NEW DELHI: For a country obsessed with politics and its prime ministers, few books have been written with insight, first-hand sources or with a gift of storytelling.
At the evening book launch of veteran journalist Neerja Chowdhury’s new book, ‘How Prime Ministers Decide’, published by Aleph, the speakers — all politicians, barring the moderator, anchor Rajdeep Sardesai — were in agreement that this was one of the most important books on the subject “in the last 50 years”.
The auditorium of the Teen Murti Bhavan library, where the event was held, was chock-a-block with Delhi’s academics, journalists, parliamentarians, and many “sources” of Chowdhury, whom the author credited with giving her the inside information behind key decisions in the corridors of power.
The book, they said, showed the inner workings of how governments work in a democracy driven by competing pulls and pressures; the ideas and thoughts behind PMs’ decisions, sometimes taken not by the PM himself, but by a cast of “other characters”.
Publisher David Davidar compared it to a thriller. “On every page there is real insight, a nugget of information or an eye-opening quote. Together with the author, they had pulled off a book that they hoped, in Muhammad Ali’s words, would float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” he said.
Kerala Governor Arif Mohammad Khan, who had been part of the Rajiv Gandhi government, which he left in 1986 in protest against its stand on the Shah Bano case, quipped that as his name has been “mentioned so many times in the book and he was a player” in this key decision, he would refrain from comment.
Congress MP Shashi Tharoor highlighted how the author had not included the current PM, Narendra Modi, in the book, with the caveat that his government was a work in progress.