MasterNotDiscovered on Client node

I have a client node which has elasticsearch 1.7.2 running on Centos 6, as a service. Cat API on other nodes shows that this node joined cluster. Cluster Pulse in marvel also confirmed it. But when tried curl for cluster information on this client node, i see MasterNotDiscovered 503 error. What could be missing?

node.data : false
node.master: false
minimum master nodes: 2

$ service elasticsearch status
elasticsearch (pid 25580) is running...

$ curl -XGET http://localhost:9200/_cat/nodes?v
{"error":"MasterNotDiscoveredException[waited for [30s]]","status":503}