About The Accidental Prime Minister Book

Author of The Accidental Prime Minister Book Sanjaya Baru was chief editor of the Financial
Express and Business Standard. He is currently director for geo-economics and strategy at the
International Institute of Strategic Studies.'Manmohan has three daughters, no son; so he treats
Sanjaya as soon.'-Sonia Gandhi, Outlook In 2004 Sanjaya Baru left a successful career as chief
editor of the Financial Express to join Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as his media adviser in
UPA 1. Singh offered him the job with the words, 'Sitting here, I know I will be isolated from the
outside world. I want you to be my eye sand ears. Tell me what you think I should know, without
fear or favour.'

The Accidental Prime Minister is Baru's account of what it was like to 'manage' public opinion for
Singh while giving us a riveting look at Indian politics as it happened behind the scenes. As Singh's
spin doctor and trusted aide for four years, Baru observed up close Singh's often troubled relations
with his ministers, his cautious equation with Sonia Gandhi and how he handled the big crises from
managing the Left to pushing through the nuclear deal. In this book he tells all and draws for the
first time a revelatory picture of what it was like for Singh to work in a government that had two
centres of power. Insightful, acute and packed with political gossip, The Accidental Prime Minister
is one of the great insider accounts of Indian political life and a superb portrait of the Manmohan Singh Era.

Sanjaya Baru The Accidental Prime Minister Author

Sanjaya Baru is in limelight after publishing book on Manmohan Singh Naming Accidental Prime Minister.

He is an Indian political commentator and policy analyst, he is currently serving as Director for Geo-Economics and Strategy at the International Institute of Strategic Studies.

Previously he had served as associate editor at The Economic Times and The Times of India, and then chief editor at The Financial Express. He quit the Express to become Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's media advisor and chief spokesperson, a role in which he served from May 2004 until August 2008.

In April 2014, Penguin India published The Accidental Prime Minister, Baru's tell-all memoir about his time at the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). 

In it, Baru alleges that the prime minister was completely subservient to Congress President Sonia Gandhi, who wielded significant influence in the running of the Singh administration, including the PMO itself. The book has sparked off a controversy, with the PMO officially denouncing it as "fiction". Baru, however, has said that he set out to show an empathetic portrait of the prime minister.

Read some Facts about Accidental Prime minister book

Prime Ministers, in the past, had overawed the Supreme Court Judges and made them throw the Constitution and guaranteed fundamental rights into dustbin, as we shamefully note from the infamous Emergency-ADM Jabalpur case.

The uniqueness of PM in our system of governance is such that the Supreme Court had felt he was no ordinary person to be summoned to appear like a common accused in a trial court. It had ordered setting up of a special court in .. 

a high-security zone to appear in a cheating case [Commissioner of Delhi Police case 1996 (6) SCC 323]. To our amazement, we learnt from a just-released book by PM Manmohan Singh's one-time media adviser, Sanjaya Baru, that this Prime Minister was bent by the party president.

After the party president took the high moral ground stand to give up power and chose Singh as the head of a Congress-led coalition government, Singh as PM had no illusion with whom the power centre rested.

Singh chose Baru as his media adviser and tasked him to be his 'eyes and ears'. Baru's eyes and ears absorbed for five years the most critical behind the curtain play of political decisions, which got branded as Singh's decision — from implementation of National Rural Employment Guarantee Act to induction of A Raja in the Cabinet.

The most startling claim in Baru's book was that PMO official Pulok Chatterjee had "regular, almost daily meetings with Sonia Gandhi in which he was to brief her... and seek her instructions on important files to be cleared by the PM."

The Accidental Prime Minister Book details

Product details

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• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books Limited (11 April 2014)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670086746
• ISBN-13: 978-0670086740
• Product Dimensions: 23.6 x 16 x 3.6 cm
• The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh is a 2014 memoir by Indian policy analyst Sanjaya Baru, who was Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's media advisor from May 2004 until August 2008. Published by Penguin India, the book alleges that Singh was not entirely in control of his cabinet—or even the Prime Minister's Office (PMO). Instead, significant power was wielded by the Congress party's president Sonia Gandhi, to whom Singh was completely "subservient".
  
  
  "There cannot be two centres of power", Baru remembers Singh explaining to him, "That creates confusion. I have to accept that the party president is the centre of power. The government is answerable to the party."
  
  
  The PMO released a statement the day Accidental Prime Minister was released, dismissing the veracity of the memoir, "It is an attempt to misuse a privileged position and access to high office to gain credibility and to apparently exploit it for commercial gain. The commentary smacks of fiction and coloured views of a former adviser." Baru's reply to the PMO's charges was "I am amused." Baru told the Indian Express, "most of the book is positive (about the PM)" and that he wrote it mainly because Singh "has become an object of ridicule, not admiration. I am showing him as a human being, I want there to be empathy for him."
  
