By Saroj Nagi (Hindustan Times)

New Delhi: Congress President Sonia Gandhi on Friday made light of talk about dual power centres in the UPA, or tensions between her and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

“Those who have doubts obviously don’t know the PM and I have worked together for long… We are not competitors. We work in an atmosphere of friendship. If he feels there are issues he has to brief me on, he does,” she told the HT Leadership Summit.

Sonia emphasized she never had any doubt about Singh as PM and never had a candidate other than him in mind. And more than three years after she declined to be PM, she remains convinced she took the right decision. Even “the idea of having a deputy prime minister was never under consideration”.

Sonia said her intervention in government policies was “not much”. It is, as she put it, “only to the extent of ensuring the Congress manifesto and CMP are followed”. In this context, she mentioned initiatives like the right to information and rural employment act.

There have been times when her own or the Congress’s views were not in agreement with the government’s, she said. On such occasions, she talked to the PM. Regardless of sporadic differences, she is “more than satisfied” with the government’s performance for which the PM deserves to be “applauded”.

The government, she said, sought to balance high economic growth with inclusive programmes. The focus has been on giving the country a climate where the business “biradari” realised its full potential and the poor and marginalised got their due through welfare programmes.

She said the government deliberately desisted from bragging about economic growth: “As long as there are huge pockets of poverty, we cannot really brag.” But no, there was no comparison between the economic growth of the present regime and the BJP’s India Shining, which was “surreal since it did not exist”.

The two things she is keen on is for the government to tighten the delivery system, so its programmes reach the targeted audience, and to try and see the women’s quota bill gets passed.

Sonia also appealed to the people to join politics to make a difference when asked if the high economic growth was because of the people and despite politicians. “When they join, they will discover politics is not dark and slimy,” she said while agreeing that there is cynicism about politicians and politics. “There are politicians who are not what they should be. But we also have people cutting across party lines like Manmohan Singh,” she said.

She was asked about her own opposition to Rajiv Gandhi joining politics. “I was afraid of losing him,” she said. But now she’s in politics, she agreed things are not as bad. Her explanation for joining politics: she thought it was “cowardly” to sit and watch certain forces her family had fought against gain ground.

Email: snagi@hindustantimes.com