Vijay Ratnakar Gutte’s hit job on the Congress party-led United Progressive Alliance headed by Manmohan Singh between 2004 and 2014 is packed with the movers and shakers of Delhi. The Accidental Prime Minister, based on Sanjaya Baru’s 2014 memoir of the same name, is an attempted tell-all account of the pressures that Congress party chief Sonia Gandhi put on Manmohan Singh’s functioning. According to the book and the film, Gandhi’s interference and her attempts to promote her son, Rahul Gandhi, undermined the Prime Minister’s Office. The movie was released on January 11, and has also been dubbed in Telugu.
Unlike previous such muckraking accounts, the screenplay by Gutte, Mayank Tiwari, Karl Dunne and Aditya Sinha uses the real names of politicians, officials and journalists (except Kapil Sibal, whose name is bleeped out). A host of actors and lookalikes play representatives of the government and the Opposition, including Congress leader Ahmed Patel, Manmohan Singh’s wife Gursharan Kaur and daughter Daman Singh, and even Chiki Sarkar, who published The Accidental Prime Minister. Here is the list of every noteworthy politician and official who appears in the film, and the actors who play them.
Manmohan Singh: Anupam Kher.
Sanjaya Baru: Akshaye Khanna.
Sonia Gandhi: Suzanne Bernert.
Rahul Gandhi: Arjun Mathur.
Priyanka Gandhi Vadra: Aahana Kumra.
Ahmed Patel: Vipin Sharma.
Gursharan Kaur: Divya Seth Shah.
P Chidambaram: Shiv Kumar Subramaniam.
Kapil Sibal: Munish Bhardwaj.
LK Advani: Avtar Sahni.
Atal Bihari Vajpayee: Ram Avtar.
APJ Abdul Kalam: Sunil Kothari.
JN Dixit: Atul Kumar.
TKA Nair: Anish Kuruvilla.
MK Narayanan: Prakash Belawadi.
Brajesh Mishra: Madan Joshi.
Pranab Mukherjee: Pradeep Chakravarti.
Natwar Singh: Yogesh Tripathy.
Pulok Chatterji: Bobby Parvez.
Sitaram Yechury: Anil Zankar.
Naveen Patnaik: Hansal Mehta.
Shivraj Patil: Anil Rastogi.
Lalu Prasad Yadav: Vimal Verma.
N Ram: Deepak Gheewala.
Yashwant Sinha: Naval Shukla.
Jaswant Singh: Deepak Dadwal.
Arjun Singh: Ashok Sagar Bhagat.
PV Narasimha Rao: Ajit Satbhai.
Prithviraj Chauhan: Ramesh Bhatkar.
Mulayam Singh Yadav: Subhash Tyagi.
Amar Singh: Manoj Tiger.
Pakistan Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani: Adarsh Gautam.
AK Antony: Chembur Hari.
George Fernandes: Kishor Jaykar.
Ghulam Nabi Azad: Aazam Khan.
Bhairon Singh Shekhawat: Vijay Singh.
Vir Sanghvi: Askari Naqvi.
Prakash Karat: Pradeep Kuckreja.
PV Ranga Rao: Chitaranjan Sinha.
Daman Singh: Gull Jolly.
Chiki Sarkar: Archana Sharma.
