New Delhi: Former Chief Election Commissioner S.Y. Quraishi has recounted an emotional 2012 conversation in which then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, “I will commit suicide,” after Quraishi raised concerns about ministers’ remarks that he felt were undermining the Election Commission. The episode appears in Quraishi’s forthcoming book, India and I: A Hundred Memories, Not a Memoir.
According to Quraishi, the exchange came after he had expressed his grievance over what he described as “loose talk” by ministers about the functioning of the poll body. Singh, he writes, then reached out personally and asked to meet him urgently, PTI reported.
Quraishi says the backdrop to the incident was a controversy during the Uttar Pradesh election campaign in January 2012, when then law minister Salman Khurshid announced at a rally that a future Congress government would raise the quota for Muslims in jobs from 4.5 per cent to 9 per cent. The BJP complained that the statement violated the Model Code of Conduct.
The Election Commission then held hearings for four days, with Abhishek Manu Singhvi representing the Congress and Arun Jaitley arguing for the BJP. Quraishi says the commission eventually censured Khurshid, which was the strongest step available under the code.
He writes that Khurshid was upset by the action and that some voices within the Congress later suggested the commission had acted in an “arrogant” or “arbitrary
” manner. Quraishi says such criticism did not trouble him as much as remarks that could weaken trust in an institution like the Election Commission.
Quraishi recalls that he mentioned his concern to Harish Khare, then the prime minister’s press secretary, during an Eid open house. Khare asked whether he should tell the prime minister, and Quraishi agreed. The next day, he says, his RAX (Restricted Access Exchange) phone rang and he was asked to meet Dr. Manmohan Singh urgently.
He says he reached the prime minister’s residence at 7 pm, where Singh was waiting at the door. Before they were even seated, Singh reportedly told him: “Harish told me what you said. If that is what you think, I will commit suicide.” Quraishi says he was stunned, because his criticism had been aimed at certain ministers, not at Singh.
Quraishi adds that Singh immediately clarified that he had not known about the ministers’ remarks and said he would have strongly reprimanded them if he had. Singh also told him that if Quraishi ever had any concern, he should call him directly. Quraishi says Singh then said the line that stayed with him: “The Election Commission is not just India’s pride; it is the soul of our democracy. If we lose that, we lose everything.”
The former CEC says the meeting left him shaken, not because of politics, but because it showed him a leader who treated constitutional propriety as a personal conviction. He also says he informed T.K.A. Nair and Shivshankar Menon about the exchange, and that Harish Khare later spoke of it to common acquaintances.
Quraishi writes that after the meeting, the hostile talk about the Election Commission subsided and no further action was needed. In his account, the episode stands out as a rare glimpse of a powerful leader who carried office with sensitivity and restraint.
“I have met many powerful people in my life but few who wore power so lightly, or felt its weight so deeply. In a profession that rewards a thick skin, Dr Manmohan Singh stood out for a rare sensitivity in the exercise of power,” says Quraishi in his book.