How Congress Kept Pranab Mukherjee Out of Power
The untold story of India's most capable leader who was denied the Prime Minister's chair not once, but twice by the very party he devoted his entire life to.
By:- Devalay Dey Law Student | Public Policy & Independent Political Commentator
Introduction: The Best Prime Minister India Never Had
There is a phrase that followed Pranab Mukherjee for decades long after he had served as Finance Minister, Defence Minister, External Affairs Minister, and eventually as the 13th President of India. Journalists, political analysts, and even rival politicians called him "the best prime minister India never had." It was a title loaded with irony. Here was a man who had arguably done more for the Indian National Congress than almost any other leader of his generation a man who had navigated impossible coalition politics, bailed out the party in moments of crisis, mentored generations of leaders, and handled ministries that no one else could and yet the one position he genuinely deserved and deeply desired was always kept just out of his reach.
This is not just the story of a political career; it is the story of how the Congress party's most powerful internal institution the Gandhi family shaped, used, sidelined, expelled, rehabilitated, and ultimately redirected the ambitions of Pranab Kumar Mukherjee over five extraordinary decades of Indian political life.
Part One: The Making of a Political Giant
From Mirati to New Delhi
Pranab Kumar Mukherjee was born on 11 December 1935 in Mirati, a small village in the Birbhum district of West Bengal. His father, Kamada Kinkar Mukherjee, was a dedicated freedom fighter who had spent years in British jails for his role in the independence movement. He later served in the West Bengal state legislature from 1952 to 1964. For a boy growing up in such a household, politics was not a career choice it was almost a calling.
Pranab pursued his education diligently at Suri Vidyasagar College and later at the University of Calcutta, from which he earned a Master's degree in both History and Political Science, as well as a law degree. He briefly worked as a college lecturer of political science before being swept into full-time political life. He was sharp, intellectually rigorous, and possessed an almost encyclopedic memory qualities that would define his political persona for the next fifty years.
The Indira Gandhi Connection
Mukherjee's entry into national politics in 1969 was, by his own admission, the product of a fortunate chain of events. He had been sent to the Midnapore district of West Bengal to serve as the election agent for V.K. Krishna Menon, a once-towering figure in Indian politics who had fallen from grace after the India-China War of 1962. During this campaign, Mukherjee came to the attention of Siddhartha Shankar Ray, a senior Congress leader who recommended him to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
The recommendation changed the trajectory of his life. Indira Gandhi, ever alert to political talent, offered Mukherjee a seat in the Rajya Sabha the upper house of the Indian Parliament at the remarkably young age of 35. He entered Parliament in 1969 as part of the Bangla Congress, a breakaway faction that soon merged with the Congress party.
What followed was a meteoric rise. Under Indira Gandhi's careful mentorship, Mukherjee was given ministerial responsibilities in quick succession first as Deputy Minister for Industrial Development in 1973, and then through a series of increasingly powerful portfolios. He impressed Indira so thoroughly that she reportedly told colleagues: "Whenever Pranab da is given any confidential information, it never comes out of his belly." This level of trust in a politician is rare, and it placed Mukherjee in an extraordinarily privileged position within the Congress party's power structure.
Finance Minister at 47
By 1980, Pranab Mukherjee had become the Leader of the House in the Rajya Sabha — one of the most powerful positions in Parliament. In 1982, at just 47 years of age, he was appointed Finance Minister of India — making him the youngest person to hold that office at the time. His tenure was widely praised. He managed to strengthen the government's finances sufficiently for Indira Gandhi to score a major political point: India returned the final instalment of its first-ever IMF loan ahead of schedule. In a striking example of how intertwined his career would be with Manmohan Singh's, it was Mukherjee who, as Finance Minister, signed the letter appointing Manmohan Singh as Governor of the Reserve Bank of India in 1982.
By 1984, Mukherjee was no longer just a minister he was the number two in Indira Gandhi's Cabinet, presiding over cabinet meetings in the Prime Minister's absence. The international financial community took notice: that very year, Euromoney magazine rated him the best Finance Minister in the world. He was, by every reasonable measure, the most powerful Congress leader after Indira Gandhi herself. The question of succession though never spoken aloud hovered in the background.
Part Two: The Fateful Flight October 31, 1984
I. A Morning That Changed Everything
The events of 31 October 1984 are among the most significant in post-independence Indian history. That morning, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was shot by two of her own Sikh bodyguards at her residence in New Delhi. Thousands of kilometres away in West Bengal, Rajiv Gandhi then a first-term MP with no ministerial experience was accompanying Pranab Mukherjee on an election campaign in the Contai (Kanthi) area of Purba Medinipur district.
