The other PM

Mukherjee needn’t worry on that score. Called “indispensable” and, therefore, not sent to Rashtrapati Bhavan despite the comrades rooting for him, Mukherjee is now back in the thick of action, trying to win the same comrades over.

He is likely to head the 14-member committee that will look into the Left’s concerns on the nuclear deal. Every crisis in the party, alliance and the Government is routed to him. The Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA), in power since May 2004, has appointed 155 groups of ministers (GoM) to deliberate on tricky issues — Mukherjee chairs 55 of them. So much so that, an OSD at his office has earned a nickname, ‘GoM Gupta.’ He has found a way out for most and only 20-odd are alive now.

In the midst of the nuclear crisis, Congress President Sonia Gandhi referred yet another problem to him—should the party’s frontal organisations have internal elections?

In the last three weeks, Mukherjee’s working overtime. After the Left walked out of Parliament when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh spoke on the deal, the PM met Karat over breakfast on August 14 but by then there was hardly any warmth between Singh and Karat. Mukherjee was present at the breakfast, and within two days, became the anchor and navigator for the shaky UPA Government.

After the Congress core committee on August 17, Mukherjee became the central negotiator, to be aided by A K Antony and Ahmad Patel as the situation demanded. As the Left remained strident, Mukherjee first consolidated UPA partners. The next day, as the PM took the backseat, Mukherjee took UPA leaders through different scenarios: For instance, what happens if the deal does not go through and what happens if the Left withdraws. After two hours, allies felt safe to club their fortunes with the Congress. Since then, he has been engaging the Left and Congress colleagues, to a find a balance between conflicting demands.

After 18 days of endless negotiations, on Thursday, Mukherjee read out a statement that holds the key to UPA government’s survival — in exactly 100 words.

“When there are two conflicting views, trust him to find something that is acceptable to both,” says T R Baalu, DMK Minister. “He is amazingly versatile and multifaceted. If we want a precedent from Congress history or political tradition to deal with a unique contemporary problem, he is the one to turn to,” says Abhishek Manu Singhvi, Congress spokesperson.

Mukherjee maintains good personal rapport with people across parties, but with Left, he has a special closeness. It goes as far back as the beginning of his political career in 1967. As a leader of the Bangla Congress, he was an ally of Communist leaders Jyoti Basu — who was deputy CM — and Indrajit Gupta. Mukherjee maintains excellent rapport with most of the Left leaders. Once Jyoti Basu remarked: “If anyone in the Congress knows the functioning of the Communists, it is Pranab.”

In 2005, when Pranab was pressed in to resolve a stalemate between the Congress and Left over the Patents Bill, Jyoti Basu’s good offices did the wonders.

His wide-ranging experience spanning 40 years is unmatched in the Congress party. Even more precious is his unique blend of intellectual intensity and pragmatic political approach. He can diligently clear a Government file while listening to a visitor, and still attend to a phone call. “He can juggle three things,” an aide says. An ordinary Congress worker can get an audience with him at his residence in the evening, before he immerses himself into files until late in the night.

An early riser, he used to walk around Lutyen’s Delhi in the morning, until he was barred for security reasons. While on travel, his brief case is always by his seat — and he reads all the time, files and books that he carries around. He remembers every small detail of the things told to him and every small commitment made by him. Ironically, he is too short-tempered for a negotiator. He is impatient with ignorance. He knows his stuff and let others know that he knows. “He can be rude even to Cabinet colleagues. He can say bluntly that someone is a fool,” a Congress leader says. “He cools down fast, too. There are occasions when he has called back people within minutes of throwing of them out,” says an aide.

Pranab Mukherjee has been pointsman for everything politically crucial for the Congress: the RTI Act, NREG Act, Civil aviation policy, SEZs, spectrum policy, OBC reservation, Telengana and creation of small states. All his skills turned out to be a liability, when the party refused to make him president citing his “indispensability.”

“Piloo Modi once told Indira Gandhi that she may cease to be PM, but he was the permanent PM,” recalled Pranab Mukherjee on being asked if he would like to be president of India. “I am also permanent PM,” he said.

Someday when he publishes the diaries that he diligently keeps, the world will know at least a part of what he carries between his ears. And how exactly he clinched the deal with Left.