'Pranab Mukherjee Wanted to Become The PM, But...': Ex-Prez's Daughter's Big Revelation

Former President Pranab Mukherjee wanted to become the Prime Minister, but he knew that he couldn’t become one, so he was not in any disillusionment, Sharmistha Mukherjee, author and daughter of the former President has claimed.

“He wanted to become the PM, but he knew that he couldn’t become one, so he was not in some disillusionment that he’ll become a PM one day,” Sharmistha Mukherjee told ANI about Pranab Mukherjee’s chances of becoming the prime minister in 2004.

Sharmistha claimed that she asked Pranab Mukherjee once if he wanted to become the Prime Minister, to which the latter replied, “Any serious politician would like to become one but that doesn’t mean that I’d become the PM.”

She also said, quoting her father, that Sonia Gandhi had assumed that the former President would challenge her authority and therefore she safeguarded her family’s interest and made “someone PM whom they felt would not challenge her authority.”

In the book, the former Congress spokesperson who quit politics in 2021 provides a glimpse into the illustrious life of her father, where she also says that he did not have any rancour against Sonia Gandhi for not making him the prime minister, and definitely not against the man chosen – Manmohan Singh.

Through her father’s diary entries, personal stories narrated to her and her own research, Sharmistha uncovers new, hitherto unknown facets of his political life – his unfulfilled ambition of becoming India’s prime minister arising out of his inability to emerge as the ‘number one person’ to earn Sonia Gandhi’s trust, the personality cult around the Nehru-Gandhi family and Rahul Gandhi’s lack of charisma and political understanding among other things, according to the book’s publishers Rupa Publications.

Pranab Mukherjee also felt that “Prime Minister Narendra Modi is the only PM after Indira Gandhi who has the ability to feel the pulse of the people so acutely and accurately”, according to his daughter Sharmistha.

According to the book, Pranab Mukherjee described Congress leader Rahul Gandhi as “courteous and full of questions but not yet politically mature”. He also thought that Rahul Gandhi’s tearing of the ordinance publicly while Dr Manmohan Singh was abroad was the “final nail in the coffin of the UPA”.

Speaking of Gandhi, Mukherjee wrote in his diary: “He has all the arrogance of his Gandhi-Nehru lineage without their political acumen.”

Mukherjee served as India’s finance minister and subsequently became minister for External Affairs, Defence, Finance and Commerce. He was India’s 13th president (2012 to 2017). He died on August 31, 2020 at the age of 84.

As the president of the single largest party Congress to win the Lok Sabha elections in 2004, Sonia Gandhi was tipped to be the prime minister and had the full support of the coalition partners.