At 9:30 AM, while Rajiv was mid-speech at a public meeting, Mukherjee received a message on the police wireless: "Indira Gandhi assaulted. Return to Delhi immediately." He quietly passed a note to Rajiv, who cut short his address. The two men, along with another senior Congress leader A.B.A. Ghani Khan Choudhury, the then Railway Minister, rushed to the airport and boarded a plane for Delhi.
What happened next on that flight has been the subject of debate, speculation, and historical revisionism for four decades.
II. The Flight Conversation Rumour vs. Reality
The aircraft was barely airborne when Rajiv returned from the cockpit and announced the news that would shatter the cabin: Indira Gandhi was dead. Pranab Mukherjee, by his own account in his memoirs, wept openly and was inconsolable for some time.
Then, as the passengers in the cabin began processing the information, the question of succession came up naturally not as political ambition, but as constitutional necessity. Balram Jakhar, the Lok Sabha Speaker who was also aboard, raised the question of who would serve as the interim Prime Minister. He mentioned the precedent set when Gulzarilal Nanda had served as interim PM after the deaths of Jawaharlal Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri.
This is where accounts diverge. The story that circulated through Delhi's political corridors for years and which many believe ultimately cost Mukherjee the prime ministership was that he had used this moment to stake his own claim to the interim PM position, pointing out that he was constitutionally the number two in the Cabinet.
Mukherjee's own version, preserved in handwritten notes from 1985 and later published through his daughter Sharmishtha's biography Pranab, My Father, tells a different story. According to those notes, Mukherjee actively endorsed Rajiv Gandhi as PM, telling the group: "I thought that Indiraji wanted Rajiv to be PM and it was my duty to ensure Rajiv is installed as PM." He also directed Rajiv to relay a message to Delhi ensuring that Indira's death would not be announced until a new government was sworn in, to prevent confusion and maintain order.
Rajiv Gandhi's own pre-assassination interview with journalist Aroon Purie of India Today partially corroborated this rehabilitation he admitted that many things said about Pranab "weren't true" and that he had done him wrong. But by then, the damage had long been done.
III. The Beginning of the Fall
When Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as Prime Minister on 31 October 1984, the list of Cabinet ministers he initially proposed to President Giani Zail Singh included Pranab Mukherjee's name at the very top. In the two months of election campaigning that followed the Congress swept the December 1984 elections with a historic 404 seats Mukherjee had Rajiv's apparent trust.
Then, on the morning of 31 December 1984, everything changed. Rajiv announced his new Cabinet. Pranab Mukherjee's name was not on it. He was replaced as Finance Minister by V.P. Singh. Mukherjee was not just excluded from Cabinet — he was stripped of his membership in the Congress Working Committee, the party's highest decision-making body, on which he had served for years.
In his own words, preserved in his memoir The Turbulent Years, Mukherjee described being blindsided completely: "I kept waiting for the call. Being dropped from Rajiv's cabinet was not even peripherally in my mind. I had heard no rumours, nor had anyone in the party ever vaguely hinted at it."
Part Three: Exile, A New Party, and the Long Road Back
I. Expelled from the Congress
What followed was the most turbulent period of Mukherjee's political life. Already stripped of his cabinet post and party positions, he found himself increasingly isolated. By 1986, after repeated humiliations and barbs from the Rajiv Gandhi camp, Mukherjee took the drastic step of leaving the Congress and forming his own party the Rashtriya Samajwadi Congress (RSC).
It was an act of political desperation as much as principle. Mukherjee had always acknowledged that he was not a mass leader he did not have the ability to whip up crowd emotion or win general elections on the strength of personal charisma alone. His power had always been internal in committee rooms, in negotiations, in the ability to make the machinery of government work. Without the Congress platform, his party fared terribly. The RSC's performance in the 1987 West Bengal Assembly elections was dismal.
By 1989, recognising the futility of standing apart, Mukherjee negotiated a reconciliation with Rajiv Gandhi and merged the RSC back into the Congress. Whether it was Rajiv's admission that he had been wrong about Pranab, or simply political pragmatism on both sides, the two men made their peace. But Pranab's position within the party hierarchy had been permanently diminished.
II. The 1991 Disappointment Narasimha Rao Chooses Manmohan Singh
When Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in May 1991, the Congress once again faced a leadership crisis. The party won the subsequent election and was poised to form a government, but Pranab Mukherjee was not an MP at the time. P.V. Narasimha Rao, who had announced his own retirement from active politics, was unexpectedly pressed back into service and named Prime Minister.
