Sonia weakened PM, writes Baru
PMO accuses ex-official of exploiting office for profit
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had been “defanged” by the Congress in his second term with Sonia Gandhi deciding on key appointments to the Cabinet and to the PMO as he seemed to “surrender” to her and to the UPA constituents.
This picture of a prime minister losing “all vestiges of control over his own government” emerges from a just-published book The Accidental Prime Minister — The Making and Unmaking Of
Manmohan Singh by a former close aide of his, Sanjaya Baru, who provides an insight into the “cautious equation” between the PM and Congress president and Dr Singh’s “often troubled” relations with his ministers.
Hitting back at Dr Baru, the PMO on Friday accused him of “misusing” a privileged position, which he held, for commercial gain in writing a book. PMO sources said Dr Singh was very upset over the contents of the book and felt like he has been “stabbed in the back”. Dr Baru, a senior editor and PM’s media
adviser between 2004 and 2008, quotes Dr Singh as having told him that there cannot be two centres of power. “That creates confusion. have to accept that the party president is the centre of power. The government is answerable to the party,” the PM told him, according to the 301-page book published by Penguin.
Dr Baru writes that after he had led the Congress to electoral victory in 2009 Dr Singh had made “the cardinal mistake of imagining the victory was his”. He may have convinced himself that his performance and destiny had again made him the PM, and not Mrs Sonia Gandhhi.
Sanjaya Baru’s book argues that the limits of PM’s political authority and the PMO’s institutional weakness meant that there was very little control of the PM and his office over the misdemeanours of ministers.
“Bit by bit, 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,” Dr Baru writes.
“I was dismayed by the PM’s display of spinelessness,” he says wondering why the PM had succumbed to the pressure.
“Initially, I saw his subservience as an aspect of his shy and self-effacing personality, but over time I felt, like many, that this might be his strategy for political survival. Was it just unquestioned loyalty to the leader of a survival instinct that prompted him to remain? Whatever the motive, his image took a fatal blow,” Dr Baru feels.
“So I, like millions of his middle-class supporters, feel tragically cheated that he has allowed himself to become an object of ridicule in his second term in office, in the process devaluing the office of the PM,” says Mr Baru.
“If his failure to do so arose from loyalty to the Congress or a promise to Sonia, it was misplaced — and unrewarded — loyalty. Except it enabled him to remain in office, even if not in power. His apparent commitment to ensuring Rahul’s succession perpetuating the Congress’s control by one family, was even more misplaced. That was Bheeshma’s failure too,” he said.
Dr Baru added, “I don’t want to comment anything now. I am not interested to do politics on the contents of. Let the people read it. why should I react to comments made against me by people who I think did not even read my book.”