For several years, the calumny went around—that Pranab Mukherjee had tried to persuade Rajiv Gandhi, who was travelling with him in West Bengal when Indira Gandhi was assassinated, to let him be prime minister. And that this overambition miffed Rajiv so much as to exclude Mukherjee from the cabinet that was formed after the 1984 election.
Circumstances should have ruled against such a story getting credence. First of all, Mukherjee was included in the first cabinet of four that Rajiv formed in the evening of Indira's assassination. Indeed, Mukherjee was with Rajiv in West Bengal when they heard of the assassination, and they rushed to Delhi together. The same evening, Rajiv was sworn in by President Zail Singh, along with Narasimha Rao, Buta Singh and Mukherjee. If Mukherjee had so blatantly sought to talk Rajiv into making him the PM, and if that had put Rajiv off, Rajiv would not have included Mukherjee in his cabal.
Though it hurt him, Mukherjee never sought to deny the story. It gained credence three months later when Rajiv excluded him from the cabinet that he formed after the 1984 election. The exclusion led to Mukherjee's exit from the party for a few years.
More than three decades later, Mukherjee cleared the air. In his memoirs, he gave a detailed account of what had happened that day—how he had flown with Rajiv to Delhi and how he had persuaded Rajiv to take over prime ministership. Indeed, upon landing in Delhi, the cabinet secretary, Krishnaswamy Rao Saheb met them and suggested that Mukherjee take over as interim PM. He invoked the precedent of Gulzarilal Nanda having taken over as interim PM on the death of Nehru and Shastri. And just like Nanda gave way to Shastri and Indira, Mukherjee could give way to Rajiv after the parliamentary party met and elected him as leader, suggested the cabinet secretary. But it was Mukherjee who put his foot down, and argued that Rajiv was to be sworn.
All the same, someone poisoned Rajiv's mind against him and that led to his exclusion from the post-poll cabinet and his expulsion from the party. The next three years were the only phase in Mukherjee's political life when he had to go into hibernation. He returned to the party towards the end of Rajiv's term, and Rajiv made him party spokesman for a short while during the 1991 election.
Narasimha Rao, who became prime minister following the assassination of Rajiv, made Mukherjee deputy chairman of the Planning Commission and later a cabinet minister for commerce. There was no looking back since.
His experience in governance was unparalleled, having served at different times as foreign, defence, commerce and finance minister. Politically too, he was indispensable for the Congress. Drawn many a time into fire-fighting operations, he was a member of the Congress Working Committee, the highest decision-making body of the party, for 23 years.
Mukherjee had humble origins. He was born in the small village of Mirati in Birbhum district of West Bengal. His parents, Kamada Kinkar Mukherjee and Rajlakshmi were freedom fighters. His father was a Congress leader.
As a minor functionary of the party during the Nehru days, he had the task of translating the speeches of defence minister V. K. Krishna Menon. A story he was fond of recounting was how Menon used to hold forth on the Suez crisis or Bandung Conference, and Mukherjee would 'translate' and transpose them as some local irrigation canal issues which the locals were familiar with.
It was during his college teaching days that he was spotted by Indira Gandhi, who wanted to build a brigade of young economists to advise her. The pipe-smoking youngster soon became her finance minister in the 1980s when she was attempting to balance between her earlier socialistic politics and the compulsions of a more liberal economy that was becoming the global fashion in the 1980s. Mukherjee's stewardship of the economy led to the rise of a new crop of industrialists including Dhirubhai Ambani, and also a quiet opening up of the stock market. Yet, when assessed from the point of view of the post-Manmohan Singh liberalism, Mukherjee is perceived as left of the centre!
During the Narasimha Rao years, Mukherjee remained non-controversial, trying not to be caught between the Arjun Singh camp and the Rao loyalists. His elder statesman image within the party grew during the Congress's days in the opposition. Yet it raised many eyebrows when Sonia Gandhi chose Manmohan Singh over the more senior Mukherjee as prime minister in 2004.
Mukherjee had a difficult time when he was invested with the defence portfolio in 2004. There was the issue of post-Kargil purchases, some of which had led to charges of scams under the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government. The charges and demands from his partymen for a probe into those scams tested Mukherjee's political sagacity—as a minister handling sensitive issues, he had to ensure that the purchases were not scuttled over flimsy corruption charges, while he also had to take up his party's fight against the previous BJP regime's allegedly corrupt deals. At the end of the day, one can say he spared the political landscape from several unwanted defence scandals.
Soon he got back his old and favourite portfolio of finance and some of his decisions seemed to be taking the economy on a reverse gear. His Vodafone order created a virtual stock market storm, but Manmohan Singh quietly got him kicked upstairs and uphill, literally up the Raisina Hill, as the President of India.
As President, he worked with two prime ministers, Manmohan Singh and Narendra Modi, and his excellent rapport with the latter was much talked about, especially since Mukherjee had opposed the BJP's ideology all along. However, what really raised eyebrows was his decision to visit the RSS headquarters in Nagpur, where he made a speech on India's pluralism.
Mukherjee was conferred the Bharat Ratna in 2019, and it was noted in political circles that the honour was given to him by a BJP government. When asked if he did not find it ironic, he said that he, as President, had given it to Atal Bihari Vajpayee in May 2015.