TOI EDIT:
Damning indictment: Sanjaya Baru's account of dual authority within UPA is a plausible explanation of what went wrong
Apr 14, 2014
Throughout the ten years of UPA rule Congress president Sonia Gandhi heaped praise on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for his vision, leadership qualities and personal integrity. The latter, in turn, sometimes went to an embarrassing extent to return the compliment. But in Delhi's incestuous circle of senior politicians, bureaucrats and media persons, hardly anyone doubted that this mutual back-scratching was an elaborate charade.
What Sanjaya Baru — who served as media adviser to Manmohan Singh in the UPA-I regime — has done in his book 'The Accidental Prime Minister' is to say aloud what many others have been murmuring beneath their breath. Namely that the Congress president used her political secretary, Ahmed Patel, and her chosen loyalists in the Prime Minister's Office and Cabinet to call the shots in matters ranging from the appointment of individuals to positions of power and influence to interference in the formulation and implementation of government policies.
If Sonia Gandhi emerges in Baru's memoirs as a suave if manipulative figure behind the scenes, Manmohan Singh comes out as a victim. One of the few occasions when he asserted himself was when he threatened to put in his papers if he wasn't allowed to get the Indo-US nuclear deal through. Otherwise, he suffered one setback after another with stoicism. Senior ministers bypassed his authority and colleagues in PMO were at each other's throats in official meetings. And for all the acclaim he received for his spotless character, he was unable to check the government's slide into a quagmire of sleaze. So here was a Congress president who exercised power without responsibility, took credit for such successes as UPA was able to achieve and by that token attributed — often furtively — its failures to the executive. The result? A near-complete subversion of the Cabinet system.
This is no doubt a damning indictment of UPA. The timing of the book's publication, coming as it is during Lok Sabha polls, will certainly raise eyebrows. Some will even see in it an attempt to settle personal scores. The PMO's statement that the author has misused his privileged position and access to high office and peddled 'fiction' and 'coloured views' for commercial gain is only to be expected and must be seen in this context. But Baru hasn't breached any law. His faults, if any, can only be attributed to journalistic legerdemain.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/Damning-indictment-Sanjaya-Barus-account-of-dual-authority-within-UPA-is-a-plausible-explanation-of-what-went-wrong/articleshow/33711669.cms
Damning indictment: Sanjaya Baru's account of dual authority within UPA is a plausible explanation of what went wrong
Apr 14, 2014
Throughout the ten years of UPA rule Congress president Sonia Gandhi heaped praise on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for his vision, leadership qualities and personal integrity. The latter, in turn, sometimes went to an embarrassing extent to return the compliment. But in Delhi's incestuous circle of senior politicians, bureaucrats and media persons, hardly anyone doubted that this mutual back-scratching was an elaborate charade.
What Sanjaya Baru — who served as media adviser to Manmohan Singh in the UPA-I regime — has done in his book 'The Accidental Prime Minister' is to say aloud what many others have been murmuring beneath their breath. Namely that the Congress president used her political secretary, Ahmed Patel, and her chosen loyalists in the Prime Minister's Office and Cabinet to call the shots in matters ranging from the appointment of individuals to positions of power and influence to interference in the formulation and implementation of government policies.
If Sonia Gandhi emerges in Baru's memoirs as a suave if manipulative figure behind the scenes, Manmohan Singh comes out as a victim. One of the few occasions when he asserted himself was when he threatened to put in his papers if he wasn't allowed to get the Indo-US nuclear deal through. Otherwise, he suffered one setback after another with stoicism. Senior ministers bypassed his authority and colleagues in PMO were at each other's throats in official meetings. And for all the acclaim he received for his spotless character, he was unable to check the government's slide into a quagmire of sleaze. So here was a Congress president who exercised power without responsibility, took credit for such successes as UPA was able to achieve and by that token attributed — often furtively — its failures to the executive. The result? A near-complete subversion of the Cabinet system.
This is no doubt a damning indictment of UPA. The timing of the book's publication, coming as it is during Lok Sabha polls, will certainly raise eyebrows. Some will even see in it an attempt to settle personal scores. The PMO's statement that the author has misused his privileged position and access to high office and peddled 'fiction' and 'coloured views' for commercial gain is only to be expected and must be seen in this context. But Baru hasn't breached any law. His faults, if any, can only be attributed to journalistic legerdemain.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/Damning-indictment-Sanjaya-Barus-account-of-dual-authority-within-UPA-is-a-plausible-explanation-of-what-went-wrong/articleshow/33711669.cms