The Accidental Prime Minister

Book Review

 

Quite a contrast!

Let me start with a disclaimer. This is a book review and has nothing to do with the movie of the same name. I read a few reviews of the movie and each one trashes the movie as cheap propaganda for the right wing. The movie seems to be an attempt to denigrate Dr Manmohan Singh as well as the Congress Party, according to the reviews I read. The book, on the other hand, is a genuine attempt to understand Dr Singh as a person.

The author, Sanjaya Baru, was Dr Singh’s media adviser during UPA-1. He had very close associations with the Prime Minister if the book is to be believed. When the book was published in 2014, the Congress Party was displeased with it for obvious reasons. Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi are shown to be manipulators who did not let Dr Singh wield any real power during his second reign as PM.  The Prime Minister’s Office released a press release then labelling the book as mere fiction.

Baru carries conviction, however. There may be some exaggerations here and there. But the book comes across to the reader with a high degree of credibility. Baru admires Dr Singh’s “intellect, his humane persona, his gentle and civil conduct, his political instinct and his deep patriotism.” The book reveals these aspects of Dr Singh’s personality.

Baru shows us how Dr Singh managed to keep the power with him during UPA-1 but lost that power when he assumed the office for the second term. The focus of the book is on the first term, however. Baru was not the media adviser during the second term; he had left the job for “personal reasons”.  

“The world is not a morality play,” the book quotes Dr Singh. “The world’s political and economic system is a power play and those who have greater power use it to their advantage.” Dr Singh’s failure was he did not know how to use his power to his and the nation’s advantage. He let others pull the strings. His second term as Prime Minister reeked of scams and scandals because he did not wield his power properly. Personally he remained clean; no one could raise a finger against his personal integrity. The book shows how personal integrity is not enough in politics.

The book throws ample light on the personality of Dr Singh. He is an admirable person. Noble souls need not be successful politicians. Thus Dr Singh ends up as a tragic character fit for a Shakespearean history play. Baru’s book is able to fathom the depths of that great character and to that extent it is a great book. We also get some brilliant peeps into the dark corridors of power at the Centre.

I don’t like the cover of the book, however. Why on earth did Penguin have to put Anupam Kher on the cover of a book about Dr Manmohan Singh? That picture is totally out of place there. Kher and Dr Singh have nothing in common except that the former caricatured the latter in a substandard movie.

PS.  My review of Tharoor's book:

https://matheikal.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-paradoxical-prime-minister.html