Congress president Sonia Gandhi weakened PM, writes Sanjaya Baru

New Delhi/Hyderabad: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had been “defanged” by the Congress in his second term with Sonia Gandhi deciding on key appointments to the Cabinet and to the PMO as he seemed to “surrender” to her and to the UPA constituents.

This picture of a prime minister losing “all vestiges of control over his own government” emerges from a just-published book The Accidental Prime Minister- The Making and Unmaking Of Manmohan Singh by a former close aide of his, Sanjaya Baru, who provides an insight into the “cautious equation” between the PM and Congress president and Dr Singh’s “often troubled” relations with his ministers.

Hitting back at Dr Baru, the PMO on Friday accused him of “misusing” a privileged position, which he held, for commercial gain in writing a book. PMO sources said Dr Singh was very upset over the contents of the book and felt like he has been “stabbed in the back”.

Dr Baru, a senior editor and PM’s media adviser between 2004 and 2008, quotes Dr Singh as having told him that there cannot be two centres of power. “That creates confusion. have to accept that the party president is the centre of power. The government is answerable to the party,” the PM told him, according to the 301-page book published by Penguin.

Dr Baru writes that after he had led the Congress to electoral victory in 2009 Dr Singh had made “the cardinal mistake of imagining the victory was his”. He may have convinced himself that his performance and destiny had again made him the PM, and not Mrs Sonia Gandhhi.