Pranab Mukherjee (may his tribe increase) was an old-school politician. Sagicious, gracious and on occasion, loquacious, the former President of India can teach the Congress babalog a lesson or two in realpolitik and liberal democracy.
Mukherjee will doubtless dismiss the angst expressed by a section of Congress leaders, over his acceptance of an invitation to address fledgling RSS pracharaks at Nagpur on June 7, with characteristic impatience. Panning engagement with the RSS in any shape or form is neither pragmatic nor in consonance with democratic principles.
As President, and even earlier as minister, he did not subscribe to the Congress hard-left stance of treating all things sangh parivar as untouchable. His Cabinet colleagues might have felt contaminated by the slightest brush with the political right, but Pranab took a hard-headed view. He lent a sympathetic ear to right-wing interest groups when they took up the cause of the Ganga and wanted to stymie dams on the upper reaches of the river. On file, he wrote: “The holy Ganga is the very foundation and is at the very core of our civilisation. Our government is very conscious of the faith that crores of our countrymen and women have in this most holy of rivers”.
He was equally pragmatic and fair as President, hob-nobbing with senior RSS functionaries and maintaining a friendly relationship with sarsanghchalak Mohan Rao Bhagwat. The grand old party would do well to accept his message, that the RSS and its affiliates are integral to India’s political landscape and eschewing all interaction would be counterproductive. Engagement with the RSS is not equivalent to a Faustian bargain, any more than former sarsanghchalak Balasaheb Deoras’ exchanges with Indira Gandhi were in the 1970s, or with Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s. The RSS-as-untouchable narrative is of recent origin, probably arising from the competitive minorityism of the post-Mandal era.
If the content of Mukherjee’s speech is not a matter of concern for the RSS, it certainly should not be for the Congress. After all, his loyalty to the party and the ideology it represents is beyond question, despite the fact that in the 1980s, he was marginalised and even kicked out of Rajiv Gandhi’s Congess. In 2004, he was again given short shrift, when Congress president Sonia Gandhi prefered Manmohan Singh – his junior and a semi-politician who had lost the only election he had ever contested – over him as Prime Minister. But he accepted that decision matter-of-factly and maintained a good relationship with his junior-turned-boss. Rumour had it that he once ticked the PM off for showing him too much deference!
Mukherjee had been one of the promoters of the Panchmarhi Resolution of 1998, but was never dogmatic and accepted the Congress shift to coalitional politics with the Shimla Declaration of 2003. He was a rock all through the UPA years, saving the Congress bacon in the nuclear deal. In Mahmohan’s absence, when he underwent heart surgery, it was Mukherjee who steered the Cabinet. He placed his political skills at the disposal of Sonia Gandhi, who found him unfailingly reliable.
Particularly in 2011, when the public face-off between Mukherjee and his Cabinet colleague, P Chidambaram, ostensibly over the 2G spectrum allocation, had become acutely embarrassing for both the UPA government and the party, it was to Mukherjee that Sonia turned, clearly expecting him to be the bigger man. And so it proved. In the full glare of TV cameras, he buried the hatchet with Chidamabaram. Not surprisingly, he was seen as a natural candidate for President of India in 2012. He gracefully opted out of the 2017 contest, leaving the field for the NDA candidate.
No rational Congressman believes, even for a moment, that the very fact of Mukherjee’s presence at an RSS conclave will be construed as an endorsement of the RSS ideology. If the fear is that it will be seen as a legitimisation of the political right, well, that particular train left the station a long time ago. The left’s dominance of the political discourse is a thing of the past. There is now such a creature as a liberal-right, or at least conservative intellectual. Ramachandra Guha may claim that the right is incapable of throwing up intellectuals, but it has certainly adopted a few! The larger cause of restraining the Hindutva lunatic fringe would be far better served by engaging with moderate and liberal elements within the right, than treating them as untouchables.
Most likely, this being an election year, the Congresss fears that Mukherjee’s visit to Nagpur will take the wind out of its communal-divisive-intolerant diatribe against the BJP. How can one of its stalwarts, albeit retired, show up to address the very organisation it reviles on a daily basis? The aam aadmi probably couldn’t care less. Old-school politicians worked against or with their rivals, as circumstances demanded. That’s how democracy works.
Bhavdeep Kang is a senior journalist with 35 years of experience in working with major newspapers and magazines. She is now an independent writer and author.
