Neerja Chowdhury’s ‘How Prime Ministers Decide’ Explores Leadership Choices At Bhopal Literature Festival

Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): Prime Ministers work under pulls and pressures – though they have the last word on any issue. This is what journalist Neerja Chowdhury’s book, How Prime Ministers Decide, relates. 

There was a discussion on the book in the Antarang Hall of Bharat Bhawan as part of the seventh edition of Bhopal Literature Festival-2025 on Sunday. With Chowdhury, former diplomat Ajay Bisaria, Director General of Hydrocarbon Pallavi Govil, and Gargi Rawat were on the stage.

About what forced her to write the book, Chowdhury said M L Fotedar, a close aide of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, had related to her an incident that led her to write the book. The incident was how superstitious Indira Gandhi was. After she stormed back to power in 1980, she decided to offer prayers at Chamunda temple in Himachal Pradesh.

The priests were told to prepare for it, but she had to cancel the programme, which enraged the priest who said she had done something wrong. On June 23, 1980, her elder son Sanjay Gandhi died in a plane crash. She had felt it was because of her failure to offer prayers at Chamunda Temple she lost her son. The incident devastated her. Afterwards, she offered prayers there.

It portrays former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi understood the needs of modern India, but failed to twig instinctively the caste and religious equations. It tells how former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s friendship with PV Narsimha Rao, another former Prime Minister, prevented Kalyan Singh from becoming the Chief Minister of UP.

Another story is how former Prime Minister VP Singh, who remained in power for 11 months, changed the political map of the country by implementing the Mandal Commission Report.