The Accidental Prime Minister: Revelation or betrayal?

The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh has its author, Sanjaya Baru, providing a Rashomon-like account of his four-year stint in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) under the United Progressive Alliance rule (UPA). Released on 20 April 2014, in the middle of an acrimonious, bruising campaign for the Indian General Election, the book created much furore. By disclosing the inherently unequal relationship that Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, president of the Indian National Congress (INC), shared, it imparted credibility to the opposition's charge that Manmohan Singh had devalued the office of Prime Minister during his ten-year rule. The reason for this devaluation, the book claims, was Sonia Gandhi's penchant for interfering in the functioning of the government, including perusing official files and deciding on the allocation of cabinet portfolios, and Singh's tame acquiescence to her extra-constitutional authority. Baru's claims echoed the opposition's strident criticism of the diarchy system prevailing under the Singh-Sonia leadership, provoking Congress members to dismiss The Accidental Prime Minister as a tendentious, even fictional, account.

But then, Baru isn't the omniscient narrator of the kind most novelists are, and, occasionally, dramatic non-fiction writers endeavour to become. Baru hasn't pieced together a narrative through interviews with characters in the book, nor has he poured through the files the PMO generated between 2004 and 2008 when he was Manmohan Singh's media adviser. By definition, therefore, his perception of the events during those years has to be partial and subjective.