Whose Line is it Anyway?

Line Is It Anyway?

The PM's, of course. But written by a band of extraordinary gentlemen.

SHEELA REDDY
Next time you hear a prime minister deliver a speech, watch closely. Hidden
in one corner, listening avidly to each word as if they were his own—as
indeed they mostly are—is his ghost writer. The only sign of life he may
show is an occasional blush when a fortunate turn of phrase is rewarded with
a round of applause or laughter. And a rather unwelcome enthusiasm for
gifting you volumes of the prime minister's speeches. These intimidatingly
grey volumes are brought out by the Publications Division, whose unenviable
job it is to print the speeches of each prime minister and President in
succession. Their latest offering: the Selected Speeches of Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh, followed by that most ominous of words: Volume One.

It's an open secret, of course, that behind every great speech a prime
minister makes is a ghost writer—and sometimes a Raisina Hill-full of them.
And as if the PMO wasn't already overcrowded with inhouse ghost writers,
successive PMs started calling in for help from further afield.


Take Manmohan Singh, for example. His official speechwriter Sanjaya Baru,
after discussing the issues the PM wants to talk about in his next speech,
dashes off e-mails requesting inputs from experts the world over, including
doctors, scientists, historians and economists. Among those who have
obligingly played bit parts as the PM's ghost writers—or rather ghost
advisors—include West Bengal Governor Gopal Gandhi; the director of the
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, Govardhan Mehta; the Oxford
economist, Vijay Joshi; historian Ramachandra Guha; and on one occasion,
over the protests of the late Mani Dixit jealously guarding the prime
ministerial speech from poaching by 'outsiders', Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria.

It wasn't always so. Nehru famously disdained ghost writers, though he
himself wasn't immune to the temptation of ghost writing his bureaucrats'
notes and letters. As a result, he spent "an enormous amount of time in
dictating letters and drafting or dictating statements and speeches", as his
private secretary M.O. Mathai, complained. Nehru, he revealed, preferred to
speak extempore, as he did the sublime 'Light has gone out' speech broadcast
on All India Radio on the day of Gandhi's assassination. And when he had to
read aloud a speech, he preferred to write it himself, "in his own hand when
alone, without any disturbance and when he was emotionally stirred". The
famous 'Tryst with Destiny' speech delivered on the midnight meeting of the
Constituent Assembly on August 14-15, 1947, was written in his own hand.
Like all good speeches, this too had its share of ghost writers itching to
get a phrase in. Mathai claimed he contributed the word 'tryst', replacing
the 'date with destiny'—with its unfortunate "American connotation of
assignation with girls and women"—that Nehru used in the original draft.

But even Nehru had to succumb now and then to the pressure of his
bureaucrats, who insisted that some speeches, especially in international
fora, were too important to be left merely to his prose and learning,
impressive though they were. Nehru accepted the draft they imposed on him
with some reluctance, even taking care to tell his audience that he had been
persuaded by his officials to do so.

Ironically, for a man who loathed ghost writers, it was Nehru who set the
ball rolling on bringing in a speechwriter to the PM. Plagued by bad press,
he suggested his then home minister Lal Bahadur Shastri appoint somebody as
media advisor. We'll never know if Nehru would have deigned to lean on his
media advisor for his speeches, but Shastri followed the advice in part
during his own brief tenure.He did appoint Kuldip Nayar as his press
officer, but except for one disastrous press conference, took little help
from him. "As an under-secretary, I did not dare suggest any changes because
of the hierarchy," Nayar recalls.



His successor, B.G. Verghese, didn't share these qualms. Appointed
information advisor by Indira Gandhi when she first assumed power, Verghese
ably combined all the resources and ideas at his—or rather, the PMO's—
command, skilfully avoiding the landmines most official drafts that come
from various ministries are usually riddled with: long sentences
overburdened with officialese and inconsequential facts. Those early
speeches of Indira had his indelible style: cogently well-argued, briskly
no-nonsense. But for Indira, smarting under the label of 'goongi gudiya',
there was still something missing: she wanted a speechwriter who spoke in
her voice rather than the other way round. She found him in H.Y. Sharada
Prasad, a former journalist and editor who spoke little but with a gift that
has now become legendary in the prime ministerial speechwriters' guild. He
could, his peers in ghost-writing circles say with awe, write Indira's words
even before they formed in her mind. "Everybody looked up to him as a
mentor," recalls Gopi Arora, who worked with both Indira and Rajiv Gandhi in
the PMO. "He shaped the institution of speechwriter to the prime minister."
Nayar agrees: "Sharada Prasad knew the mind of the Nehru family, he could
anticipate their thoughts."

The trick, according to Prasad, "is to be a dramatist of sorts, imagining
what the actor would say in every circumstance." It helped, says Prasad,
"that I belonged to the same generation as Indira—only eight years younger
than her—and had edited her father's collection of speeches." Prasad's first
chance to prove his talent for "paraya pravesa"—entering into Indira's
mind—came during her very first broadcast to the nation. "I knew it would be
important to her to stress her relationship with Gandhi and Nehru, so I put
into the speech her memory of the first Congress session addressed by her
father in 1929, when Indira must have been about 12." Therefore the line:
"Mine was one of the voices which cried Mahatma Gandhi ki jai."

