President Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi on Monday. PTI Photo President Pranab Mukherjee at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi on Monday. PTI Photo

Pranab Mukherjee was the school-teacher from Birbhum who went onto join politics. He was one of the senior-most ministers in Congress cabinets holding a variety of key portfolios including Finance, Defence, Foreign Affairs. He was the senior-most minister in the Manmohan Singh cabinet (he had been the Finance Minister when Manmohan Singh was appointed Deputy Governor, RBI). He reportedly felt he should have succeeded Indira Gandhi after she died in 1984, and that is said to have scarred his ties with the Gandhi family forever.

Pranab Mukherjee, India’s President till Tuesday morning has been in all senses a copybook one, with a keen sense of what is right, appropriate and proper in the Constitution. With a strong mind of his own, and a memory for fact, detail and procedure that could rival powerful search-engines, Mukherjee came to office as a long-term Congressman but had to spend most of his time in office with a powerful BJP Prime Minister.

The balance he chose to strike has been interesting. Sources close to him say he believes that while the Constitution is silent on the full scope of the President’s role, it is limited to being a watchful but not a very active guardian of the Constitution.

So, as in his last address to the nation on Monday evening and on several other occasions before going back to 2015, he did respond to public debates of his times and made crucial observations which may not have always gone down well PM Modi. He balanced such moments by criticizing Opposition tactics and their philosophy as well.

One of the main issues he had to deal with during his stint, was the death penalty, mercy petitions and the role of the President to grant reprieve. His immediate predecessor Pratibha Patel is said to have indicated fairly clearly to the UPA government that she would not be signing off on death penalties. Mukherjee chose a different path. The most debated death penalty was in the case of Yakub Memon, convicted for the Bombay serial blasts of 1993, where dramatic midnight hearings by the Supreme Court kicked off a debate on the death penalty itself. Mukherjee chose to firmly stick with the political executive and go with the sentence. He did that with an earlier matter of a hanging during the time of the UPA too in the matter of Afzal Guru.

Another major issue was the signing of ordinances and bills. While he spoke on why Ordinances were not the best way forward, Mukherjee firmly believed in playing his cards close to his chest even when and if he had any questions of the BJP government. The Land Ordinance Bill was signed thrice and the Enemy Property bill five times by him. His predecessors had raised questions about such ordinances/bills, such as in the case of Giani Zail Singh when he sent back the Postal Amendment Bill and it eventually got shelved. APJ Abdul Kalam returned the Office of Profit Bill triggering the resignation of the UPA Chairperson, Sonia Gandhi (who later got re-elected in a by-election).

President Mukherjee, on the other hand, eventually did not pose a problem for the government.

In the grand scheme of “Congress-mukt” India that the top leadership of the BJP speaks of, Mukherjee’s going marks the last of the Congress’ visible imprints on the Indian state, for the moment.

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