T C A Srinivasa-Raghavan: Not quite an accidental prime minister

Tempers have cooled over Sanjaya Baru's book about Manmohan Singh. So the time has come to provide some perspective on books by persons who had served in very close quarters to the source of supreme power in government but had not been in the innermost or (even inner) councils.

Whether it was Alan Campbell-Johnson, who was Mountbatten's press officer in 1947-48, or Lord Moran, who published his diaries of the time he was Winston Churchill's personal physician, or Ron Ziegler, who was Richard Nixon's press secretary, or Margaret Thatcher's Bernard Ingham, or Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's spin doctor - or anyone else who was similarly placed - there has almost always been very sharp criticism when they published their books.

The general refrain is usually the same. If at all they wanted to "betray confidences commonplace at the workplace", they should at least have waited. Letting the ashes cool, as it were.

There is a reason for this: whatever a subordinate may think of his closeness to the supreme boss, in reality the distance remains very great. Usually it is one or maybe two persons who actually help the boss run the government. It is they who have the full picture. R K Dhawan, P C Alexander, A N Verma, Ashok Saikia and now Pulok Chatterjee, for instance. The others have to rely on hearsay and gossip within the Prime Minister's Office (PMO).

Is never a good time?
Mark Twain once said that more than the spoken word, it was the well-timed pause that carried more weight. Ask a batsman the difference between a good shot and a bad one, and he will tell you it is timing. Ask a musician why he played so badly that day, and he will tell you he wasn't getting the timing right. Ask a comedian why her jokes fell flat, and she will tell you her timing was off.

And ask Sanjaya Baru why he has received so much flak for his book about Manmohan Singh, and he may well say that his publishers, perhaps anxious to get it right after the Wendy Doniger debacle, got the timing wrong.

But whether he says that or not, they ought to have waited till July, which is when the book was originally due. Advancing the date, for whatever reason, was not just unseemly, it was unfair to the author, who, despite his attempt to salvage Dr Singh's reputation, has been made to look like an ingrate.

That's how it is
Dr Baru and I have known each other ever since we were colleagues at The Economic Times in the early 1990s. He has many virtues, but malice is not one of them.

So to accuse him of it in writing The Accidental Prime Minister is plain silly. All that he has done is to confirm what everyone knew all along, namely, that Manmohan Singh did not wear the pants in the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) house.

If that upset so many people, well, what can one say except that the Congress party's lickspittle cannot be expected to keep its idiotic mouth shut even when someone points out the obvious or, indeed, perhaps, especially then.

Dr Baru's book, as so many other similar ones, is his version of what happened. As such, it did not deserve the vicious reviews and comments that it has attracted.

But then if you criticise the Gandhis - directly or by praising someone else - vitriol is something you must expect from the Congress party. That is par for the course.

Dr Baru's defence of Dr Singh reminds me of the late Ziegler's defence of Nixon and Ingham's of Thatcher. Like them, Dr Baru tells scores of interesting stories, which I am not going to repeat because everyone must have read the book by now.

On several things, he is not one hundred per cent right, most notably about the appointment of Manmohan Singh as prime minister. Hold your breath - Manmohan Singh was told as far back as 1998 that he would be prime minister when Sonia Gandhi thought she had the requisite majority of 272. In that sense, what happened in 2004 was not quite an accident.

But he is absolutely right when he says Sonia Gandhi stymied Dr Singh at every step. So the question will be asked repeatedly: why didn't Dr Singh quit? Where was his self-respect? Did Dr Singh put the survival of the government above his own reputation? Or did being prime minister matter more than anything else to him?

Dr Baru needed to have explained Dr Singh's thinking on this more convincingly. Maybe it is part of the 50 per cent he has not revealed.

As it stands, the book - apart from the anecdotes - is an admiring subordinate's defence of his boss who, when push came to shove, did not stand by the subordinate.

But then, Dr Singh didn't stand by himself, either, did he?