There was broad expectation that Pranab would be made Finance Minister after all, he had held the post before and understood the Indian economy intimately. He was actively consulted by Narasimha Rao during Cabinet formation. And yet, when the Cabinet list was announced, Mukherjee was not on it. Dr. Manmohan Singh an economist and technocrat who had never stood for election was named Finance Minister instead.
Mukherjee was stunned. As consolation, Narasimha Rao offered him the post of Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission. For a former Finance Minister rated the best in the world, it was a humiliating comedown. Rao later brought him back into the Cabinet as Commerce Minister (1993-95) and then External Affairs Minister (1995-96), but the Finance Ministry — his home ground was occupied by Manmohan Singh, who was overseeing the historic liberalisation of the Indian economy. The man who had laid the groundwork for a stable Indian fiscal system in the early 1980s was watching someone else be credited with transforming it.
Part Four: The UPA Years and the 2004 Betrayal
I. The Return Under Sonia Gandhi
After the Congress's defeat in 1996, Mukherjee reinvented himself once again. He became one of the chief architects of Sonia Gandhi's ascent to the Congress party presidency in 1998, mentoring her through the complexities of Indian politics with the same dedication he had shown toward Indira Gandhi decades earlier. He was one of Sonia's most trusted advisors, guiding her on how her mother-in-law would have handled difficult situations.
In 2004, when the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) scored a surprise general election victory defeating the incumbent BJP government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee Pranab Mukherjee was at the peak of his political rehabilitation. He was 68 years old and had just won his first Lok Sabha election from Jangipur in West Bengal. He had spent five terms in the Rajya Sabha and was now finally a member of the lower house.
He believed the Prime Ministership was, at last, within reach.
II. Sonia Gandhi Chooses Manmohan Singh Again
What happened next is the defining episode of Mukherjee's political life. Sonia Gandhi, facing controversy over her Italian origin, declined to become Prime Minister herself a decision she announced in a dramatic address to Congress MPs who had gathered to support her. The party, and the country, waited to see who she would nominate.
Her choice: Dr. Manmohan Singh.
Mukherjee's dejection was reported widely. He reportedly conveyed to Sonia Gandhi his difficulty in working under Manmohan Singh, given the long history between them. In the 1970s, when Pranab was a junior minister in Indira Gandhi's Finance Ministry, Manmohan Singh had been a secretary in the same ministry technically, his subordinate. Now the equation was inverted. But Sonia was insistent. She told Mukherjee he was indispensable to the government and that the UPA could not function without him.
Mukherjee relented. He joined the Cabinet as Defence Minister (2004-06), then External Affairs Minister (2006-09), and finally almost poetically as Finance Minister again from 2009 to 2012. He became what political observers described as the de facto Number Two of the UPA government, heading an extraordinary 24 out of 39 Groups of Ministers and Empowered Groups of Ministers. For every thorny political problem coalition management, difficult legislation, inter-ministerial disputes — it was Mukherjee who was called in.
In his memoir The Coalition Years, Mukherjee wrote with characteristic restraint about his expectation of the Prime Ministership. He noted that he had even harboured a theory that Sonia Gandhi might make Manmohan Singh the Presidential candidate in 2014, leaving the PM position for him: "I thought that if she selected Singh for the presidential office, she may choose me as the prime minister. I had heard a rumour that she had given this formulation a serious thought."
It never materialised.
III. Why Manmohan Over Pranab The Trust Deficit
The explanation that political insiders most commonly offered was that Sonia Gandhi never fully trusted Pranab Mukherjee. The roots of this distrust ran deep back to 1984, and the rumours of what had transpired on that flight from Kolkata to Delhi. Even if those rumours were unfounded, they had poisoned the well. As Sharmishtha Mukherjee wrote in her biography of her father, the Gandhi family had viewed Pranab's relationship with them through the prism of that October 1984 speculation.
There was also a temperamental dimension. Mukherjee was, as one account put it, "too polished a politician." He knew too much, had too many alliances, was too capable of operating independently. Rajiv Gandhi and his circle had always been "a bit apprehensive with him around." The same wariness appeared to have been inherited by Sonia Gandhi. Manmohan Singh, by contrast, had no independent political base, no ambitions beyond the role he was given, and an almost infinite capacity for loyalty. He was, as one analyst noted, far more "pliant" than Pranab could ever be and that pliance was precisely what made him safer in Sonia's scheme.
Part Five: The Presidency An Honourable Exit or a Golden Cage?
