Pranab Mukherjee: A free citizen, no longer bound by Congress party line

He is also 82 and doesn't give a damn about what anyone says or thinks

Pranab Mukherjee, former President of India, has decided to accept the RSS’s invitation to him to attend a parade or something. Delhi’s chattering class which -- by and large -- tends to be ignorant, judgemental and sycophantic is hissing like Jean Baptiste Colbert’s geese.

Well, here are three reasons why the chee-chee brigade should revert to its beers and try not to tax its intellect too much.

First, Mr Mukherjee has the total and absolute right to go wherever he pleases. He is a free citizen who is no longer bound by any party affiliation. Therefore, as economists might say, no one has the right to impose their preferences on anyone else.

Second, assuming that Mr Mukherjee has a political motive – many say of legitimising the RSS in the eyes of the ordinary members of the Congress party – we need to be mindful of two things. I doubt though that he is playing politics.

A. Why is the Congress party itself either ambivalent or silent on the subject? The only senior Congress member – senior by virtue of age and not political following – to have spoken against the visit is Mr P Chidambaram. The rest, including the Gandhi family, are wondering what to do or say.

B. And, while Mr Mukherjee may be a loyal party man, his loyalty to the Family has always been restricted to Indira Gandhi. It has never come down to her descendants. He has never made any bones about this. So as free citizen, he no longer feels any obligations to the India-Rajiv-Sonia-Rahul brand of secularism. Unlike Manmohan Singh, he doesn’t think he ‘owes’ anything to Sonia Gandhi and the dauphin.

Third, and most crucially, why is today’s Congress not recalling what Jawaharlal Nehru had warned against back in 1949? He said communists and communalists constituted the biggest threat to India. If the Congress can embrace the Communists, why not the communalists?

Like the RSS, the Communist Party of India (CPI) had also not taken an active part in the freedom movement. Instead it had sided with the British because the Communist sarsanghchalak, Joseph Stalin of the USSR, had said it was their duty to do so. These communists, by the way, had also not given up the idea of secession from India till 1964. Not just that: they had also sided with China in 1962.

Yet, the RSS and the Hindu Mahasabha are excoriated at every opportunity by the Congress even as it gets into bed with the Communists. We never see the chatterers discussing this. Instead, they focus on the Congress brand of secularism.

Mr Mukherjee’s visit has to be seen in this overall context: he is a free citizen, he has no time for the Gandhi family and he is fully aware of the hypocrisy involved in the post-Indira Congress strategy of accepting the communists and rejecting the RSS.

Moreover, he is 82 and probably doesn’t give a damn about what anyone says or thinks.

Twitter: @tca_tca