Memory man

that isn’t the case.”

Mr Mukherjee is 81; his memory remains sharp. Something else that remains sharp, and it comes through in this book, is his pain at not becoming the prime minister.

At the launch, former prime minister Manmohan Singh said Mr Mukherjee had every right to feel aggrieved, since he has had a more distinguished political career. In 2004, Mr Mukherjee had debuted in the Lok Sabha after two failed attempts. Mr Singh, picked by Sonia Gandhi to be the prime minister, was a Rajya Sabha member.

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

His character sketches of his colleagues in the Congress and his political rivals make for interesting reading. On P Chidambaram, Mr Mukherjee writes he is “intellectually sharp and wellinformed, 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 “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 D Subbarao, when Mr Mukherjee was the finance minister during UPA-II 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, then Congress president Sitaram Kesri, whose ambition brought down the United Front government in 1998, and how he climbed his way into Ms Gandhi’s inner circle at the 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 Sharad Pawar raised the issue of Ms Gandhi’s foreign origins, as he felt “alienated” because after her elevation as the Congress president, she would consult P Shiv Shankar rather than him. He has written about his warm equation with Mr Vajpayee, and his account of his relationship with L K Advani is also of some interest. “When I moved to Rashtrapati Bhavan, we drew closer, as we both share interest in books and often enjoyed music recitals…” 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 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 the party 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-I 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” 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 she had gained from the Emergency. “In those 21 months, we comprehensively managed to alienate all sections of the Indian people,” she replied. Mr Mukherjee writes that a moment of silence was followed by loud laughter and the journalists melted away. It was an early lesson he received, Mr Mukherjee says, on acknowledging mistakes and rectifying them. That held true for Indira Gandhi, and could be a lesson for current crop of leaders. 1996 to 2012 Pranab Mukherjee Rupa 278 pages; ~595