  
  According to the Guardian, "Such an intimate portrait of dysfunction will certainly have political ramifications", especially since India is in the midst of a general election. Spokespersons of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the chief opposition party, posed a series of questions to Singh and Sonia Gandhi on the basis of The Accidental Prime Minister's revelations, "did the PM refuse to take daily briefings from intelligence agencies and did this not have a bearing on our security situation? ... Did the PM forfeit his prerogative to decide on who would be in his cabinet? Was the '2G fame' A Raja appointed at the behest of Sonia Gandhi? Did the PM knowingly overlook corruption by his colleagues as alleged in the book. Did 2G, CWG and Coalgate happened because of this?" In light of the elections, the BJP also promised "We will not give an accidental Prime Minister to this country."

The Accidental Prime Minister Book reviews

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh once said he believed that history would be kinder to him than contemporary media. He does not have to wait for historians. His erstwhile media adviser Sanjaya Baru has written a book that is not only kind to Singh but is effusive in its praise for him. The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh is by design a book meant to salvage the reputation of India’s 13th Prime Minister. 

From economic policymaking to ending India’s nuclear apartheid, Baru can find no fault with Singh. In the author’s eyes, Singh’s first innings (2004-09) was outstanding; his second round, beginning 2009—by which time Baru had left the Prime Minister’s Office—was full of trouble for Singh.

Unwittingly, however, the Manmohan Singh who emerges in the book is at a considerable remove from his perceived image of an apolitical and tactically naïve leader who landed the prime minister’s job accidentally. Baru does not say so directly but throws enough hints, scattered across his book, that show Singh in a different light.

Two are worth noting: Singh’s attitude and response to corruption and his unwillingness or inability to quit as prime minister at the right time. Both proved fatal to his image.

Consider corruption first. Singh’s reticence to tackle his erring colleagues is not a product of his political weaknesses but one of personal choice.

“Dr Singh’s general attitude towards corruption in public life, which adopted through his career in government, seemed to me to be that he would himself maintain the highest standards of probity in public life, but would not impose this on others,” Baru writes in the book. (p84)

If this is true, it explains a lot about the nature of corruption in his government. The attitude that Baru ascribes to Singh is one suited to a civil servant—detached and aloof—but one that is unsuitable for a head of government. As later events showed, it was corruption that hit the United Progressive Alliance’s (UPA) fortunes the most. Singh’s passivity was certainly a reason why the problem acquired such threatening proportions.

The second personality trait, his inability to quit when he ran into rough political weather is equally complicated. In UPA-1, Singh successfully used the threat of resignation to get the India-US civil nuclear deal cleared past a sceptical Congress leadership. One reason why that threat worked was the absence of a next rung leader who could take over if Singh quit. By UPA-2, that problem had been obviated: Rahul Gandhi was on the horizon. At that moment, with one crisis after another hitting his government, Singh withdrew his hand. After the nuclear deal, he never threatened to resign.

It is hard not to conclude that Singh used the threat to resign as a strategic device. But having used it once, he knew it would not work again.

Baru raises the question but chooses to defend his master. “Should he have resigned at the first whiff of scandal, owning moral responsibility for the corruption of others, instead of defending the government? Perhaps. Could he have resigned? Maybe not. The party would have hounded him for ‘letting it down’. It would have then accused him of trying to occupy the high moral ground and quitting in principle to avoid being sacked for not ‘delivering the goods’. When the horse you are riding becomes a tiger it is difficult to dismount,” Baru writes (p281). This is nothing more than an adroit defence.

Had Singh quit when things began taking a turn for the worse, his party and its leadership would have been in trouble and not Singh. But he chose to linger on until his party came to believe that he was a liability. The writer ofThe Accidental Prime Minister highlights many such points when Singh could have taken the decision to go. Baru ends by showing how Singh willingly chose a different course.

The Accidental Prime Minister

About Book

This book is written by Sanjaya Baru he  worked as chief editor of the Financial Express and Business Standard. He is currently director for geo-economics and strategy at the International Institute of Strategic Studies

In 2004 Sanjaya Baru left a successful career as chief editor of the Financial Express to join Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as his media adviser in UPA 1. Singh offered him the job with the words, '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 or favor.

The Accidental Prime Minister

The Accidental Prime Minister is Baru's account of what it was like to 'manage' public opinion for Singh while giving us a riveting look at Indian politics as it happened behind the scenes. As Singh's spin doctor and trusted aide for four years, Baru observed up close Singh's often troubled relations with his ministers, his cautious equation with Sonia Gandhi and how he handled the big crises from managing the Left to pushing through the nuclear deal. In this book he tells all and draws for the first time a revelatory picture of what it was like for Singh to work in a government that had two centers of power.

Insightful, acute and packed with political gossip, The Accidental Prime Minister is one of the great insider accounts of Indian political life and a superb portrait of the Manmohan Singh era.