The Accidental Prime Minister Quotes

“When the horse you are riding becomes a tiger it is difficult to dismount.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“For Congress MPs, the leader to please was always Sonia. They did not see loyalty to the PM as a political necessity, nor did Dr Singh seek loyalty in the way in which Sonia and her aides sought it.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Moreover, promising loyalty to hereditary succession is a monarchical attribute, not a democratic one. That was Dr Singh’s fatal error of judgement.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“As UPA-2 began to unravel, another Mahabharata comparison came to suggest itself to some of Dr Singh’s critics. They likened him to the blind king Dhritharashtra, unhappily presiding over a strife- torn kingdom. I never accepted this view of a man who had earned himself the slogan ‘Singh is King’.”
― 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”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“he showed the country that an ordinary, honest Indian, an aam aadmi, to use the current buzzword in politics, could become prime minister through sheer hard work and professional commitment.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Initially, I saw his subservience as an aspect of his shy and self-effacing personality, but over time I felt, like many, that this might be his strategy for political survival.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“dampened his spirit. Dr Singh never really recovered from that initial deflation of his authority and it came to affect multiple areas of governance. Even though the economy performed well in the early part of UPA-2,”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“The nuclear deal was the crowning glory of Manmohan Singh’s first term. As Narasimha Rao’s finance minister, he had made history by opening up the economy. Now, he had made history once again, by giving India a new status as a world power.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“After the elections, Dr Singh did try to be more assertive, taking a view on who would be in his Cabinet and who would not, and resisting the induction of the DMK’s A. Raja and T.R. Baalu, for their unsavoury reputations”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“For the first time after 1962, a sitting prime minister who had served a full five-year term was being re-elected with an improved majority.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Singh’s five years of 9 per cent growth, his standing up to the Left on the nuclear deal in defence of the national interest, and the BJP voters’ disappointment with Advani’s lacklustre leadership had helped win the urban voter over.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“2009, it was Dr Singh’s tenure during UPA-1 that helped the party secure 206 seats—nine more than the 197 seats that Rajiv Gandhi managed to deliver in 1989, after five years in office.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“After the Kerry visit, it would seem, he finally came on board, endorsing the deal as being in India’s national interest. I encouraged Karan Thapar to interview him and make this public.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Helping a democracy like India become stronger would enable it to deal both with the threat of Islamic radicalism and the rise of China. The US had a stake in this outcome.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“The three senior American leaders were only confirming what Dr Singh always knew, that if there was any chance of India getting the nuclear deal, it was only because President Bush wanted to do this for India.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“the Democrats, all three agreed, would find it very difficult to support the nuclear deal. Interestingly, Kerry and Biden were Democrats and Hagel was then a Republican.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“It is very important for us to move forward to end this nuclear apartheid that the world has sought to impose on India.’ Manmohan Singh to IFS probationers
11 June 2008”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“She has let me down,’ he said to both in the separate meetings he had with them, in a voice tinged more with sadness than anger.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“I have only completed what you began,’ Dr Singh said, breaking the silence. Vajpayee smiled, nodded his head again, got into the car and drove away.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“After proclaiming the 123 Agreement ‘sound and honourable’, he followed up with an editorial a few days later, toeing Karat’s line and advising the government to put the deal on hold. AndYechury, who had privately agreed that the PM had done what he had promised to, publicly criticized him.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“General Saheb, you are a soldier and much younger,’ replied Dr Singh to Musharraf, ‘but you must allow for my age. I can only walk step by step.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Once the economy began to falter and the government became wobbly, India and its PM lost their sheen,”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“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

“Improved relations with the US were the key to better relations with China, Pakistan and much of the rest of the world. This simple fact, one that Subrahmanyam ingrained in Dr Singh, escaped most of Dr Singh’s critics.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“By linking India’s geo-political interests with its economic interests Dr Singh defined the new ‘geo-economics’ of Indian grand strategy.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Kalecki called the non-aligned countries ‘the proverbial clever calves that suck two cows’. The”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“the world wants India to do well . . . our challenges are at home’—”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Jawaharlal Nehru told the Constituent Assembly in December 1947: Talking about foreign policies, the House must remember that these are not just empty struggles on a chessboard. Behind them lie all manner of things. Ultimately, foreign policy is the outcome of economic policy,”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“new scheme of merit-cum-means scholarships was introduced for post-matric students, with twenty million students benefitting by the end of UPA-1.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh