New Delhi, April 26:Maybe this may warm a few hearts in the Left brigade — Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has lately been engrossed reading their patron saint Noam Chomsky. Parliament Library records show that the PM recently read Chomsky’s Profit over People, a critique of the new economic world order “where transnational companies rule the roost.” Besides Chomsky, late Prof M N Srinivas — a colleague during Singh’s Delhi School of Economics days — figures high on the PM’s reading list. Singh recently finished classics like The Remembered Village and Village, Caste, Gender and Method.

Not just economics, perhaps those who say the PM isn’t political enough may rethink looking at his reading list of political theory: Power: A Radical View by Steven Lukes and Political Theory & the Modern State by David Held.

If the Prime Minister takes time off for books, so does Leader of Opposition L K Advani. His reading list is more than an indicator of Advani’s resolve to outgrow the image of a hard Hindu political entrepreneur. It’s only recently that he finished Jawaharlal Nehru’s Discovery of India, apart from Michael Brecher’s India and World Politics and Granville Austin’s Working a Democratic Constitution: A History of Indian Experience.

Over the last few years, Advani has read books on Indira Gandhi (Indira Gandhi: Courage under fire; Two faces of Indira Gandhi), revisited Francis Fukuyama (The End of History and The Last Man), and his old favourite, Stephen Covey.

Those under the impression that his Jinnah remarks were an “one-off thing”, or that “friend and colleague” Sudheendra Kulkarni brought about the shift in Advani’s stand, may be in for disappointment. Parliament records suggest that the BJP leader read various accounts on Jinnah in 2003 and 2004 before articulating his own stand.

If his June 5, 2005 Jinnah speech left the Sangh Parivar seething and his confidants perplexed, one of them, BJP general secretary Arun Jaitley, rushed to the Parliament Library and got as many as five volumes on the man issued: Jinnah: Man of Destiny, Pakistan and Muslim India, The Tragedy of Jinnah, Secular and Nationalist and The Man who divided India.

Former foreign minister and BJP leader Jaswant Singh has been busy with books on China (The Rise of Modern China and China from the Opium War to the 1911 Revolution) and even Gandhi (The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi) while Union Minister and now West Bengal Congress Committee chief Priyaranjan Dasmunsi is poring over past volumes of — what else — New Age and People’s Democracy (party organs of the CPI and CPM, respectively).

CPM leader Hannan Mollah’s recent acquisition from the library was Land Reforms in Karnataka. For a party that doesn’t believe in caste, he would have found two volumes on caste and democracy (Caste Polarisation and Politics, Caste and Democratic Politics) enlightening. He also read Robert Burns’s Philosophies of History recently. BSP’s deputy leader in Rajya Sabha Gandhi Azad’s last book from the library was in 1998 — a Hindi volume on Ancient India.

Many high-profile MPs, including Congress president Sonia Gandhi, CPM’s Brinda Karat and Young Turks like Rahul Gandhi and Milind Deora, have rarely availed of the library. The books consulted by some other high-profile users provide a peek into their lesser-known facet of personality. Congress’s Arjun Singh, who, predictably, read Political Ideas of M S Golwalkar in 2002 has authors like Tagore, Gorky and Renu for company for his bed-time readings. He love his Hindi fiction, and some interesting titles he has read lately include Naari man ki Kahaniyaan, Pyaar ki baatein tatha anya Kahaniyaan and Sacha Sukh. Wonder what Samajwadi Party general secretary Amar Singh has got to do with International Marketing, e-Commerce & Cyber Laws or Tourism Marketing?

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