Pranab Mukherjee’s name does not invoke much awe among Congressmen in his home state, West Bengal, although he was the president of the country and a Bharat Ratna. Many of them think he was the “real destroyer” of the Congress in the state. When he was nominated by the Congress in 2012 as its presidential candidate, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee made her opposition public and said, “Pranab da did not do anything for Bengal.” But when it became clear that he would win, she came around and endorsed him.
It was perhaps Mukherjee’s meteoric rise in the party and in Delhi that made him an object of envy. Although Bengal has been home to a galaxy of eminent Congressmen, Mukherjee was in a league of his own, especially in national politics. His capability to maintain cordial relations with people from across the political spectrum and to sense the political atmosphere made him indispensable to the Congress and the governments he was part of.
It was senior Congress leader Siddhartha Shankar Ray who recommended Mukherjee’s name to Indira Gandhi in 1969 as a potentially efficient administrator. Indira made him a member of the Rajya Sabha and, in 1973, appointed him deputy minister of industrial development. In 1974, he was appointed minister of state for finance. Mukherjee played an important role during the Emergency as Indira’s key man overseeing the bureaucracy. When she was voted back to power in 1980, he was inducted into the cabinet as commerce minister and two years later was made finance minister, a post he held till her death in 1984.
As finance minister, one of the major challenges before Mukherjee was to fund the Tamil revolutionaries in Sri Lanka. Indira also wanted him to finance her defence budget, which required a considerable outlay. He achieved both targets and also arranged for paying back loans owed to the International Monetary Fund. According to Congress insiders, it was Mukherjee who conceived Indira’s famous ‘Garibi Hatao’ slogan and designed various poverty alleviation schemes.
Mukherjee played a key role in appointing Manmohan Singh as governor of the Reserve Bank of India. It was perhaps an irony of fate that he had to serve under Manmohan a few years later. It happened because of a political miscalculation he made after Indira’s death. At the time, there were rumours that Mukherjee was trying to elbow out Rajiv Gandhi, a political novice, in the race to succeed Indira. And he did nothing to dispel the rumours.
After Rajiv took over as prime minister, Mukherjee was dropped from the cabinet. When he rebelled against the decision, he was expelled from the Congress. Mukherjee reconciled with Rajiv in 1989 and was made a member of the Congress Working Committee and, later, a spokesperson for the party.
The maturity Mukherjee gained during his years in political wilderness was evident in the manner in which he handled the challenging transformation faced by the Congress after Rajiv’s assassination. He attempted the uphill task of convincing Sonia Gandhi to take the plunge into politics. At the same time, he became the most trusted lieutenant of prime minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, serving as deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and running the ministries of commerce and external affairs.
After the Congress lost the general elections in 1996, Mukherjee became close to the new party chief, Sitaram Kesri. Yet, he gave full support to Sonia when she became Congress president in 1998. The sudden shift in loyalty, however, did not earn him the top spot in 2004, when Sonia chose Manmohan as prime minister. Mukherjee, however, took it in his stride and was, in fact, happy, handling key portfolios such as defence, external affairs and finance.
During an interaction with this correspondent during his last election campaign in 2009, Mukherjee opened up about why he could not become prime minister. “Yes, there were chances,” he said. “But they were lost most likely because I could not bring more MPs from my home state.” Many Congressmen wanted him to be the president of India back in 2007, but Sonia did not want that to happen. “She said my service in the government was much more needed,” said Mukherjee. In 2012, he was the unanimous choice as the presidential candidate of the United Progressive Alliance.
This correspondent first met Mukherjee in 2000 as a student to interview him for a dissertation on a decade of economic reforms in India. He spoke about India’s massive agricultural production and pointed out that reform in that sector could turn India into an economic superpower. “For that, farm workers and labourers must have money to spend on goods and services,” said Mukherjee. So when India encountered an economic recession in 2008, Manmohan tapped Mukherjee to be his finance minister, as he knew that his former boss could deliver during a recession.
During our 2009 encounter, I asked Mukherjee what could be in store if he was again given the finance portfolio. “There is a huge drop in demand and people do not have money in their hands,” he said. “I would do everything possible to infuse money into the system. To be precise, I would give money directly to their accounts.” He proposed to do so by augmenting the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and other welfare schemes. When I asked him about finding money for his plans, he said he would print more money if needed, as inflation, back then, was quite low.
As promised by Mukherjee, the second UPA government saw huge government spending. He raised MNREGA outlays to Rs40,000 crore and absorbed media criticism when inflation crossed double digits. But he helped India ward off the recession.
Mukherjee was always a careful speaker, but was also known for occasionally losing his temper. I once pestered him for his reaction to West Bengal governor Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s decision to switch off lights in the Raj Bhavan against police atrocities in Nandigram in 2007. “The role of the governor is being debated at different political platforms across India,” said Mukherjee. When pressed further, he lost his cool. “Just shut up,” he shouted.
Mukherjee, however, was quick to own up to his mistakes and make amends. I once asked him for his reaction to a comment by a former BJP minister about his performance at the finance ministry. “He should not talk like a mad man,” he said. Within ten minutes, I got a phone call from Mukherjee. “Please don’t use the word mad,” he said. “The man is a BJP leader, but he is a respected person.”
That was Mukherjee. Sensitive, intelligent and a stickler for political and personal propriety. The diminutive giant of Indian politics remained a fighter till his last breath.