the past nine years of UPA rule; first when P Chidambaram was shifted from finance to home after the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, and then again when Pranab Mukherjee resigned to contest the presidential election last year.On merit, any one of them could have become fine finance ministers; but the political decisions triumphed, with the Congress seemingly more at home with a politician rather than a technocrat in that key role. The PM wouldn’t be complaining — not at least now, when he seems alone and almost vulnerable on the political battleground. If there was a time that he needed dyed-in-thewool aides with experience and allegiance it is now.“The PM’s origin is not in politics. So it’s quite natural that he may have more non-political friends. I am sure the PM trusts his political colleagues in some matters and bureaucrats for other matters,” says Mani Shankar Aiyar, Singh’s former cabinet colleague and diplomatturned-Congressman. A person close to the PM points out that Singh has faith in his circle of babus because he is assured of relatively more objective clarity from them than politicians.Those who have seen Singh from close quarters say the PM trusts his adviser TKA Nair the most during crises. Back in 2004, Singh as PM did not have a team of his own. His then national security adviser JN Dixit and adviser MK Narayanan were known to Congress’ first family from the days of former PM Rajiv Gandhi. His then joint secretary Pulok Chatterji was so close to Congress president Sonia Gandhi that he was known as her “eyes and ears” in the PMO. And that means the only man Singh managed on his own was Nair, a 1963 batch Punjab cadre retired IAS officer who Singh had known for years.A number of serving and retired bureaucrats who ET Magazine consulted for this feature say Nair still remains PM’s most critical confidant. In difficult times during the past nine years, Singh called on his senior colleagues like Pranab Mukherjee (before he moved to Rashtrapati Bhawan) and P Chidambaram, but in nine out of 10 instances of exigencies, the first thing Singh did was to summon Nair to his cabin.But Nair may have lost his influence over the years. One reason for this could be that he was seen to be championing the cause of Kerala bureaucrats. What further damaged his strategic ability was when some of his key appointments boomeranged — at least on the government. Nair, for example, backed Kerala cadre finance ministry official Vinod Rai as CAG; Rai duly went on to drag the PMO into some of his audit reports, exposing mega scams from 2G to coal allocation.Two years ago, the WikiLeaks cables revealed how former US ambassador to India David Mulford dubbed Nair and Narayanan the “Keralite mafia” in the PMO. “In a bureaucratic culture dominated by North Indian Hindi speakers, this Keralite lock on the PM’s inner bureaucratic circle represents something of an anomaly, which could in the long term create new faultlines around the Prime Minister,” the leaked cable said.The faultlines became visible in the beginning of UPA-II. Nair’s influence in the affairs of two key ministries, finance and home, diminished with heavyweight ministers Mukherjee and Chidambaram at the helms. Also, the differences and even fierce rivalry between Mukherjee and Chidambaram burst into the open, and even took an ugly turn when Mukherjee’s office was reportedly bugged.Yet, Nair’s matching chemistry with former cabinet secretary KM Chandrasekhar who got a four-year-term did come to the UPA’s rescue. Along with the continuity of the PMO’s middleranked officers, the Nair-Chandrasekhar combine helped South Block minimise the impact of many crises, including those arising from the CWG and 2G spectrum scandals.A top PMO official on the condition of anonymity insists that the PM still trusts Nair the most, even though he is no longer principal secretary. “If the PM is comfortable talking with someone for one hour in his cabin, it will be Nair. Yet, Nair does not interfere with any file that’s directed to the principal secretary [Pulok Chatterji],” says the official.Singh had to take a calculated gamble when it came to replacing Nair with Chatterji as principal secretary — with Nair moving on to becoming adviser to PM — in October 2011. It was not Singh’s idea, but he had to play along with a larger plan to bring back Gandhi confidante Pulok Chatterji — who had an excellent working relationship with the PM too — from a World Bank posting in Washington. One reason for roping in Chatterji, say analysts, was to make the PMO better placed to address the party’s concerns.The original game plan was that Chatterji would be made cabinet secretary. But the government did not dare attract controversy — which it wasn’t doing a bad job of inviting anyways — as Chatterji was not the seniormost officer in his batch. Unlike when appointing the cabinet secretary — where the government has to go by the rule book — the PM has the liberty to choose anyone, even a retired bureaucrat, as his principal secretary.Chatterji began his PMO innings, the third in his 39-year-long career, by inducting a few officials he trusted most. One of his juniors at the World Bank, BVR Subrahmanyam, was appointed as a joint secretary in the PMO as a “special case” after changing Central deputation rules. Chhattisgarh chief minister Raman Singh immediately objected to the move as the officer did not go back to the state after his foreign assignment, as is the norm.The PM then defused the crisis by writing a letter to the chief minister, explaining why BVR who has “experience in handling sensitive matters” is required in the PMO. It’s another matter that Subrahmanyam deftly coordinated finance ministry-related matters when the PM took additional charge of the finance ministry after Mukherjee’s resignation for contesting presidential elections.