Sonia real power in India – PM

A new book has been launched in the midst of India’s month-long election which will give no comfort to the ruling Congress Party, already well behind in the polls.

In The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh, a former media adviser to Singh, Prime Minister for the past 10 years who is stepping down at this election, quotes him as saying that he had to accept that Congress President Sonia Gandhi was the real power in his government.

“I have to accept that the party president is the centre of power. The government is answerable to the party,” he reportedly told the book’s author, Sanjay Baru, shortly after Congress had won re-election in 2009.

In some ways this confirms what many Indians has suspected all along – that Singh, who was already over 70 when he took office a decade ago, was taking his orders from Gandhi, the widow of assassinated former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and mother of the leader of Congress in the current election, Rahul.

However, to have the matter raised again at this stage underlines the Gandhi family’s influence over Congress that stretches back decades. Rahul’s great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru was the country’s first Prime Minister after independence from the British in 1947 and Nehru’s daughter, Indira, led the country from 1966-77 and again between 1980-84. Rajiv held office from 1984-89.

Baru, said that Sonia’s influence, always present, reached its highest level after Congress was successfully re-elected in 2009 when Singh was effectively “defanged” with Gandhi distributing Cabinet portfolios against his wishes.

The publication brought a swift response from the Prime Minister’s Office which denounced it as a work of fiction. The current media adviser, Pankaj Pachauri described it “as an attempt to misuse a privileged position and access to high office to gain credibility and exploit it for commercial gain”.   

By coincidence, Baru’s book comes only weeks after a biography of the Opposition  Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Leader Narendra Modi in which his role in the 2002 Hindu-Muslim Gujarat riots is discussed.

In Narendra Modi: A Political Biography, author Andy Marino states that Modi, who was then in his first term as Gujarat Chief Minister, was “shaken to the core by the mindless violence”.

More than 1000 people died in the riots, most of them Muslims, and Modi’s detractors have long claimed that he did not do enough to halt the violence. However, he tells Marino that a request to bring in the army to maintain law and order and keep the two communities apart was refused because the army was needed to deal with heightened tensions with Pakistan.

Marino writes that Modi wanted to resign after the riots but was persuaded by the BJP hierarchy to stay on. In the years since he has rarely talked about the violence, saying his role in building Gujarat’s economy into the strongest in the nation was sufficient answer.

“I never waste my time in confrontation,” he is quoted as saying in the biography.

In a recent interview Modi defended his staunch religious views but said he respected the traditions of all religions.

In a television interview he said Muslim children should get better quality education “with a Koran in one hand and a computer in the other”.

Another prominent politician to come under the microscope during the campaign is the leader of the Samajwadi Party, Mulayam Singh Yadav, who criticised a new law under which rapists can be sentenced to death for a repeated offence.

Yadiv, whose left-of-centre party holds 22 seats in the Lok Sabha (Parliament) said it was unfair to hand the death sentence “to boys who make mistakes” and he would move to water down the law if he came to power.

His remarks have caused outrage across India where the subject is a sensitive issue in the wake of several high profile rape cases, and Yadav was quickly into damage control saying no one respects women more than his party.