Pranab Mukherjee will be remembered as the prime minister the country never had. The man with a vast experience in governance is widely believed to have been amongst the best suited candidates for the job, and he himself had expected, more than once, to be nominated to the post.
Mukherjee is said to have been dejected at being overlooked for the post in 2004, when the Congress had registered a surprise victory in the Lok Sabha elections, and the then party president Sonia Gandhi had chosen the apolitical Manmohan Singh to be the prime minister.
He is learnt to have conveyed to Sonia his inability to work under Manmohan, but she had persisted upon him to join the government, saying he was indispensable. At a function to release Mukherjee's autobiography a few years ago, Mukherjee and Manmohan sought to lay the old ghosts to rest, with the former prime minister admitting that Mukherjee had every reason to believe that he ought to have been the prime minister.
“He had every reason to believe that he should be the prime minister....He also knew that I had no choice in the matter,” Manmohan had said. He further said contrary to the popular notion that the two had an uneasy working relationship, that they made a cohesive team and the United Progressive Alliance government ran smoothly because of the trust and respect that Mukherjee commanded.
Mukherjee was the go-to man for Manmohan when it came to dealing with tricky issues, and the most often used remedy was the creation of a group of ministers headed by the man from Bengal.
The reason for Mukherjee's initial hesitation in working under Manmohan was probably because of the manner in which it would change the power dynamic between them. In the 1970s, when Mukherjee had joined the finance ministry as a junior minister, Manmohan was a secretary in the ministry. Later, when Mukherjee became finance minister, Manmohan was the chief of the Reserve Bank of India. However, in the P.V. Narasimha Rao government, Mukherjee had worked under Manmohan, who was then the finance minister, as deputy chairman of the planning commission.
In his autobiography, 'The Coalition Years', Mukherjee wrote about his expectation of becoming the prime minister. He wrote that he had the vague impression that the Congress might nominate Manmohan as its presidential candidate, and he would be the party's prime ministerial nominee in the Lok Sabha elections in 2014.
“I thought that if she (Sonia Gandhi) selected (Manmohan) Singh for the presidential office, she may choose me as the prime minister. I had heard a rumour that she had given this formulation a serious thought while on a holiday in the Kaushambi Hills,” he wrote.
It is believed that Mukherjee could not become prime minister because he had lost the trust of the Gandhis. It is said during his flight back from West Bengal with Rajiv Gandhi after the assassination of Indira Gandhi in October 1984, what he said to Rajiv gave him the impression that he aspired to be named Indira's successor.
In his autobiography, however, Mukherjee tried to understand and explain why Rajiv lost trust in him. He wrote that on the flight back to Delhi from West Bengal, he and Rajiv had a discussion on what was to be done next. He cited to the other leaders present on the aircraft precedents from the time when Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri had died in office and Gulzari Lal Nanda was sworn in as the interim PM on account of being the senior-most minister. “However, that took place when the incumbents died a natural death. This was an extraordinary situation when an incumbent prime minister had been assassinated. Apart from a political void, a lot of uncertainties, too, had been created.”
It was decided on the flight itself that Rajiv will be requested to take over as prime minister, wrote Mukherjee. “I took Rajiv to the rear of the aircraft and requested him to take over as prime minister. His immediate question to me was, `Do you think I can manage?”
Mukherjee wrote that many stories were circulated that he aspired to the interim prime minister, that he had staked claim and had to be persuaded otherwise, and that this created misgivings in Rajiv’s mind. “These stories are completely false and spiteful,” he wrote.
On the question why Rajiv dropped him from his cabinet, Mukherjee wrote that he was clueless about his imminent downfall. “I kept waiting for the call. Being dropped from Rajiv’s cabinet was not even peripherally in my mind. I had heard no rumours, nor had anyone in the party ever vaguely hinted at it,” he recounts. He was later expelled from the party as well.
Mukherjee, who eventually became the President of the country, wrote in his memoir that he had learnt to deal with the two ends of the power spectrum. He said the failures and bad times taught him courage, while every success reinforced in him the value of humility.