As always with President Pranab Mukherjee’s reminiscences, one is left with the nagging feeling that he could have said so much more without violating his oath of office. Prime Minister Narendra Modi observed some time ago, when releasing an anthology of Mukherjee’s speeches, that he had “a sharp and perceptive mind”. That, combined with the places he has inhabited, the personalities he has interacted with and the events he has helped shape, could have led to a much more meaty volume.
This book begins on an additionally confusing note (a typo): Mukherjee refers on the first page of Chapter 1 to “12 Wellington Crescent, Sanjay’s office”. He adds in parenthesis that “Indira Gandhi had stayed there during her days in the Opposition, from 1977-80.” Did she? I was under the impression that the bungalow where I interviewed her twice for The Observer, in London, and where she regularly received foreign tourists, telling them people visited India to see the Taj Mahal, the Qutub Minar and Indira Gandhi, was 12 Willingdon Crescent.
It’s not an address Mukherjee should bungle for, as he reminds us later on, he and P.V. Narasimha Rao stood by her during that spell of political exile. I can’t remember Narasimha Rao there but Mukherjee was as much a fixture as Dhirendra Brahmachari or Mohammed Yunus, especially when Sanjay Gandhi was around.
His references to Sanjay are predictably laudatory, in contrast with the restraint of the encomiums that, as a loyal Congressman, he is obliged to shower on Rajiv Gandhi. But the most poignant passage concerning Sanjay is not about him but his mother, whom Mukherjee worshipped. It was the day after the fatal air crash, and Mukherjee was keeping nocturnal vigil at 1, Safdarjung Road, where Sanjay’s battered body had been taken.
It was late in the night, and a stream of people was continually pouring in when I saw Mrs Gandhi walk up to where Sanjay’s body lay. She seemed to notice that the part of the sheet covering his foot had gone slightly askew. Murmuring softly that he might feel cold, she gently pulled the sheet back over his foot.
One expects much from someone who is sensitive enough to notice such details and has the literary ability to describe them without sounding maudlin. If the expectation is not fulfilled, it’s because Mukherjee lives at several levels.
In The Turbulent Years: 1980-1996, he chooses to present his public political persona which may not be the most captivating. Undoubtedly, the bookish man of refinement who is a voracious reader and who surprised Mrs Gandhi by recommending Alvin Toffler’s Previews and Promises to her on the eve of presenting his first Budget as finance minister lurks somewhere under the drab exterior.
But it’s not often that the creature is allowed out among prowling political predators. There is also the keen observer of human foibles who is a raconteur too. Drawing on both skills, Mukherjee demolishes the when-in-doubt-pout image of Narasimha Rao with a telling anecdote. When he promised to think about the offer of deputy chairman of the Planning Commission, Narasimha Rao replied, “You can think for as long as you want, but I expect you to join on Monday.”
Dwarfing both images is that of the economist, the shortest finance minister who delivered the longest Budget speech, as Indira Gandhi put it with affectionate cattiness. One suspects Mukherjee would like to be remembered as the planner who parleyed with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, led India’s delegation to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and shaped the World Trade Organisation.
Trips (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) trips off his pen, Marrakesh, where the WTO was born, is thrown in as casually as Mumbai. Page after page is filled with long chunks from dreary speeches on the Eighth Plan (“an unqualified success” according to the author), the Uruguay Round, the National Development Council, Finance Commission and other such scintillating topics.
Mukherjee has also always been something of an amateur psephologist and regales readers with tables of election results and musings on the why and wherefore of the outcome. The drawback here is that a practitioner like him is seldom able to distance himself from the game and dispassionately assess the players, their strong and weak points and the moves they make.
These dry as dust pages may help to explain why Mukherjee failed where his fellow Bengali brahmin Mamata Banerjee has succeeded. Despite the stellar cast he was able to rope in, his Rashtriya Samajwadi Congress flopped. Ms Banerjee’s Trinamul Congress may have turned out to be a shabby and shoddy one-woman outfit, but it is firmly entrenched in power. He makes the interesting point in passing that Indira Gandhi too ploughed a lonely furrow.
The absence of a populist dimension need not be held against him. But memoirs lose credibility if an account of Sanjay’s death when Rajiv — not Maneka — inherited his political mantle has nary a word about the flaming saas-bahu drama that gripped the nation’s attention; if the Asian Games can be lauded to the skies without any mention of the scandal of imported television sets; or if the rise of Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale ignores widespread assumptions of the role of Gyani Zail Singh. Given this anodyne narrative, it’s startling to find Mukherjee committing himself so far as to say Rajiv ran a “babalog” government and “some of them turned out to be fortune seekers.”
Whether or not he was The Man Who Knew Too Much (citing a magazine’s hyperbolic bid for attention), someone in his position knew a great deal. But readers are not the only ones to be left guessing. Mukherjee tells us that two questions baffle him still: Why did Rajiv drop him from his government and expel him from the party? And why did Narasimha Rao not take him into his Cabinet to start with? If the author is to be believed, no one knows.
Sunanda K. Datta-Ray is a senior journalist, columnist and author
