Memory Man

Book review of 'The Coalition Years'

The Coalition Years

1996 to 2012

Pranab Mukherjee

Rupa

278 pages; Rs 595

At the launch of the third volume of former president Pranab Mukherjee’s autobiography on Friday, Communist Party of India (Marxist) chief Sitaram Yechury said Mr. Mukherjee has the memory of an elephant, to which Congress President Sonia Gandhi, sitting among the audience, suggested that he had the memory of two elephants.

As everybody on the dais and in the audience at the New Delhi’s Nehru Memorial Museum and Library chuckled, Mr. Yechury elaborated the point. He said some years back he was asked for his reaction on the comments made about his party and its leaders in the memoirs of a former prime minister. “I said the only thing that I have learned is that if you at all want to write your memoirs, you should write when you are much younger and when your memory doesn’t fail you. But with Pranab da that isn’t the case,” Mr. Yechury said.

Mr. Mukherjee is 81 years old, and by all accounts his memory remains sharp. Something else that remains sharp, and it comes through in the third book of his autobiographical trilogy titled, The Coalition Years 1996-2012, is his pain at not ever becoming the prime minister of India.

At the book launch, former prime minister Manmohan Singh said Mr. Mukherjee had every right to feel aggrieved that he didn’t become the prime minister in 2004, since he has had a more distinguished political career.

Mr. Mukherjee dived into history to invoke the famous instance when after the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1965, the then Congress president K Kamaraj had ruled himself out of the succession battle. “Kamaraj had said: No Hindi, no prime ministership,” Mr. Mukherjee quoted the Tamil Nadu leader. Mr. Mukherjee said, just as Kamaraj, his grasp of Hindi was limited. Moreover, he considered himself “disqualified” since for most part of his career he was in the Rajya Sabha. 

Interestingly, if contemporary accounts are true, Kamaraj had said “No Hindi, no English. How?” Moreover, in 2004, Mr. Mukherjee had debuted in the Lok Sabha after two failed attempts. He had contested from Malda in 1977 and Bolpur in 1980. Mr. Manmohan Singh, picked by Sonia Gandhi to be the prime minister, was a Rajya Sabha member.

Mr. Mukherjee has written that he was “reluctant” to join the government in 2004, and that Ms. Gandhi wanted him to handle a key portfolio but also the Planning Commission but Mr. Singh wanted that job for Mr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia. There are also suggestions that Mr. Mukherjee believes UPA 2 suffered when he shifted to the Rashtrapati Bhavan in 2012. Briefly in 2012, Mr. Mukherjee writes that he was convinced that he might just become the prime minister, and it was Mr. Singh who was headed to the Rashtrpati Bhavan.

His character sketches of his colleagues in the Congress, and his political rivals, make for interesting reading. On P. Chidambaram, Mr. Mukherjee writes that he is “intellectually sharp and well-informed, though sometimes appears to be arrogant…” He has also written about his disagreements with Mr. Chidambaram on economic issues, particularly the retrospective tax proposal.

On the so called ‘dream budget’ that Mr. Chidambaram presented during the United Front years, the former president writes: “Unfortunately, the dream budget didn’t remain so. Though it did not morph into a nightmare, in the course of the year it was found that many of the projections of revenue receipts and expenditures were off the mark and did not conform to targets that were taken into account while preparing budgetary calculations. Consequently, there was a decline in the rate of growth and employment generations, coupled with rising inflation.”

His equation with then Reserve Bank of India governor Mr. D Subbarao, when Mr. Mukherjee was the finance minister of the country during UPA 2 years, has also been commented upon. “The much-publicised stand-off between the RBI and the government stemmed from the fact that (Subba) Rao had limited understanding of autonomy.” 

The book has fascinating details on his love-hate relationship with the mercurial West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, the ambition of then Congress president Sitaram Kesri which brought down the United Front government in 1998 and how he climbed his way into Ms. Gandhi’s inner circle around the time of the 1998 Pachmarhi conclave.

During the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led government, Mr. Mukherjee and Mr. Singh, both of whom were in the Rajya Sabha then, disagreed with Ms. Gandhi’s “obstructionist path” as the opposition party in the Lok Sabha. “Finally, she told us, ‘You manage in your way in the Rajya Sabha and I will manage my own way in the Lok Sabha’. That put the matter to rest.”

Mr. Mukherjee writes that Sharad Pawar raised the issue of Ms. Gandhi’s foreign origins as he felt “alienated” after her elevation as the Congress President she would consult P Shiv Shankar on all important issues rather than him. He has written about his warm equation with Vajpayee, but it his account of his relationship with Mr. LK Advani that is of some interest. “When I moved to Rashtrapati Bhavan, we drew closer as we both share interest in books and often enjoyed the music recitals at the Rashtrapati Bhavan…” One would expect Mr. Mukherjee to shed more light on this in his forthcoming book on his Rashtrapati Bhavan years.

Mr. Mukherjee might have been the UPA’s crises manager, but he says that at the party’s Shimla conclave in 2003, his was the lone voice to disagree with Ms. Gandhi and Mr. Singh on the need to build a coalition of parties to challenge the BJP. He believed this would undermine the Congress identity, and that the Congress should rather sit in the opposition than forsake its identity for the sake of forming a government. “I remain consistent with the view even today,” he writes.

There are also delightful anecdotes on how Jyoti Basu had intervened to ask then CPI (M) chief Prakash Karat to talk to Mr. Mukherjee on the issue of the Left parties withdrawing their support to UPA 1 on the India-US nuclear deal issue, but Mr. Karat defied the senior leader. Mr. Mukherjee says he earned Ms Gandhi’s disapproval when he met Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray to canvass support for his presidential candidature in 2012.

Mr. Mukherjee pays ample tribute to his “mentor” Ms. Indira Gandhi. During a visit to London in 1978, after the defeat of the Congress in the post Emergency elections in 1977, a journalist asked her what were the gains from the Emergency. “In those 21 months, we comprehensively managed to alienate all sections of the Indian people.” Mukherjee writes that a moment of silence was followed by loud laughter and the journalist throng melted away. It was an early lesson he received, Mukherjee says, on acknowledging mistakes and rectifying them. That held true for Indira Gandhi, and could be a lesson for current crop of leaders, and not just in the Congress.