Rashtrapati Bhavan in for hard times

Some deals have been struck. Don’t you think so? Otherwise why would the Samajwadi Party and its chief Mulayam Singh Yadav, in a matter of a little more than 48 hours, switch sides, not once but twice, and after dumping the two Congress nominees, come up with a set of names of his own including that of prime minister Manmohan Singh for the post of President of India, jettison Mamata Banerjee and later, in the most docile and servile manner, extend full support to the most ‘erudite’ Pranab Mukherjee, UPA’s presidential nominee?

For unlike Mamata, for whom everything to do with Pranab, or everything she did in the last few days against Pranab, was personal, for Mulayam the entire episode was business, though the business had everything to do with (his) matters personal.

Well, what can anyone do? That said I’ll say this: I don’t think he is the superman some people make him out to be. To my thinking, he is just another politician, who has, like so many of his ilk, been climbing up the beanstalk of politics, clinging to it for the power that politics brings with it. True, he wears a safari suit better than most others and there’s no one in India Against Corruption who can point a finger at him. They don’t have dirt on him and I doubt if they will find any.

But if you dig deep you’ll find that Pranab Mukherjee has other shortcomings. He is arrogant. There are numbers of stories doing the round that speak of how he’s been throwing his weight around, in and outside cabinet. So much so, he has several times gone to the extent of humiliating ministers and reducing them to tears. There is this report of him once pulling up Mamata Banerjee when she was railway minister at a cabinet meeting as if she was a schoolgirl and berating her till she broke out in tears. No wonder she hates his guts and went hammer and tong against him.

And has he really been the best finance minister India has had? Think again folks. As he sits smug, looking to walk into the hallowed halls of Rashtrapati Bhavan and be addressed as the President of India, the Indian economy he leaves behind to his successor is in shambles. Just last week, Indian industry hit rock bottom and foreign investors have been fleeing India. For weeks now, the Indian rupee has been depreciating like nobody’s business, especially not Pranab Mukherjee’s business, and the finance minister has been blaming the Eurozone for all the troubles he brought on the common man’s head, reeling under inflation that refused to abate during his entire tenure as finance minister in UPA-II. Ladies, Pranab Mukherjee is a failed finance minister and to my mind he’s not going to be the best president India has had or will have.

The run up to this presidential election so far has been a circus and it has been a comedy of sorts to read and hear that Pranab Mukherjee was frantically calling up Left Front politicians of West Bengal to support a fellow Bengali for the top post. Pranab has always hankered after top posts and it is on record that he harboured ambitions of becoming the prime minister of India, which on its own is nothing wrong, but betrays that hankering for top posts, an eagerness to lord it over people.

As I write this, my heart goes out to the staff of Rashtrapati Bhavan — the chefs and cooks, the gardeners, the liveried staff, the stenographers and secretaries and similar sorts employed to help the first citizen of India carry out his chores. They will be unaware of his quick temper, his impatience, his arrogance and his sharp tongue.

They are in for some hard times in the five years Pranab will be President of India. I hope those who manage the President’s household keep a ready supply of handkerchiefs and tissue paper in Rashtrapati Bhavan.