The first thing Prasad set out to do in his new job as her speechwriter was
to "play the sedulous ape". He wanted to discover what her personal style
was, and he did it by watching her. He studied her while she was with party
colleagues, with journalists, with friends, on foreign tours—diligently
taking notes, and going through her correspondence, tucking away interesting
little tidbits for the speeches he drafted for her "from four days before
she became prime minister until her death".

It didn't take him long to figure out Indira's natural voice. "She liked
clipped, modern language, hated pomposities and heavy-handed sentences,
loved poetry and music and dance." Above all, Prasad recalls, "she was a
compulsive sub-editor". Each speech he drafted for her, says Prasad, not
only went through 15 or 16 drafts but would come back with a 'Can't you give
me a nice quote?' Prasad would then supply a dozen, but they weren't good
enough for Indira. "She wanted novelty," says Prasad. And if Prasad couldn't
provide it, she resorted to her own little quotes' trove. "She had this
little book in which she wrote down lines of poetry she liked. But she would
never show us the book, always disappearing into her room and emerging with
the quote she wanted to use." So compulsive indeed was her editing that
Prasad often stayed up till three in the morning rewriting the draft.Few
could understand this obsession with the right word, especially her party
colleagues and ministers who waited for hours to get a word with her while
she was busy reworking her speeches till literally the last minute, says
Prasad.

But the master speechwriter had one advantage those who stepped into his
shoes sorely lacked: "No one in the PMO, even his seniors like P. N. Dhar
and P.N. Haksar, took it amiss if he went directly to Indira with his final
draft." The secret, says Prasad, was because "we didn't have personalities.
It was her speech in the end, and the rest of us merely the cook's
assistants, chopping up the vegetables".


"Personalities" began to overwhelm the thus-far invisible hands of
speechwriters during her son Rajiv's term. Mani Shankar Aiyar, who was put
on the job some eight months after he became prime minister, recalls the
process with a shudder. "It was like being put through the wringer." Aiyar
says he first collected the material for the speech from various ministries
and PMO officials and put up a first draft to a peer group. The criticism,
says Aiyar, "was vicious", with the speechwriter meekly taking notes of all
the points being made. But the torture was only beginning: the second round
went through a larger group of people, presided over by Rajiv. "With all of
them—invitees and officials—out to impress the PM, the draft would be torn
into little pieces, with no one to stand up for it except myself."
Mercifully, the final draft went to Rajiv alone. With he sharing his
mother's obsession for last-minute changes, the rows sometimes continued on
the PM's plane until touchdown on his foreign tours.

Like Prasad, Aiyar recalls sleepless nights drafting important speeches and
discovering the symbiotic relationship that inevitably grows between a prime
minister and his speechwriter. By the end of it, says Aiyar, "I hardly knew
which idea was mine and which his. I learnt to clothe his thoughts in my
words."



Not all prime ministers, however, are willing to let others dress their
thoughts for them. P.V. Narasimha Rao, for instance, who prided himself on
his prowess over prose and languages, and who had already gained a
reputation during Indira's regime for being an even more compulsive
sub-editor of Indira's speeches than Indira herself, did not rely too much
on any of his PMO staff for his speeches. Similarly, H.D. Deve Gowda
entrusted no speeches to his media advisor H.K. Dua for the simple reason:
"He didn't attend to speeches much." And Morarji Desai began his short term
with an "I don't need a speechwriter." But the Jan Sangh decided that he
did, coercing him to appoint a reporter from The Organiser, V.R. Mohinder,
in Sharada Prasad's place. But on the morning that Prasad was to hand over
the job to Mohinder, he received an unexpected summons from the PM. "You
know that man," Morarjibhai said in his cut-and-dried manner, "he died." For
Prasad, who was asked to continue in the job, it was just a change of voice.
"It was a little more 'I', a little less Gandhi and no more Nehru," Prasad
says succinctly.

And if a popular prime ministerial speech has many ghost claimants, few want
to claim credit for the disastrous ones. Which ghostly hand, for instance,
wrote Rajiv's infamous "When a big tree falls, the earth is bound to shake"?
Everyone claims it was Rajiv's first—and perhaps last—attempt at speaking
extempore.



The prime minister acknowledged as one of the greatest orators of his time,
Atal Behari Vajpayee, showed the least disinclination in hiring a
speechwriter for himself during his tenure. Sudheendra Kulkarni, who served
as Vajpayee's official speechwriter for six years, wisely let Vajpayee speak
for himself in Parliament and rallies. Apart from supplying the occasional
quote, dug out from Gandhi's works or even from Vajpayee's own four volumes
of speeches, Kulkarni limited himself to drafting his prepared speeches,
both in Hindi and English. Even then, Kulkarni recalls, "people would ask me
why I make him speak from a paper, it doesn't sound like Atalji."

But unlike the others in his craft, Kulkarni didn't feel obliged to speak in
Vajpayee's voice when he wrote his speeches. "I was a political appointee
and I certainly had an agenda. And I believe it was the PM's agenda as well.
He wanted to leave a legacy and so I pushed for the idea of dreaming big,
implementing big. 'India Shining' may be inappropriate as a poll slogan but
who can deny that India is indeed shining?"

"It's easy for a man to become a ghost," Prasad likes telling his friends,
"but it's hard for a ghost to become a man again." It's a sentiment none of
the ghost writers who followed in Prasad's train can quite share because
none of them had his ability to play ghost writer so perfectly.