The Accidental Prime Minister Quotes

“The biggest ever expansion of government- funded scholarships in India has happened during Dr Singh’s tenure.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Let them take all the credit. I don’t need it. I am only doing my work. You just write my speeches for me. I do not want any media projection.’ He then”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“On several occasions I could sense his irritation with Congress party propagandists who claimed credit for the MGNREGA in the name of Sonia and later Rahul, but would never give Raghuvansh Prasad credit for his stellar work on it.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“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

“usual response, whenever I suggested we should respond to such comments, would be, ‘Let my actions speak for me.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“The Congress party is not yet ready to take this step.’ The implication of his remark was that any declassification of official papers based on a thirty-year rule would begin to throw more light on Nehru’s and Indira’s time in office.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“think the time has come for us to have at least a fifty-year rule, if not a thirty-year rule, that allows scholars and researchers free access to declassified official papers.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Public office offers the opportunity for private education at public expense.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“The same trait of self-effacement was seen as a virtue in UPA-1 and a weakness in UPA-2.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Whenever a TV channel or newsmagazine conducted an opinion poll and showed that his popularity, while rising, was a few notches below that of Sonia, he would feel relieved. ‘Good,’ he would say, with a mischievous smile. That defined the limit to his projection and brand-building.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“was standard practice in the Vajpayee PMO for some journalists to get such limousines when travelling abroad with the PM. I was told that Vajpayee’s son-in-law, Ranjan Bhattacharya, who had befriended many senior editors, had taken personal interest in ensuring that the PMO’s favoured journalists were well looked after. I brought to an end all such privileges and incurred the wrath of some professional peers.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“the BJP remained in denial about its defeat and was refusing to extend to the new PM the basic courtesy of letting him speak in Parliament. Finally,”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“At the heart of the governance reform failure lay the weakening of the PMO. Dr Singh’s deliberately low-profile style was compounded by the relative inexperience of Principal Secretary Nair, who lacked the confidence of some of his distinguished predecessors,”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“In UPA-1, when there was considerable euphoria over the RTI Act, few would have imagined that analysts would hold the RTI Act responsible for at least some of the so-called ‘policy”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“His constant refrain was that there was a paucity of administrative talent in the Congress and among the allies.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“In UPA-1 public opinion did not turn against the PM for this moral ambivalence on his part, because”
― 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.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Chidambaram, Jayalalithaa’s bete noire, to quit the Congress and join the Tamil Maanila Congress. Against this background, the 2004 alliance with the Congress could not have been negotiated by Sonia. It was left to Dr Singh to do that, and I was always surprised that political analysts paid little attention to these capabilities of the PM.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“early to rise and late to sleep’ schedule had its pluses and minuses. On the plus side, his habit of tuning in to the BBC early in the morning helped the Government of India respond with alacrity to the tsunami in December 2004. Long before any disaster management, national security or intelligence agency woke up to alert government agencies, the PM was up and heard the news of the tsunami.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Dr Singh took his job seriously. He rose early and, after a morning walk, exercise and a light breakfast, usually walked down from 3 RCR to 7 RCR between quarter to nine and nine o’clock. For those who had worked in the Vajpayee PMO, this was all very new. Vajpayee had slowed down towards the end of his term and”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Nair’s risk-averse personality only compounded Dr Singh’s careful approach and contributed to a further dilution of the PM’s authority.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“once jokingly remarked to Dr Singh that in Vajpayee’s time the principal secretary functioned as if he were the PM,”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“It would be easy to be his ‘eyes and ears’, which is what he wanted me to be when I joined the PMO. The tough part would be to be his ‘voice’.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“how much of this ‘shyness’ was a defence mechanism acquired during a difficult childhood when, after his mother’s death, he had to live with an uncle’s family”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“As PM, he would listen to all opinions, only rarely disagreeing with anyone in meetings, so as not to discourage free expression, and then doing what he felt was needed to be done.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“while working for Dr Singh, I discovered that misleadingly friendly smile was especially reserved for his critics and opponents.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.’ He went on to say: ‘I suggest to this august House that the emergence of India as a major economic power in the world happens to be one such idea. Let the whole world hear it loud and clear. India is now wide awake. We shall prevail. We shall overcome.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Contrary to the mischievous remarks of some of them that he had been converted to economic liberalization after becoming finance minister, the fact is that he had always been an advocate of trade liberalization and a critic of export pessimism.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“Dr Singh said to me with a smile, ‘It is time, again, to be foolish.”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh

“to drop the idea of pursuing the civil nuclear energy cooperation agreement with the United States,”
― Sanjaya Baru, The Accidental Prime Minister: The Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh