Madam Prime Minister review: An engrossing read amid a galaxy of others

Seema Goswami's second novel, 'Madam Prime Minister', moves in and out of New Delhi's power corridors.

The political thriller Madam Prime Minister by senior journalist and novelist Seema Goswami is her second novel, and follows the events in Race Course Road.

This book builds on the premise that a 29-year-old single woman, Asha Devi, takes over India’s premiership, following the death of her father who’d held the position.

As premises go, this sounds deliciously dramatic, able to fuel the reader’s speculation about how a young woman would wield immense power and bear the pressure of the job, how she would navigate the power networks of Parliament, composed largely though not wholly of an older generation.

Does the book develop the idea well?

Madam Prime Minister sets up a number of challenges Asha must overcome. Right at the beginning, we see her taking the oath of office. Then a terror attack in Delhi, which becomes a hostage crisis, prompts her to act decisively and face several terrible consequences that ensue in rapid succession (no spoilers).

The high-adrenalin stuff eases up by and by into a political drama. Asha must deal with the manipulations of her coalition partner, the hot-headed Bengali politician Sukanya Sarkar and the machinations of the opposition coalition headed by adroit tactician and goat enthusiast Satyajit Kumar and Dalit leader Didi Damyanti. (Some characters are somewhat inspired by real life.)

Asha must also tend to her family which is going through an upheaval. Hey, hey, Cupid visits Raisina Hill, too, shooting with one arrow both Asha and her cabinet minister, Alok Ray. Will they, won’t they?

These are a lot of sub-plots, which complicate the book in an entertaining way. Which is not to say they are all equally palatable. In some, Asha is quite passive. Other sub-plots or individual scenes are more or less convincing, such as the hit-or-miss emotional interplay between Asha and Alok. It is the scenes with political intrigue that shine the most. The psychology of competitive TV anchors is brought out lucidly, particularly that of a male TV anchor who rants a lot, ahem.

A lot of the book channels current events: there is the ominous background of terror attacks, and at one point Asha sets in motion a ‘surgical strike’ across the border. But as I said before, most of the hot-button issues of the time are largely excluded from the book. The book takes a stance which is progressive when it comes to gender equality, but unfortunately, is less so when dealing with nationalism. Militancy, for instance, is seen through the mindset of ‘They attack us, we’ll hit them back’, which sounds like an endorsement of an unending spiral of violence and retaliation. The army is glorified uncritically. Not one major character is non-Hindu, though a secondary character is Dalit and a woman.

The premise has all the potential in the world to have Asha’s character be truly memorable. Here I’m thinking of the novel Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, and the TV series Borgen, though an apples-to-apples comparison is obviously impossible. The point is that Lisbeth Salander and Birgitte Nyborg come off as striking characters, staying with you long after the plotlines have smudged with time.

But Asha’s character as Prime Minister remains underdeveloped in this book, simply because she isn’t put through enough tests of her values and instincts. What’s her response to, say, concerns of the LGBTQ community? Or those of the communities in the North-East? Or in the Southern part of the country? What does Asha think about caste - not just at a pragmatic level but viscerally? Or moral policing of young love and censorship of art? What’s her position on Hindutva and the right wing? At least some of these issues engross today’s Gen-Z Indians, but these issues are not presented to Asha in any major way. So the potential of the character remains largely untapped. What we get is an engrossing read amid a galaxy of others.