Pranab Mukherjee will always be remembered in the terms he once used to describe RSS founder KB Hedgewar: “a great son of India”. As a nationalist, statesman and secularist who fought for “the holy Ganga”, he was held in high regard by the RSS-BJP. Like other eminent Congressman, he may well be appropriated and inducted into the nationalists’ hall of fame.
Pranab da’s long and eventful association with the Congress has already receded into the background. It was the BJP-led NDA which awarded him the Bharat Ratna in 2019, and news of his demise was mourned by the BJP leaders, with heart-warming visuals of Prime Minister Narendra Modi engaging with him or bending to touch his feet and seek his blessings.
The Congress is failing to hang on its icons, for two reasons. First, the party simply cannot bring itself to valorize leaders other than the Nehru-Gandhis. The media has made much of the fact that Pranab da was never given his due by the party he served. He was famously superceded, at the instance of Sonia Gandhi, by his ‘apolitical’ junior, Manmohan Singh – but had the grace and courage to make that announcement himself.
The Nehru-Gandhis regarded him with cautious respect. He was suspended from the party in 1984, after protesting the arbitrary nomination of Rajiv Gandhi as party leader, following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. He formed the Rashtriya Samajwadi Congress, but eventually came back home and proved a stellar asset to the party.
He was tasked with drafting the Pachmarhi Resolution in 1998 and thereafter maintained a cordial relationship with Sonia Gandhi, which did not stop her from choosing, first, Manmohan Singh as PM and then, P Chidambaram as FM, over him.
In 2011, he did her the enormous favour of publicly burying the hatchet with Chidambaram, then Home minister, after they clashed on the 2G spectrum allocation issue. Their differences went deeper and Pranab da was widely perceived as the injured party, but Sonia requested him to retreat, in the interests of the UPA government. In the full glare of TV cameras, a visibly upset Mukherjee complied.
The second factor is the party’s outdated notion of secularism, which treats the sangh parivar as ideological lepers. The storm of protest that broke over Pranab Mukherjee’s head when he visited the RSS fountainhead in Nagpur is a case in point.
In 2018, a year after he had demitted office as President of India, Pranab da accepted the RSS’ invitation to preside over the valedictory function of its Sangh Shiksha Varga. Congressmen went into paroxysms of righteous indignation and all but accused him of betraying the party’s core ideology. They wrote numerous letters begging him to reconsider, to think of the message his presence in Nagpur would convey.
But Pranab da, a Congressman of the old school, had conducted himself as a neutral entity from the moment he assumed the office of President of India. During his term from 2012-17, he received the RSS sarsanghchalak and other functionaries at Rashtrapati Bhawan. As a democrat, he a did not regard any legal entity as untouchable, simply because it was right of centre.
Left-wing activist Apoorvanand fulminated: “the RSS… got not only one, but many frames which it will showcase to future generations to prove that it is not shunned by the civilised”. However, Pranab da’s graceful speech at Nagpur, which emphasized tolerance, pluralism and constitutional values, silenced most of his critics. In a masterly fashion, he got his message across without giving offence to anyone.
The RSS soft spot for Pranab da pre-dates his Presidential term. Many years ago, as Finance minister, he had stepped in to “save” the Ganga. The controversial Loharinagpala hydel power project in the upper reaches of the river had been red-flagged by ecologists, who approached him, as head of the GoM looking into the scheme. Unusually for an FM, he came down on the green side of the development vs environment debate.
“The holy Ganga is the very foundation and is at the very core of our civilization. Our government is very conscious of the faith that crores of our countrymen and women have in this most holy of rivers”, he observed, while scrapping the project (by the simple expedient of declaring the stretch from Uttarkashi to Gaumukh an eco-sensitive zone).
The sangh parivar will remember the statement, even if the deed has been forgotten, swept away in a series of flash floods.
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