Timing of Baru book is curious

The relationship between the Congress president and the Prime Minister (in the good old days when only the Congress produced PMs) was loaded in favour of the latter. Just consider the political heavyweights who were PM and the reason becomes clear. This has also been true of the oldest democracy, Britain. It was true of BJP’s stalwart leader, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, as well. Whether this was a good thing can be debated. But the situation as existed was a marker of the power balance within the system.

Sonia Gandhi’s arrival on the scene as the Congress chief who revived the party’s sunken fortunes, and dramatically brought it back to power in 2004 — a job done only by PMs in the past — was bound to alter the equation in relation to the PM who, in this case, was her chosen nominee. This was the “diarchy” which has been talked about — mainly by the Congress’ principal opponent BJP — for the past 10 years by way of criticising the Congress and its leadership. From reported accounts, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s media adviser during UPA-1, Mr Sanjaya Baru, treads the same ground in his sensational account which appeared in public in book form on Friday.

The nub of Mr Baru’s argument is that Mrs Gandhi called all the shots, and decided policy, and Dr Singh was too powerless to be his own man, or to assert his privilege as PM of hiring and firing his ministers, which is a given in the Westminster system.

Here Dr Singh’s former aide appears to lose sight of India’s evolution as a democracy in the coalition era. He quite forgets that it has been the norm in this phase that regional parties which help make a government at the Centre also decide (and not the PM) who the Cabinet minister from their party would be. The PM’s power and privilege stand starkly eroded.

Thus it was in the Vajpayee era as well. (Indeed, Mr Vajpayee couldn’t even remove Narendra Modi — his own party man — as Gujarat CM after the 2002 violence, though he wanted to.) Mr Baru should have known this as he had been adviser to TDP leader Chandrababu Naidu who had ministers in the Vajpayee government. So, Dr Singh is in no way unique. There was little chance that anyone in Mrs Gandhi’s place won’t help steer the decision in respect of choice of Cabinet ministers from the Congress rank.

Mr Baru’s book looks timed to arrive bang in the middle of the Lok Sabha election. It seems like a hatchet job on the Congress president, with Prime Minister Singh playing the fall guy. It doesn’t illuminate the terrain of the relationship between ruling party chief and government leader.