Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Jr | Pranab Da’s politics: Adept at managing power games

The death of former President Pranab Mukherjee on the evening of August 31 after battling medical complications, including Covid-19, has opened the debate, a rightful and meaningful one too, about Pranab Mukherjee the politician and what is to be counted as his legacy, if there is one. Some journalists had showed a bit more courage and talked about how he could not become the Prime Minister either in 2004 or in 2009 because he did not seem to inspire Congress president Sonia Gandhi’s confidence, that was sine qua non for getting the job. It is tempting to rephrase the position of Pranab Dada -- the generic Mukherjee would take away from the man of flesh and blood that he actually was -- as “the man who became President because he could not be Prime Minister”. Narasimha Rao, who became PM once the Congress returned to power after Rajiv’s assassination, knew Pranab’s worth well, but Rao had his own cunning way of handling talent. It can be said that Pranab really came into his own in the UPA years -- the eight years from 2004 to 2012 where he was the manager of governmental workings even as Sonia Gandhi was managing political affairs for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.