The Accidental Prime Minister Quotes

“He was the first prime minister in a long time who did not have a son or a son-in-law in business or real estate”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister

“No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“One of his favourite couplets, by the poet Muzaffar Razmi, which he quoted on more than one occasion, in Parliament and to Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, was: ‘Ye jabr bhi dekha hai, taareeq ki nazron ne / Lamhon ne khata ki thi, sadiyon ne saza payi’ (Much injustice / has been seen in the saga of history / When for a mistake made in a moment we are punished for centuries).”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“I dream of a day when, while retaining our respective national identities, one can have breakfast in Amritsar, lunch in Lahore and dinner in Kabul. That is how my forefathers lived. That is how I want our grandchildren to live.’ Manmohan Singh, FICCI annual general meeting
8 January 2007”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Never organize a media interaction without deciding what headline you want to come out of it!”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“The Indian peasant is born in debt, lives in debt and dies in debt.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Sometimes in life it is wise to be foolish.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Politics is about power and patronage, and ministerial positions are won not just on the basis of competence but also in recognition of a politician’s political clout or loyalty to the leader.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“He is, even at his worst, a cut above the competition, be it from within the ruling Congress party, or would-be prime ministers in other parties.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Dr Singh’s general attitude towards corruption in public life, which he adopted through his career in government, seemed to me to be that he would himself maintain the highest standards of probity in public life, but would not impose this on others. In other words, he was himself incorruptible, and also ensured that no one in his immediate family ever did anything wrong, but he did not feel answerable for the misdemeanours of his colleagues and subordinates. In this instance, he felt even less because he was not the political authority that had appointed them to these ministerial positions. In practice, this meant that he turned a blind eye to the misdeeds of his ministers. He expected the Congress party leadership to deal with the black sheep in his government, just as he expected the allies to deal with their black sheep. While his conscience was always clear with respect to his own conduct, he believed everyone had to deal with their own conscience.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Diplomats Jayant Prasad and S. Jaishankar, both of whom had intimate knowledge of the nuclear deal, helped me prepare a booklet, ‘Facts about India’s Initiative for Seeking International Cooperation in Civil Nuclear Energy’, that was then translated into all Indian languages and published by the Directorate of Advertising and Visual Publicity (DAVP) of the ministry of information and broadcasting.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Ye jabr bhi dekha hai, taareeq ki nazron ne / Lamhon ne khata ki thi, sadiyon ne saza payi”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“At a meeting of business leaders from India and Southeast Asia in Kuala Lumpur in 2005, the secretary general of the ASEAN, Ong Keng Yong, introduced Dr Singh as ‘the world’s most highly qualified head of government’. A standing ovation followed.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“in the Congress party known for planting stories against the PM in the media were”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“I am aware of the risks, but for India’s sake, I am willing to take those risks.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“But he did not stop with mouthing phrases. He readily agreed to sign on to the United Nations Democracy Fund launched by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2005, sitting alongside President Bush, and offered Indian professional expertise in conducting elections, and in the use of electronic voting machines developed by India, to countries that sought such assistance. India had rarely identified itself with such democracy-related foreign policy initiatives in the Cold War era for fear of offending many Third-World potentates.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“The Left have always opposed the Congress on foreign policy when it suited them. They criticized Panditji, they criticized Indiraji, they attacked Narasimha Raoji. Whatever I did as finance minister, they criticized. They criticized non-alignment when it suited them, they supported it when it suited them. As long as I am prime minister, I will not allow these communists to dictate our foreign policy.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“During the Kargil war, R.K. Mishra and Aziz would meet secretly, exchanging messages between Musharraf and Vajpayee. Mishra also doubled up as Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) chairman Dhirubhai Ambani’s aide, seeking assurances from the Pakistanis that they would not bomb RIL’s Jamnagar plant.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“The impressive performance of the Indian economy in the 2004-08 period and its ability to withstand the immediate impact of the Lehmann collapse contributed to India’s global standing and to Dr Singh’s global image. Leaving the London G-20 summit in April 2009, President Barack Obama went to Germany where a young school student asked him which politician he admired. Obama’s instant reply was that among existing world leaders he admired Dr Singh of India the most.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“But Dr Singh’s view was that India’s economic rise and its regional and global profile would make it impossible for the world community to ignore its legitimate claim when the time would come for UNSC expansion. There was no need, he felt, for India to make a repeated claim each time the PM spoke somewhere. During the first three years of UPA-1 Dr Singh referred to the UNSC membership issue only on three occasions—when he addressed the UN General Assembly in 2004 and 2005, and when he addressed the US Congress in 2005.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“to her economic development and the well-being of the people of India’.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“First, that India’s relations with the world—both major powers and Asian neighbours—would be shaped by its own developmental priorities. The single most important objective of Indian foreign policy has to be to ‘create a global environment conducive”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“street lighting and everyone who uses the street, irrespective of whether she is a taxpayer or not, a citizen or a visitor, benefits from it. A loan waived by a bank may appear to be a private good since the primary beneficiary is the debtor. However, in keeping farmers alive, in sustaining the livelihood of farmers and in ensuring rural social stability, a loan waiver in the case of an impoverished and highly indebted farmer would have wider social benefits. Many countries, including developed market economies, justified farm subsidies on such social grounds. A debt waiver was a subsidy, and a public good.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“It was the British, he explained, who first understood the nature of rural indebtedness and the importance of keeping the farmer alive. Rural credit, he recalled K.N. Raj telling him, is a ‘public good’. Economists define a ‘public good’ as any good or service that, once provided, does not discriminate between beneficiaries and non-beneficiaries. A street light is a common example of a public good. Government spends money on”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Scheme (MEGS). Though conceptualized in 1977, during Vasantdada Patil’s tenure as chief minister, MEGS was launched by Pawar in 1979. As the deputy chairman of the Planning Commission in the 1980s, Dr Singh had studied this scheme and had been impressed by it. Hence, he was in favour of implementing this programme at the national level and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) was nothing more than a variant of MEGS.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“As an ancient saying goes, a road is made by walking.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“British India, had said, in 1925, on the eve of a period of great distress in Indian agriculture: ‘The Indian peasant is born in debt, lives in debt and dies in debt.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“As long as the prime minister’s image is good,’ he said to me, ‘so, too, the image of the government and the country. When the image of the PM suffers, the government’s image, and the country’s, also suffers.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“An important lesson he seemed to have learnt from his predecessors was to never reveal his mind on a policy issue till it was absolutely necessary to do so.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“So I, like millions of his middle-class supporters, feel tragically cheated that he has allowed himself to become an object of such ridicule in his second term in office, in the process devaluing the office of the prime minister. This book is an effort to offer a balanced view of Dr Singh’s personality and of his record as head of government.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh