Harsimran kaur ON  Nov 012, 2023, IN BOOK REVIEW,HOW PRIME MINISTERS DECIDE BY NEERJA CHOWDHURY–NON FICTION

Rating: 5/5

Prime Ministers can be unsettling yet invigorating in their relapses of expediency.

Often an experience arouses a sense of guilt, hidden conspicuously under the somber mood eclipsing the impenitence. One such Prime Minister, imperturbable in his flaws and frissons, lived with this guilt throughout his life; the Livy-livered P.V.Narasimha Rao saw the Babri Masjid being slaughtered as the last-ditch lamprey.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee condemned the blasphemy but was quick to recover, impetuous in his response to avoid impedance of his party members. He was an intuit interlocutory, obstinate and often quick to impress with his innuendos. The effectual pride towered by testing the nuclear weapons during his regime did arouse a caterwaul of ambiguity by the Nuclear Weapons States, clangoring the entire effort as a clanger but for India—it was hitting the bull’s eye.

The real bull riding on the opponents pantomime accompanied by sycophants scribbled as doggerels was the iridescent and the impressionistic Indira Gandhi. How notorious she was to fissure her horns in the bleeding imprudence of the ‘Emergent Action’. She ran past the enfeeble fracas, bellowed fortissimo. The relevance of ‘scare’ and ‘fear’ became more evident. ‘Emergency’ was an officio of ‘power’, and the et seq.—hanging democracy by the noose.

Once upon a time, the bull had a ‘bull-calf’. Embittered by his mother’s assassination by the Sikh body guards, he painted an impasto of indiscriminate strokes giving rise to religious incendiary; an inchoate calf he was! He was an indisposed Prime Minister unattended to by the political chicanery and the eagle-eyed opponents. Tempers often brawl, thanks to the incapacitated mind but the hegemony to lay invidious claims on religious solipsism is a strait-laced bathos. Rajiv Gandhi and the ‘Shah Bano’ imprecation; was it an ill-disposed impinge to garner Muslim sympathy or Mr. Prime Minister was a cotyledon still learning what pacifies the storm?

An implacable whiff of wind did try to put Rajiv at the ripper’s edge; the immutable V.P. Singh, though he himself had to bend the wind of the ‘Mandal Mayhem’. Many considered ‘Mandal’ a cul-de-sac for the UP government; it actually turned out to be a damp squib nevertheless opened new possibilities for the rise of caste-based political parties. His Prime Ministership was inured; a ‘Raja’ turned into a ‘ruminative reformer’.

What always turned out to be a series of battlements for the Congress in flagrante delicto, one man came out to be inviolable. Often insidiously challenged by his party members, he embarked in situ to revivify the Indo-US strategic partnership. Manmohan Singh, the indisputable Prime Minister, was like soft dew left on the otherwise blemished panorama; the coalition casus belli made the ‘old man’ run a cold sweat to the flutter of paranoia on the Nuclear Deal.

THE BIG QUESTION!! How did these Prime Ministers decide the watershed moments of their life?

Neerja Chowdhury in her book, ‘How Prime Ministers Decide’ opens a real can of worms; a comprehensive study of minds that either enact a devilry for ‘power desideratum’ or a derring do to deride the unpalatable. Ultimately, isn’t it a personal aspiration to achieve an ideologue dogged in the make-up of ‘power personification’? Or an ‘error of judgment’ solidified by a sacrosanct inclusivity of thoughts?

Who can forget Indira Gandhi’s promulgation of ‘Emergency’—an aggressive quest for power or a dilly-dally dilettante to justify the belore in belabor of the opponents actions? It was a lip-sync duet with her son Sanjay Gandhi born out of impassioned flutter of being in the limelight. What about the inexperienced rebuttal by Rajiv Gandhi that made him a scourge to the anti-Sikh riots?—a personal set-back and the bleak politics tossed him bleary. All he had was ‘Arun Nehru’ to accelerate the bone shaker.

Unputdownable, the book assesses personal traits, tragedies and the megalomania to be ‘relevant’. Each Prime Minister’s discussed carries a sense of pride to do the ineluctable; some decisions coming in cropper and some a block & tackle for the country’s progress. It’s impressive to learn how an incumbent Prime Minister settles invasively for his ideologies to make it visible through his actions; the result could be an ignominy, blatantly tainting his belief structure which was quite evident in case of V.P. Singh or rejoice the worthwhile efforts put in case of the India-US Nuclear deal by the taciturn Manmohan Singh.

The humdrum Rao to the rictus Vajpayee on going ahead with the Nuclear Testing signals the camaraderie in the political circle. Follies play a part too; opening the locks of the Babri Mosque by Rajiv Gandhi’s Government to appease Hindus further emboldened the BJP to resort to iconoclasm. 

Decisions—ill-advised or ill-disposed, setting of immediacy or procrastination warfare; decisions attested to bellicose judgments or advocating a spirit of tolerance—the power to ingratiate the inner voice finally leads any Prime Minister to act the sine qua non.

TAKE AWAY

Illuminating and Coarse…