Pranab Mukherjee reveals diary-writing habit

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A witness to the momentous events in post-Independence India, including two splits in the Congress and coalition governments at the Centre since 1996 without a break, veteran politician Pranab Mukherjee is jotting down a 'truthful account' of happenings around him but these will be published only posthumously.

Mr Mukherjee, who has seen results of pre and post-reforms, growing terrorism and communalism in last five decades, is widely seen as a potential Congress candidate for the post of President. He disclosed that he was a keen diary writer during an interaction with the reporters.

But the Union finance minister has no plans to publish his diaries in his lifetime. “That job will be done my daughter,” he told reporters here at a dinner hosted by parliamentary affairs minister Pawan Kumar Bansal on Saturday, indicating that since the diaries were a truthful account of events as seen by an individual 'it is always better that they be made public after the individual is no more'.

The chief trouble-shooter of the UPA coalition said he had done away with the practice of writing diaries for some time in the late 80s when the basement of his Greater Kailash house in South Delhi had got flooded damaging several of his diaries as also books in his study there.

He revived the practice in early nineties at the insistence of the then Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao.

After becoming PM, Narsimha Rao had come to his residence to invite him to join the Planning Commission as the Deputy Chairman. He knew that Mr Mukherjee had been maintaining a diary for years and asked him whether he continued to do so. Mr Mukherjee had then tried to ignore the query but his wife told Narsimha Rao about the flooding in the basement and how it had led to the discontinuance.

Narsimha Rao insisted that Mr Mukherjee resumes the practice and the next day sent a new diary as a gift to him.

The minister smiled away suggestions from reporters that he would get more than adequate time in the Rashtrapati Bhavan to write a diary.

“My simple answer to all these questions is wait and see,” he said in response to questions on the next President of India.

Mr Mukherjee has been an avid reader too and finds times to read books. He is currently reading a book written by a US ambassador to Berlin during the early years of the Second World War titled In the garden of beasts - Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin by Erik Larson.

It is based on the life of William E. Dodd who was an academic historian,living a quiet life in Chicago, when Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him US Ambassador to Germany.It was 1933, Hitler had just then been appointed chancellor, the world was about to change.

He is also reading a book by a Bengali scholar titled Bengalnama.