Why Manmohan Singh failed

From the semi-retired academic discussions of Saturday Club at Delhi's India International Centre to the hurly-burly of 7 RCR, Manmohan Singh's rise in 2004 was meteoric. The architect of India's economic liberalisation would now be the helmsman of the UPA Government, keeping the seat alive for the Young Inheritor. It should have worked. Sonia Gandhi was steering the party, Manmohan Singh would handle the government. It didn't.

From senior bureaucrats in the PMO such as M.K. Narayanan to junior ministers Jairam Ramesh to even his PMO deputy Prithviraj Chavan, everyone felt they owed loyalty to Sonia Gandhi. Senior Cabinet colleagues routinely ignored him, some even denying him the basic courtesy of briefing him on foreign visits or addressing him as Mr Prime Minister. His silences, especially on corruption of colleagues, undid him. Worse, his shiniest moment, of striking his beloved nuclear deal with George W. Bush, carried with it the stigma of a deal. His media adviser Sanjaya Baru, 59, who has known Manmohan for over two decades, saw the unravelling from close quarters until he quit in 2008. Baru was a key member of Manmohan's diminished PMO, and probably his closest aide after the sudden death of JN Dixit, often acting as courier of messages, seeker of advice and even sounding board.

As the Prime Minister gets ready to step down after ten years of running the world's largest and most complex democracy, Baru's book, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh, reads like a primer of what not to do in power. Stubbornly resisting advice to be projected in the media, refusing to contest the Lok Sabha polls in 2009, surrendering control of his government by allowing key appointments to be made over his head and failing to quit when Rahul Gandhi humiliated him in public, Manmohan leaves behind a legacy that he doesn't deserve, says Baru. Comparing the Prime Minister to Bheeshma who took the terrible vow of defending the indefensible, Baru points out that unquestioning loyalty to the dynasty may have been the epic patriarch's obligation in a monarchy, but in Manmohan it was a fatal error of judgement. From the Great Liberaliser, he became the Great Liquidator-of his own equity and that of the all-powerful prime minister's office.