Sonia usurped PM’s power

Ex-PM adviser Baru’s book reveals Manmohan’s ‘weak personality’

new delhi — In a book that has sent ripples across the political establishment for its timing, Sanjaya Baru, media adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in his first term, has said that Congress president Sonia Gandhi slowly chipped away at the authority of the Prime Minister’s Office, created a parallel power structure and left a weakened prime minister who “allowed himself to become an object of such ridicule in his second term in office.”

In a book that hit the stands on Friday, Baru, who now works with a think-tank, said so weak was Manmohan Singh that he also failed to defend his (Baru’s) promised reappointment after the 2009 election victory as Secretary in the PMO and tamely surrendered to the party’s veto.

“To tell the truth, I was dismayed by the PM’s display of spinelessness,” Baru said of his former boss. Giving several instances of Manmohan Singh capitulating to the extra-constitutional authority of Sonia Gandhi and refusing to assert himself, Baru stated:

“Initially, I saw his subservience as an aspect of his shy and selfeffacing 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,” Baru said in the book The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh.

“So I, like millions of his middle-class supporters, feel tragically cheated that he has allowed himself to become an object of such ridicule in his second term in office, in the process devaluing the office of the prime minister,” Baru said in the book.

The BJP promptly reacted with a I-told-you-so, with party leader M. Venkaiah Naidu saying that “I have been saying from day one, PM presides, Madam decides.”

The Congress, battling countrywide negative perceptions about the government and widely expected to do badly in these polls, was left red-faced.

Baru, during whose tenure in the first term of Manmohan Singh (2004-2009) enjoyed a positive media, was always uncomfortable with the Congress establishment who made no secret of the fact that they wanted him replaced in Manmohan Singh’s second term.—