NEW DELHI: It was an informal exchange with what could loosely be called his peer group of parliamentary leaders. Prime Minister Narendra Modi remarked, spending a few hours with President Pranab Mukherjee was like reading a good book. Well, access to the President’s repository of stories—memoirs of events—may not remain restricted to the privileged few for too long.
His book from the early years to a watershed moment in Indian history, 1984, is ready for print. It will be off the block, by the festival season of October, or before the year is out.
“Two volumes I’ve completed, it will come out. The rest (by which he means the more recent years) will have to wait till the time I demit office,’’ President Mukherjee says with his inimitable half-smile and a far-away thoughtful look, during an interaction.
With him confirming, a promise lingers in the air, creating anticipation in its wake. Or maybe, even a sense of apprehension—with certain targeted people sure to feel a tingling menace about the ‘outing’ of embarrassing secrets.
But with Mukherjee, he makes it clear, it won’t be a piqued retort-in-book form. It would be “facts and facts alone” as he witnessed them “first-hand”. Not so much “insider’’ revelations, at least not in the first two parts.
Often called a ‘walking encyclopaedia’, prone to imparting free history lessons whenever he has a little time on hand, Mukherjee’s has had a ring-side view of the social, economic and political upheavals of the past five decades. So, his is going to be a historical chronicle, written in first person.
A person blessed with his kind of pinpoint institutional memory—spanning four-and-a-half decades of his career—means one can look forward to an involved “chronicling of Indian politics” from the perspective of a man who was always close to the centre of it, often a key player.
But for the more interesting take on the UPA years, the horses will be held. That will have to wait. The readers meanwhile will have to rest content with Mukherjee’s passage from early life in remote Mirati village, Birbhum, where he had to wade through a river while walking miles to school, till the year 1984—that’s where the two volumes of Mukherjee’s autobiography that are ready stop.
That year was, of course, an inflection point in his career over who should succeed Indira Gandhi in the immediate aftermath of her assassination. The consequent lack of trust Rajiv Gandhi had in him led to a brief period outside the Congress party, admittedly the lowest ebb in his career.
Sources say the fact that India’s history (according to Mukherjee) of the last three turbulent decades, up to the present, have been kept for the time after he demits office could merely be protocol, or it could be the sign of a commitment to truth-telling, regardless of its inconvenience.
There are two reasons to believe the latter might be the case. One, Mukherjee is the person under whom the party allowed itself a flash of self-criticism during the writing of its official history, which had been authorised by Sonia Gandhi herself during her most confident time, the first year of UPA-II, fresh from a validating General Election.
Two, a prominent Bengali publication is sitting on a manuscript of Mukherjee’s autobiography in Bangla, whose span ends with the post-Emergency years. The arch constitutionalist, Mukherjee obviously does not find it politically kosher that a serving President freely opinionates on Indian politics. So that too is waiting for him to demit office. Along with the rest of the story in Bangla, he has finished writing on everything till the UPA years.
No such protocol binds the silent man, Manmohan Singh, and though no one has said anything officially, it has been around that he too will seek to set the record straight on the UPA flameout with a book of his own. Over and above the conversational volume his daughter Daman Singh has put together on him and his wife, Gursharan Kaur.
Then there’s Sonia Gandhi’s blow-back assertion: “I too will write a book.’’ But the only thing is, for Congress people the party chief writing a memoir seems like the harbinger of retirement. Now, that would be an inflectional moment in the party’s own biography.