Column

Power circles in Delhi were not surprised by the way the PM pulled out the stops to rescue Pranab Mukherjee from the backwaters of Bengal after his car accident last weekend.

As soon as he got the news — which was about an hour and a half after the head-on collision — the PM was on the phone to defence minister AK Antony to first arrange a helicopter to airlift the injured external affairs minister from Krishna Nagar to a hospital in Kolkata, and then an air force plane to fly him to the military hospital in Delhi.

A PMO official was put on 24-hour duty to monitor Mukherjee’s condition and provide the PM with regular updates. And when Mukherjee landed in Delhi, the PM broke protocol and received him at the airport. The PM’s anxiety just reaffirmed the talk in the corridors of power — that Mukherjee is an indispensable number 2 in Manmohan Singh’s cabinet.

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The PM’s dependence on Mukherjee’s political sagacity for solutions to tricky issues has been evident almost from the start. It was Mukherjee he consulted from Washington in the final stages of the July 18 statement on the nuclear deal. It’s Mukherjee to whom he turns every time a GoM (group of ministers) has to be set up.

(Government circles have lost count of the number of GoMs the external affairs minister heads.) And it’s Mukherjee at whom he looks when a cabinet meeting threatens to turn stormy. Mukherjee, Chidambaram and Montek Singh Ahluwalia: This is the PM’s list of troubleshooters, in that order.

Congress circles recall that till quite recently, Singh used to address Mukherjee as ‘Sir’, out of sheer habit from the days when he was RBI governor and the man from Bengal was finance minister. He finally dropped the nomenclature because it sounded odd coming from the PM to a cabinet colleague. But he has not abandoned the respectful tone.

Mukherjee has responded in kind. After his initial reluctance to work under a man who was once his junior, the external affairs minister willingly fills in as the PM’s chief sounding board, advisor and aide. When some journalists asked him about their relationship, Mukherjee readily acknowledged the skill with which the PM eased what could have been a sticky situation. He’s a very nice man,” he said.

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No wonder then that the PM was more than a trifle concerned when he was told about the accident. But it takes more than a near fatal collision to get Mukherjee down. He’s driven his family and doctor mad by insisting on going back to work without delay. The doctor advised him two weeks’ rest, to which Mukherjee replied that a look at the files would cure him faster than bed rest!

TAILPIECE

Defence minister AK Antony can’t seem to escape his bête noire K Karunakaran, even in Delhi. He’s been allotted the ministerial bungalow that was once Karunakaran’s residence during his stint as union minister in the Narasimha Rao government. Talk about ghosts that haunt!

This is the same bungalow that made headlines because of the swimming pool Karunakaran had built with imported tiles, ostensibly for therapeutic use after he suffered a paralytic stroke. The pool has since been filled. Antony chose to move in on Easter Sunday and hosted a small dinner party for relatives and a few friends.

Email: a_jerath@dnaindia.net