Pranab daughter custodian of diaries, to take publishing call

New Delhi, Sept. 2: The late Pranab Mukherjee, former President and long- time Congress leader, made his daughter Sharmistha Mukherjee custodian of the diaries he wrote almost every day during his fivedecade political career and authorised her to take a call on publishing them.

“He has left his diaries with me, and left it to my discretion whether to get them published or not,” Ms Mukherjee said on Wednesday.

Mukherjee, 84, who died on Monday after a threeweek battle with multiple ailments and was cremated with full state honours on Tuesday, entered politics in 1969 and then served as minister for external affairs, defence, finance and commerce and then as India’s 13th

President.

Writing a diary every day was one of Mukherjee’s ways to keep his famously encyclopaedic memory razor sharp until the very end, said his close friends.

“I once asked him what the fate of his diaries would be, and he said he’d given them to his daughter because a lot of controversies can take place. In

his diaries, he wrote whatever he thought, things that were off the record but he didn’t want to publish it before his death,” said veteran journalist Jayanta Ghoshal.

Ghoshal, who had known the late politician since 1985, said Mukherjee was in the habit of writing diaries since his days as a Cabinet minister in the Indira Gandhi government and continued to write them even after retiring as President.

In fact, the length of his entries had increased after he demitted the President’s office, he said.

Gautam Lahiri, another senior journalist and long- time friend, added that the seventime parliamentarian would write a diary every day, but the entry would be for events that took place two days earlier.

“I asked him once what the secret of his razor- sharp memory was, and he told me he wrote diaries not on the day’s events but on what happened two days ago. I try to remember that,” he said.

One entry Mr Lahiri knows of is a drawing by Mukherjee’s granddaughter. This followed a conversation between Mukherjee, the child and then PM Manmohan Singh.

After Pranab Mukherjee was elected President, Dr Manmohan Singh went to his house and Pranabda called his granddaughter and said: “You were looking for a PM, he is a PM.” She didn’t believe it and ran away.