Sonia chose Rao over me, reveals Pawar in memoir

A day after Congress president Sonia Gandhi visited Sharad Pawar’s birthday event, the NCP chief’s memoirs revealed the former had preferred P V Narasimha Rao to him in 1991 since she did not want “someone with an independent mind” for the prime minister’s post.

Pawar in his book “Life on my terms-From the Grassroots and Corridors of Power” has nuggets of information that are uncharitable to Sonia and the Congress he had left in the late 1990s to float the NCP. The book was released on Thursday. Sonia, coincidentally, in her ode to Pawar at his birthday event on Thursday, described the Maratha strongman as the “only choice” for the agriculture portfolio during the two Congress-led UPA governments at the Centre.

“His friendships with his political opponents and adversaries are legendary. In the modern language of IT, his networking skills are formidable and those skills are much needed when politics takes on a bitter partisan flavour as it does every now and then. He is a politician through and through in the best sense of that term,” Sonia said.

The two have had an off-and-on relationship with Pawar, who had once opposed Sonia’s foreign origins, patched up with her later. The NCP leader claimed that ‘self-styled’ loyalists of 10, Janpath, such as late Arjun Singh who he said was himself an aspirant for the top post, had convinced Sonia not to consider him for the 7, RCR, since he was young and “would harm the first family’s interest”.  Pawar was the defence minister in Rao’s Cabinet. “Though a senior leader, P V Narasimha Rao had withdrawn from mainstream politics for health reasons before the election. Given his long experience, there were suggestions to bring him back following the unforeseen exit of Rajiv,” Pawar wrote in his book.

During 1996-97, Sonia had on several occasions tried to undermine Pawar who was the leader of the Congress in the Lok Sabha, the book said. He also claimed that he was shocked at the Congress’s move to amend its constitution to make Sonia its parliamentary party chief in the early ’90s when she was not even a member of Parliament. He also recalled events that widened differences between the two, leading to his exit from the Congress.