Ex-PM aide drops book bomb, says Sonia ran govt
“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.” This is what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh ostensibly told his former media advisor, Sanjaya Baru, soon after being re-elected in 2009.
In an account of his years in the PMO, ‘The Accidental Prime Minister – The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh’, Baru has detailed the complex relationship between the PM and Sonia Gandhi, written about the PM’s allies and antagonists in the cabinet, exposed the policy battles in the PMO, said there was jostling to give credit to the party instead of the PM for policy initiatives, noted that failure in 2009 polls would have been pinned on the PM while success was appropriated by the Nehru-Gandhi family, and claimed that the PM was ‘defanged’ after the 2009 electoral success, with Sonia deciding on cabinet portfolios against his wishes. But, despite this apparent conflict, Baru claims the two leaders ‘implicitly trusted each other’.
The Prime Minister’s Office has, however, said the book ‘smacks of fiction’, and dismissed it as an attempt to ‘misuse a privileged position and access to high office to gain credibility, and exploit it for commercial gain’.
Responding to the statement, Baru said, “I don’t want to remark on what the PMO has commented on the book. They should first read the book. There’s nothing fictional or hypothetical about anything that I have written. Anyone who reads the book will know that this is not fiction at all.”
The book claims it was a different Manmohan Singh in UPA-1.
After Sonia Gandhi said at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in 2007 that the survival of the government took precedence over the nuclear deal, Singh reportedly told two interlocutors – the late K Subrahmanyam, and Baru’s father –, “She has let me down.”
In June 2008, the PM issued an ultimatum to Sonia – “Ignore the Left and proceed, or agree with the Left and stay put,” the book says. If it was the latter, she would have to find another PM. Sonia used intermediaries like PM’s confidante Montek Singh Ahluwalia to dissuade him from resigning, but eventually supported the PM.
Baru had moved out of the PMO in 2008, before the polls, for an academic assignment in Singapore. After the UPA victory in 2009, the PM – according to Baru – asked him to come back and join as advisor. But the appointment did not materialise, since the party leadership was renot comfortable with him.