When Lord Ram was manoeuvred into vanvaas, his brother Bharat placed his sandals on the throne to remind his subjects that he was a mere proxy for Ram. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, however, need do no such thing. His Congress colleagues leave no one in any doubt that he is but a caretaker for the Gandhi family.

Singh's predicament is not new. It has dogged Lal Bahadur Shastri and P.V. Narasimha Rao, the two Congress PMs before him who did not belong to the Nehru-Gandhi family. Both failed the crucial test of winning over the Congress's First Family during their tenures as prime minister, although Shastri did include her in his council of ministers. Rao's example is more relevant since by then the principle that the Nehru-Gandhi family was the only legitimate inheritor of the Congress legacy had been clearly established.

Rao in fact was installed as prime minister only because Sonia Gandhi declined the job. She preferred the aging, low-key Rao who had no votebank of his own, to the glamorous youthful Scindia, who was heir to a fairly powerful dynasty, or the able and ambitious but undependable Sharad Pawar, who had a power base of his own in Maharashtra. But once installed in office, Rao lost his characteristic reticence and self-effacement. He gained kudos for turning around the economy. Somewhere along the way he forgot that he was a surrogate PM and started to believe he was elected by the party.

A more recent example of a Congress leader paying the price for assuming that she remained in office because of her own performance and popularity ratings and not by the grace of the Congress president is Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit. She follows in the footsteps of a long line of chief ministers from K. Karunanakaran and Vasantdada Patil, to J.B. Patnaik and S.M. Krishna, who got their comeuppance when the party felt they had become too big for their boots.

Like Rao, Singh too was handpicked for the job by Sonia. Pranab Mukherjee seemed to be a more obvious candidate for prime minister, given his experience and reputation for efficiency. But he was never in the running. He cannot live down the fact that when the Cabinet met after Indira Gandhi's assassination he differed with the consensus that Rajiv Gandhi be immediately sworn in, and suggested that for the sake of propriety it might be wiser to install someone already in government as interim prime minister.

Singh's clean image, innate modesty and unassuming ways made him the ideal surrogate prime minister. A man who does not want the spotlight on himself, is not into realpolitik and offers no threat. In fact, Singh even insisted he did not want his ministers to put up his photograph in their offices, as is the established practice. The PM does not seem to mind that he figures very marginally in Congress poll campaigns.

But a prime minister can ill-afford to be totally self-effacing. Political opponents like L.K. Advani are ready to pounce on him at the first opportunity and dub him Mr Invisible. Singh's own party colleagues are forever trying to undermine his authority by rushing to 10 Janpath to tattle against his appointees. Singh has, therefore, to walk a tightrope. He has to be forceful and decisive in government without appearing to be the one calling the shots.

Almost a year into office, it seems Manmohan Singh has managed his delicate balancing act rather well. The opposition's wishful dream that Singh would be a total pushover or simply throw up his hands in disgust and walk away from the job has not materialised. The nominated PM has shown that he is made of sterner stuff and might be here for the long haul. Credit must be given equally to the parallel secretariat at 10 Janpath, which despite apprehensions has not interfered too much in the day-to-day functioning of the government, even if it has reservations about some of the PM's key officials.

At the start of his tenure as prime minister, several of Singh's senior cabinet colleagues had assumed that he would be simply the first among equals who would stick to handling the subject he knew best, that is the economy, while they would be free to run their ministries as they saw fit. But Singh has grown into the prime minister's job and has not always restricted himself to this convenient division of labour. When the need has arisen, he has intervened effectively to assert his will on his ministerial colleagues. In fact, his biggest triumph so far has not been on the economic front but in foreign affairs, where the PMO has overshadowed the Ministry of External Affairs in dealing with both China and Pakistan. The start of the Muzzafarabad-Srinagar bus was a personal triumph for the PM, as was the willingness of Pakistan to discuss the possibility of a soft border in Kashmir.

It was also assumed that Singh would keep away from political management which would be handled by the party president. But the prime minister's job profile is such that he cannot always duck the responsibility without seeming weak and ineffective, as he appeared during the Goa crisis. In Jharkhand, however, after his party managers made a mess of things, Singh stepped in and restored the battered image of the Congress by warning Governor Sibte Razi not to adopt a blatantly partisan approach. His forthrightness in Parliament in condemning the US government's cancellation of Narendra Modi's visa took the wind out of the BJP's nationalist sails. But in both cases it was Singh whose image was enhanced, not that of the party president.

Ironically, as the prime minister grows in stature more than opposition leaders, it is his own party colleagues who feel discomfited - in fact some are downright uneasy. The pitfall of being a surrogate PM is that he can ill afford to seem totally in charge or appear to have developed a working relationship with the opposition, for whom the high command nurtures a paranoid dislike. A Congress prime minister who is a non-Nehru-Gandhi has to rule, but must never assume that it is his reign.

Courtesy The Indian Express