Sanjaya Baru’s, “The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh” is buzzing with business. The book has given Penguin its blockbuster of the season.
Congress loyalists have only themselves to blame for the serious money Penguin, the publisher, is making. By threatening to slam cases against the former media advisor to Singh, they’ve left Penguin boss Chiki Sarkar with just one dilemma - how many fresh imprints should she put on the shelves this week.
That for an account of an effete PMO nearly everyone knew about all along. The first 10,000 copies have flown off the shelves. Also, e-retailer flipkart has no stocks left. An additional 20,000 are being printed ahead of the coming weekend. For a non-Chetan Bhagat book, that’s good business.
Folks like Randeep Singh Surjewala from Haryana have helped by calling the work, “cheap fiction from a jobless opportunist.” (Factually incorrect. Baru, we hear, has a job at International Institute for Strategic Studies, a leading think tank, and Surjewala can’t say for sure that IISS doesn’t pay!)
But sundry Congress loyalists don’t hold a candle to Pankaj Pachauri, communication advisor to Manmohan Singh. The Penguin Prize for Unwitting Promotion must go to him. Pachauri, Baru’s grand-successor in the Prime Minister’s Office (there was Harish Khare in between) took it upon himself to attack the author. Pray whyIJ
I doubt if Manmohan Singh told him to do so – Baru’s sense is that Pulok Chatterji, the prinicipal secretary to PM did. Thus a “written” statement during Pachauri’s interaction with the international media corps allied to the Foreign Correspondents Club (FCC) of South Asia, New Delhi, has catapulted the book to the front pages of every newspaper in the country.
It was an event the PM himself was slated to attend, but he stayed away and the Communication Advisor was fielded. Now, I wasn’t there at FCC, but Baru’s sources tell him that Pachauri came there prepared with a statement. If that indeed is the case, his intervention proved to be the proverbial wind under the Penguin’s wing, a fit case for what strategic advisors mustn’t do in crisis times.
Until Pachauri (read PMO) had lammed Baru, even Arnab Goswami hadn’t returned requests by the publishers to feature Baru in the News Hour. But the moment Pachauri had opened his mouth, Goswami was on the phone bulldozing all other competing engagements the author might have had.
True to form, Goswami made sure that the PM’s biographer was at the News Hour first. “The result is pretty much for all of us to see…even I don’t have copies of the book!” says Baru, lamenting though that the controversial parts and cacophony among Congress sycophants is the only stuff that doing the rounds.
“Substantive parts of my book are being completely ignored!” When I called him, Pachauri denied being part of the marketing plot. “I was asked a question (on the claims made in the book) and I said what I did,” he told me. “look at PC Alexander or HY Sharada Prasada (legendary aides in PMO of yesteryears). The countries secrets went with them to their graves.”
Pachauri also promised that he won’t write his own memoirs of his own part of UPA-II (2012-14) – a far more gory phase of the present government’s 10-year tenure than 2004-09 that Baru has documented. Don’t be surprised if the embattled PM wants him to promise that under oath!
(The columnist has been a former colleague of the PM’s biographer. He works at the intersect of media, strategy and regulation on RIl. The views expressed are personal. Tweets @therohitbansal)