Harry Potter of the PMO
Book Review
The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh.
By Sanjaya Baru
Penguin 2014, Rs 599
If a book’s title, content and timing can polarize opinion in the midst of a heavily polarized election campaign, then Sanjaya Baru’s sccount of his years as media adviser to the prime minister in UPA-1, has scored a bull’s eye. The response in quarters close to Dr Manmohan Singh has perhaps been excessive. His daughter Upinder Singh, a respected professor of history, has called it “nothing but a stab in the back…a huge betrayal of trust”; his office has gone into overdrive in long-winded dismissals. Opponents of the Congress Party have had a field day in holding the book as further proof, if it were needed, that it was Sonia Gandhi not Manmohan Singh who dictated key government decisions, from allotting cabinet posts to making policy. The Congress, of course, in the words of spokesperson Ajay Maken, denounces it is as a “fantastic, fictional narrative”.
Sanjaya Baru, a well-known economics journalist and editor, was under no illusion when he accepted the job on his 50th birthday in the summer of 2004; his acquaintance with Dr Singh was based on professional and personal connections. As he points out early on, he was, like his boss, well aware as to where the real centre of power lay: “After all, had Sonia Gandhi not been born an Italian she would have kept the job for herself. The fact of her alien status had made it necessary for her to choose another leader and Dr Singh was the man she chose.”
When he first visits the new prime minister at Race Course Road to ask about his job profile, the prime minister says, “Sitting here, I know I will be isolated from the outside world. I want you to be my eyes and ears. Tell me what you think I should know, without fear and favour.”
No shrinking violet, Baru takes the words to heart; as the PM’s spin doctor he resolves to shore up the image of a man---whose intellect and ability he deeply admires---handicapped by painful shyness, “notorious for his silences” at official meetings. His efforts appear to be thwarted by three key PMO officials: the overly cautious and risk-averse T.K.A. Nair principal secretary to the PM; spymaster M.K.Narayanan, later national security adviser; and Pulok Chatterjee of the IAS and devout Gandhi family loyalist. The latter two owe their allegiance to 10 Janpath, with Chatterjee in almost daily touch with Sonia seeking “her instructions on important files to be cleared by the PM”. Ministers, too, Prithviraj Chavan and Jairam Ramesh for example, owe their jobs directly to Sonia. Although much of this was widely known, Baru builds up enough evidence to show how it happened in the parallel power universe that erased the distinction between ruling party and government.
Baru’s effort to project the PM as “his own man” rather than Sonia’s “puppet” lands him in trouble. In 2007 after being appointed general secretary in the party Rahul Gandhi visits the PM on his birthday; Ahmed Patel, Sonia’s political secretary, asks that a statement be issued that Rahul wants the rural employment guarantee scheme be extended to all 500 rural districts rather than the 200 planned by the rural development ministry, the PMO and the all-powerful National Advisory Council headed by Sonia. Baru refuses, on the grounds that such a statement should emanate from the party, not the PMO; later in response to a journalist’s query he sends an SMS, “half in jest” he claims, that the scheme’s extension is in fact the PM’s birthday gift to the nation. As the SMS gains currency he is summoned by the PM and given a dressing down as the stony-faced trio of Nair, Narayanan and Chatterjee troop out. He reports a party leader as saying: “What does Baru think? He thinks Dr Singh can win us elections? We have to project Rahulji’ image and this kind of SMS does not help.”
If the episode leaves the author “with a depressing awareness of the limitation of my job as Dr Singh’s spin doctor” he is still resolutely unstoppable. He describes some touching scenes between him and his boss that are impossible to verify. On one occasion, when rumours gain strength that that the PM may be replaced, he finds Dr Singh sitting alone, “his eyes moist…he was holding back tears.” As self-appointed “court jester…summoned to entertain a morose king” he succeeds in cheering up his boss with a dollop of gossip.
At the height of the long battle to negotiate and clinch the civil nuclear energy deal with the US (Manmohan Singh’s finest hour as PM, according to Baru, which he recounts in considerable detail) the pro and anti factions are ranged across the spectrum of the US and Indian establishments. Tensions between the PM and Sonia escalate, the latter keen to appease the Left parties on whose life support the UPA government depends, and save it at all costs. The Left itself is seemingly divided between hard-liners like Prakash Karat and moderates such as Sitaram Yechury. A headline-hungry media, dogging the story relentlessly, is getting harder to please. As Baru tells the story, if the PM was willing to quit and go down blazing all guns to save the deal, so was he, firing all cylinders in remorselessly marshalling the media, and smoothly manoeuvring seasoned journalists like Manini Chatterjee, Karan Thapar and Rajdeep Sardesai.
As a last-ditch resort he visits the PM and his wife Gursharan Kaur at home, both companionably reading their books. He eloquently argues, in a speech with shades of Bollywood rather than Shakespearean delivery, that this is the PM’s do-or-die moment. “If you don’t get through this one initiative that everyone identifies with you with, what can you claim as your own legacy?” What did I.K.Gujral, Deve Gowda and V.P.Singh achieve? “After four years, what can the PM claim he has done, when all the credit for everything, other than the deal is given to her?”
Baru does not tell us in what tone he spoke these words, in an urgent whisper borne of desperation or thundery oration.
“Haan,” says Gursharan Kaur, in apparent agreement at the end of his soliloquy. He fails to report whether she shut the book she was reading.
Such closed-door encounters will forever remain in the realm of conjecture although, in my opinion, they are no less valid for being one man’s view of the unfolding personalities and processes at centre of power. Baru writes clean prose, with a journalist’s sharp eye and ear, and adroit setting of scenes. On no occasion does he say that he was privy to official files or what transpired between the PM and Sonia Gandhi.
At the end, though, the reader is entitled to ask who the book’s real hero (or heroine) is. There is only one answer, loud and clear: It is Sanjaya Baru himself. He emerges as a sort of Harry Potter of the PMO, endowed with supernatural powers to fight the Dark Forces. Other than being the PM’s media adviser he is also Dr Singh’s crutch, hot water bottle, chief humourist and firefighter.
It is a thrillingly self-congratulatory performance . And well-rewarded, it turns out. The publishers report that the book has sold 50,000 copies since its appearance on April 11.
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