‘Pranab, My Father’ by Sharmistha Mukherjee: Between the personal and the political

Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr

On their first night at Rashtrapati Bhavan, when Pranab Mukherjee sat down for dinner with his family at the table, formally laid out with plates, spoons, forks and knives, and the President’s sisters and daughter were a little awestruck by what was expected in the President’s house, Pranab told them, “Eat with your hands.” That sort of broke the ice. Now this is the kind of intimate detail that is much more revealing about the man than Pranab telling his daughter about Sonia Gandhi’s unforgivable act of not allowing PV Narasimha Rao’s hearse into 24 Akbar Road, the Congress office, and that he did not expect her to behave any more generously with him.

Pranab’s three-volume autobiography was interesting for its political details, and there was nothing very sensational about them. One of the interesting aspects of Sharmistha Mukherjee’s book is that she refers to Pranab as Pranab and as ‘Baba’ only occasionally, which is an interesting narrative strategy, while she refers to her mother as ‘Ma’ throughout.

‘Pranab, My Father’ is based on the diary he maintained meticulously. It turns out that he did not mention the personal aspects of his life much in the diary, which Sharmistha had access to after his passing away. So, she dips into the diary quite often even as she narrates Pranab’s political career.

The daughter recalls the heartwarming relationship that her family enjoyed with Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed and her sister Raina, which goes back to the days when the daughters of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman took asylum in India and Indira Gandhi asked Pranab to take care of them. Sheikh Hasina maintained the friendship when each time she broke protocol, visiting Sharmistha’s mother at home, and when Sharmistha visited Dhaka and stayed with Sheikh Hasina because she insisted there is no other way. This was a pure personal bonding of Sheikh Hasina with Pranab’s family, and Sharmistha’s inference that personal relations matter in international relations is an overstatement.

Sharmistha has written this book with a sense of responsibility. She is the custodian of Pranab’s diaries, and Pranab insisted that she should not read them till after his death, and that she should be discreet about the parts to be made public. Sharmistha admits that there are parts of the diaries that cannot be made public. She read the diaries only after Pranab’s passing away, and writes that she should have been less scrupulous because she could have asked Pranab for clarifications!

She is also quite critical of her father in the political sense. She writes: “It took Pranab more than 40 years to admit to himself that, perhaps, all was not well with his mentor Indira Gandhi. In his post-retirement diaries, there are references to Indira’s ‘feet of clay’.” She goes on to say, “Pranab was himself guilty of this ‘sycophancy’ to the extent that he too came to believe and accept the inevitability of a Gandhi-Nehru family member to lead the Congress.”

Though Pranab was critical of Congress and he was friendly with Narendra Modi, he believed that following Congress ideology was his ‘svadharma’. She says he quoted from the Bhagavadgita, and told her to follow it as well. Pranab was a Congressman but he respected the RSS pracharak who became Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. So, it would be false to infer that Pranab turned a right-winger because he spoke at the RSS headquarters. She writes: “I remember hearing a fleeting conversation between him and Sonia during one of her visits after his retirement. As I entered the room to serve tea, I heard Pranab saying, ‘I still stand by the Panchmarhi resolution.’”

Sharmistha has written a valuable book full of intelligence, interspersed with disarming and charming personal anecdotes. Whatever one’s assessment of Pranab — many, especially journalists, would believe that he was a political genius, and others would dismiss him as a middling politician — Sharmistha reveals all the hues of the man with rare candour. She has been able to write this book as she ‘quit’ politics! She mentions her father saying, “When were you in politics for you to quit”, when she told him she wanted to quit politics!