A look at Pranab Mukherjee, or a customary listen to any of his speeches and one wouldn’t need to point out that he was a Bengali. But while Delhi remained the workplace, Bengal was always home.
Mukherjee & Bengal Politics
Mukherjee’s initiation into politics happened in Bengal. Born to freedom fighter parents, his father was an early and loyal member of the Congress. Mukherjee delved into politics under the tutelage of veteran leader Ajoy Chakraborty who had formed the ‘Bangla Congress’, a split-off faction from the West Bengal Congress.
His first assignment was to handle the by-election campaign for VK Krishna Menon from Midnapore in 1969. He pulled off a successful campaign, and Krishna Menon beat the Congress candidate by over 1,87,000 votes.
This feat caught the eye of none other than Indira Gandhi who took Mukherjee under her wing and the rest, they say, is history.
Since then Mukherjee became a ‘Delhi politician’. He was considered to be one of Mrs Gandhi’s Man Fridays, was inducted into the Rajya Sabha in 1969, and then went on to serve as a member of her cabinet till she was assassinated in 1984.
It is then that Mukherjee had his second tryst with politics in Bengal.
After being sidelined in the Congress by the Rajiv Gandhi dispensation, Mukherjee decided to break away and form his own party – the Rashtriya Samajwadi Congress (RSC) – in 1986.
A 1987 article by India Today magazine called the RSC a ‘ragtag band’ and predicted that the party will be a “sure flop”.
“Political observers were unanimous that the party had little more than nuisance value: bereft of a constructive ideology, a credible leadership or a mass following of any note,” said the article.
Mukherjee wanted to build the RSC as an alternative to the Congress which would be ready to receive leaders that were disgruntled with Rajiv.
The first test of the party was the West Bengal Assembly election of 1987. The Left, led by the CPI(M), swept that election, with the Congress party being a distant second. The RSC went seat-less.
In 1989, the party merged with the Congress after reaching a compromise with Rajiv Gandhi. However, the failure of the RSC in the elections, analysts say, cemented the idea that Mukherjee, while an astute statesman, was not a “mass leader”.
A Conscious Decision to Stay Away From Bengal Politics
Those close to Mukherjee say that his famous encyclopedic memory extended to matters of Bengal politics as well.
A former bureaucrat who worked with him recalls how he’d once rattled the entire electoral history of the Diamond Harbour constituency, down to specific dates, while speaking about a leader from the area.
He also recalls how Mukherjee would visit Bengal every 10-15 days, making frequent trips to his ancestral home in Mirati, Birbhum.
Mukherjee’s decision to not get embroiled in the nitty gritties of Bengal politics was a conscious one, says former CEO of Prasar Bharati, Jawhar Sircar, who’d also worked closely and extensively with Mukherjee.
“He wanted to stay away from the politics of Bengal because it was at odds with the politics at the Centre. When the Congress is looking for Left support at the Centre, Mukherjee couldn’t be on the streets of Kolkata in a dharna against the Left,” says Sircar.
It must also be noted that Mukherjee’s general personality was a lot different from the heavyweight leaders of Bengal (Congress or otherwise) at the time. Unlike someone like a Siddhartha Shankar Ray or a Jyoti Basu, Mukherjee lacked the “charisma” and was not an electorally successful leader.
However, over the years, he was made state Congress President several times whenever the high command needed a trouble-shooter in the state or had to put its house in order. But for Mukherjee, his role in Delhi would remain superior to his role in Bengal, with him insisting many times during his Presidentship of the party that the West Bengal unit needed a “full-time President”.
“He was more of a projects person”, Sircar says. “When he was here, he would get involved in administrative and policy work, overseeing projects in several districts, as opposed to involving himself in the factionalism of the state unit”.
Sircar also points out how Mukherjee was the Congress’ chief negotiator for the Left both in Bengal and Kerala.
His close relationship with legendary Left leader and former chief minister, the late Jyoti Basu, was well known. Both Basu and Mukherjee are considered to be Bengal’s missed chances at prime ministership.
Due to his close relationship with the Left Front, Mamata Banerjee had also opposed his bid for Presidentship in 2012, but later came around.
Like in Delhi, Mukherjee, however, continued to maintain a relationship with leaders across party lines in Bengal as well. In her tweet condoling his demise, Banerjee described Mukherjee as a “father figure” – a sentiment shared by many other politicians in Bengal who wrote about him.
For the people of Bengal, across political lines, Mukherjee remained their shining representative at the highest echelons of power, and one of their strongest contenders for the prime minister’s chair.
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