President Pranab Mukherjee’s address at a conclave in Mumbai on Friday attests to our First Citizen’s status as a consummate and enlightened politician and statesman who has hit the final stretch of the road. Mr Mukherjee’s tenure ends in July this year. Will there be a second term? That’s in the realm of speculation. After the BJP’s sweeping victories in the recent Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere, that will bolster its numbers in the electoral college for the presidency, there may be every likelihood that the saffron party will throw its weight behind someone from the RSS stable for Rashtrapati Bhavan, and not look at a good man. That’s the way of political logic.
Unlike some of his predecessors, Mr Mukherjee has the distinction of skillfully guiding the country through governments run by his own former party, the Congress, and the BJP, which is the polar opposite and bitter contestant of the Congress ideology and legacy, at a time when the saffron party — for the first time in 70 years — has emerged as the dominant pole in Indian politics under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
This couldn’t have been an easy part to play. What seems to have animated Mr Mukherjee’s official conduct is his abiding faith in our Constitution, of which he has continually offered proof through his timely articulations when Hindutva brigades appeared to have a free run of the social and political space.
Reflecting on his long, distinguished innings at the Mumbai event, the President confessed to being an admirer and emulator of Pandit Nehru, our first Prime Minister, whom he never met, and acknowledged Indira Gandhi, who he regards to be an extraordinary articulator of power among the politicians he has known, was “virtually my mentor”, although he had no hesitation in making a public criticism of the Emergency and referring to Mrs Gandhi’s “mistakes” in the exercise of power.
The President’s strong Congress antecedents didn’t stop him from heaping political and personal praise on two BJP Prime Ministers — Atal Behari Vajpayee and Mr Modi (though the latter has been around just three years and hasn’t faced the daunting odds of some of his most distinguished predecessors), showing that he can be even-handed with deftness.
Mr Mukherjee also had words of solicitude for Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh and P.V. Narsasimha Rao. He offered no comments, however, on Rajiv Gandhi, other than to say that he had worked with the country’s youngest PM only “briefly”.
Politics at the top is a high-stakes game that needs imagination, boldness and nerves of steel. Mr Mukherjee has adroitly displayed all of that, along with a capacity for excavating consensus even from impossible situations.
