Sanjaya Baru, former media advisor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose recent book kicked up a political storm, has clarified that he did not say that files were taken to Congress President Sonia Gandhi for approval.

“I said she was briefed. And how do you brief a person? Through conversation,” Baru said, defending his book The Accidental Prime Minister at an interaction with women journalists on Friday.

PMO reaction The Prime Minister’s Office has come down heavily on the book and said that it was “coloured” and smacked of “fiction.” A PMO release stated that the claims made in the book that files were seen by Sonia Gandhi were “baseless and mischievous.”

Baru’s book says: “Pulok, who was inducted into the Manmohan Singh PMO at the behest of Sonia Gandhi, had regular, almost daily, meetings with Sonia at which he was said to brief her on the key policy issues of the day and seek her instructions on important files to be cleared by the PM.”

“I stand by what I wrote,” Baru said.

Timing Commenting on the timing of the book, Baru said he wanted it to be published after the ongoing elections, but even then there was a risk of being criticised for not having the guts to publish it when the Congress was in power.

Critics would then have said that I was doing it to get a job with the new government, he said.

Baru, a former editor, said his book was an attempt to defend the Prime Minister and not to malign him. “If you read my book, you will realise that Chapter 1-13 has the strongest defence of Manmohan Singh as the PM. This book tries to say what he wanted to do, what he could achieve and what he could not,” he said.

It is only because people were commenting on the book before reading it that such misinformation is being spread, he added.

BJP has tried to gain political mileage from the book, with its Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi taking pot shots at the Congress.

Referring to the book, Modi said at an election rally recently: “I have heard of remote-controlled governments, but here it was the remote running the government. This was revealed yesterday after the book was released.”

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