I. The Presidential Nomination
In June 2012, the UPA nominated Pranab Mukherjee as its candidate for the President of India. He won the election comfortably, defeating P.A. Sangma of the NDA with nearly 70 percent of the electoral college vote. On 25 July 2012, he was sworn in as the 13th President of India.
It was, on the face of it, the crowning achievement of a lifetime in public service. But for those who understood the inner workings of the Congress party, the Presidency was also a way of removing Mukherjee from the political chessboard. The office of the President, while constitutionally the highest in the land, is largely ceremonial in practice. A President does not set policy, cannot lead a coalition, cannot become Prime Minister. By elevating Mukherjee to the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the Congress party simultaneously honoured him and neutralised him.
The Economic Times captured this paradox elegantly, noting that with Mukherjee's election as President, "the last of the Congress triumvirate along with Rao and R. Venkataraman who formed the core team of the Indira/Rajiv regimes bows out. While Rao became PM, Pranab's political marathon too ends where Venkataraman's did, at the Rashtrapati Bhavan."
Even on the question of his ambition, Mukherjee maintained the composure of a man who had learned to live with disappointment. When asked whether he had ever wanted to become Prime Minister, his reply was both elegant and evasive: "7 RCR was never my destination." (7 Race Course Road was the official residence of the Prime Minister.) Zee News noted at the time: "The statement assumes heft in the light of the longstanding speculation that Mukherjee always nursed an ambition to occupy the top executive post."
II. The Presidency Itself
Mukherjee served as President from July 2012 to July 2017. Observers noted that, consistent with his character, he was more engaged in the functions of the Presidency than most of his predecessors. He launched initiatives like the SmarTgram project to develop villages in Haryana, was deeply engaged with parliamentary and constitutional processes, and continued to receive widespread respect from politicians across party lines.
His term ended in 2017 and he retired from politics, citing age and health concerns. He was succeeded as President by Ram Nath Kovind, who was the BJP's candidate.
In 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government awarded Pranab Mukherjee the Bharat Ratna India's highest civilian honour. It was a recognition that transcended party lines, confirming what India had long known: that Pranab Mukherjee was one of the most consequential figures in the country's post-independence political history.
III. Death and Legacy
Pranab Kumar Mukherjee died on 31 August 2020, at the age of 84, in New Delhi, following brain surgery that had left him in a coma, complicated by a lung infection and septic shock. His death prompted an outpouring of grief from across the political spectrum from Congress veterans to BJP leaders to regional chieftains. Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in a gesture of personal and political reconciliation, paid his respects and acknowledged what many had long believed: that Mukherjee had every right to expect the Prime Ministership.
Conclusion: What It All Means
The story of how Congress kept Pranab Mukherjee out of power is ultimately a story about the nature of dynastic politics and its costs. The Congress party, under the Gandhi family's stewardship, consistently made decisions based on loyalty, control, and the preservation of family primacy over purely meritocratic considerations. Pranab Mukherjee was brilliant, experienced, and unmatched in his command of governance but he was also independent, ambitious, and potentially ungovernable. He could not be fully controlled, and that, more than anything, was his political undoing.
In 1984, a misunderstanding or misreading on a flight from Kolkata to Delhi planted the seed of distrust that would define his relationship with the Gandhi family for the next three decades. In 1991, Narasimha Rao excluded him from the Finance Ministry, choosing instead the safer, technocratic option of Manmohan Singh. In 2004, Sonia Gandhi again chose Manmohan over Pranab, tolerating the emotional fallout because the alternative a Prime Minister she could not fully control was too risky.
Three times the door to the highest office was opened, and three times it was quietly, firmly shut before Pranab Mukherjee could walk through it.
Yet through all of it, he stayed. He did not defect permanently, did not destabilise, did not go to the opposition. He came back, built alliances, served under subordinates, accepted consolation prizes with grace, and kept the Congress party together through some of its most difficult moments. His loyalty to an institution that repeatedly denied him what he deserved was, perhaps, the most extraordinary thing about him.
India may never see another politician quite like Pranab Mukherjee a man of towering intellect, political savvy, and institutional memory who spent a lifetime in service to a party that never truly trusted him with its greatest prize. He remains, in the words of countless observers, the best prime minister India never had.
Sources: The author has drawn on Pranab Mukherjee's published memoirs including The Turbulent Years and The Coalition Years; Sharmishtha Mukherjee's biography Pranab, My Father (Rupa Publications); archival accounts from Scroll.in, The Week, Daily O, Onmanorama, The Indian Panorama, Republic World, and the official Presidential Biography of Pranab Mukherjee.
By:- Devalay Dey Law Student | Public Policy & Independent Political Commentator