Penguin India published, author Sanjaya Baru’s new book ‘The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh’ has sparked a fresh controversy in the country. Sanjaya Baru – a renowned journalist and former advisor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has claimed in the book that Congress President Sonia Gandhi had run the parallel government in the centre and Dr. Singh had surrendered to her.
In the book Baru has quoted Manmohan Singh who said that there cannot be two centres of power.
“That creates confusion. I have to accept that the party president is the centre of power. The government is answerable to the party,” Baru quoted the PM.
In the book, Baru writes that Singh had made “the cardinal mistake of imagining the victory was his” when Congress-led UPA won the 2009 Lok Sabha Polls.
“Bit by bit, in the space of a few weeks he was defanged. He thought he could induct the ministers he wanted into his team. Sonia nipped that hope in the bud by offering the finance portfolio to Pranab (Mukherjee), without even consulting him,” Baru writes.
Baru has categorically written that Sonia Gandhi was the power in the center and took all the major decision undermining the authority of Prime Minister. Manmohan had no control over his Cabinet colleagues in his second terms.
In the book Baru claimed, Congress strategy was to give every credit to Gandhi family and ‘if the Congress had lost, the blame for the defeat would have been placed squarely on the PM’s shoulders.’ He writes that Congress had decided to give credit to Rahul Gandhi more than Manmohan Singh for victory.
Baru has iterated that Manmohan Singh turned a blind eye to corruption by his colleagues and he did not ‘feel answerable for the misdemeanours of his colleagues and subordinates.’
“But in UPA-2 when corruption scandals tumbled out, his public image and standing took a huge hit from which he was unable to recover because there was no parallel policy narrative in play that could have salvaged his reputation. In other words, there were no positive acts of commission that captured the public mind enough to compensate for the negative acts of omission for which he was being chastised,” Baru writes.
The PMO hit back at Baru by saying he has written a fiction for commercial gains.
“It is an attempt to misuse a privileged position and access to high office to gain credibility and to apparently exploit it for commercial gain,” said the current PM’s media advisor Pankaj Pachauri.
Reacting to Pachauri’s comments, Baru who was the chief editor of the Financial Express before joining Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as his media adviser in UPA I, said, “I am amused”.
The Accidental Prime Minister is one of the most Insightful, honest and insider story which takes a profound look at Manmohan Singh era. The book will be launched on 20 April, 2014.
Book Details:
Author: Sanjaya Baru
Publisher: Penguin Books India
ISBN13: 9780670086740
Binding: Hardback
Pages: 320
MRP: Rs. 599
