“This is a type of man who has no recourse to the useful deceits of articulation. And, constricted by decency, he lacks the means of sly backdoor channels to deliver news favourable to him,” wrote novelist and journalist Manu Joseph in January 2014. He was writing about then Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh in his column for The New York Times.

January five years ago was also the month when Dr Singh’s former media advisor (May 2004- August 2008) Sanjaya Baru’s book The Accidental Prime Minister was published. The book was read as a tell-all account of the former Prime Minister’s constant struggle to find relative autonomy in an arrangement which was premised on the real power centre being located in the Gandhi family-led Congress headquarters. With elections a few months away, the book was lapped up for its voyeuristic appeal to people curious about Delhi’s power elite offered by someone who apparently had access to the Prime Minister in the initial four years of his first term in the South Block.

Expectedly, Dr Singh’s office disowned the factual details in the book.

Come January 2019, Vijay Gutte’s screen adaptation of the book into the eponymous film seems a case of mistaking caricatures as a slice of history in New Delhi’s corridors of power.

This is one of the central failings of this overdramatised take on the relationship of the country’s former head of government with what was once called press secretary ( before its avatar as “media advisor” in the cyber age) and with his party. Is it as much a failing of the book? Perhaps not. In seeking its cinematic licence for adopting the book, Gutte’s film is driven by something which can be the undoing of political films—morality as a plot device propped by a protagonist pitted against characters which were till recently a part of a country’s current affairs.

Dr Singh is a man known for his inept public communication skills and awkwardly robotic body movements, and Anupam Kher seems to be creaking under the weight of playing him. As was always feared, he overdoes it. His “Manmohan walk” is exaggerated, so are his hand movements and the suspended animation that you knew somewhere lurked around him. Twenty minutes into the film, you begin to see Kher stretching too hard to get into that—a bad sign for a performance.

Besides Manmohan and Baru (played by Akshaye Khanna) none of the characters get any room. That includes Sonia Gandhi—shown as a controlling and scheming matriarchal presence in the Congress-Prime Minister’s Office equations—Rahul Gandhi, Ahmed Patel, K Natwar Singh and handpicked bureaucrats like Gandhi family favourite Pulok Chatterji and Dr Singh’s principal secretary TKA Nair.

There is an element of oversimplification for those who had followed the politics and policy trajectory of 10 years of the UPA government—something the book couldn’t be accused of. However, that could have been excused if the film made an effort to reach out to an audience unaware of the events and issues which occupy the characters. No such context is offered: the Indo-US nuclear deal, India-Pakistan diplomatic fiasco and NREGA are talked about as if they were dining table chatter. So the film swings between the shallowness of dilettantism and disregard for a cross-section of its audience.

The film veers towards a portrayal of media advisor Baru as much as it’s about Dr Singh’s time in the PMO. The overused device of fourth pillar storytelling, with Baru talking, becomes an intrusion after a while and impedes. Baru’s is a difficult story to carry in a country where the role of the top media manager of the head of government isn’t properly understood. That pushes the film into a niche segment. The same can’t be said about the screenplay which lacks the detailing and finesses that the project deserves.

The morality play of a Bhishma-like upright, reticent and dutiful Dr Singh making peace with the hold of a dynasty-led party and the corrupt mess in his government gets repetitive and just seeks different frames throughout the movie. Characters turn into caricatures of themselves—including the protagonist.

As someone who had his moorings as a detached economist-bureaucrat, Dr Singh also had a less explored side of political skill in navigating adverse conditions to remain a survivor in the PMO for 10 years. No wonder political commentator Pratap Bhanu Mehta had described him as the most successful politician of his time. It’s that side of him which seems lost in the cloying tale of a wronged man willing to offer his spine. One can’t say that’s a fault of Baru’s recollection of his PMO days, but it’s clearly a problem with how the story has been woven on the screen.  

The assorted electronic media clippings, punctuated by bytes from media personalities like N Ram (then editor-in-chief of The Hindu) and cover stories in magazines like Outlook have been used to recall the news cycle of those times. However, beyond a point, they aren’t a substitute for a more detailed reconstruction of the key drivers of political and policy debates of Dr Singh’s tenure.

It’s interesting to recall the three words of advice that HY Sharda Prasad, civil servant and Indira Gandhi’s media advisor, gave to Sanjay Baru before he was entrusted with the same role in Dr Singh’s office. “Write good English,” Prasad had told Baru. Similarly, a film chronicling the important years of a country’s leadership in the first two decades of a new century needs a better language of book adaptation, as well as of getting into the layers of the cast of characters. It lacks this on both counts. Perhaps that’s the lack of ambition the film had set out for itself.