Politicians’ president

Congress party veteran and former finance minister Pranab Mukherjee’s consummately plotted transition from North Block, New Delhi to the magnificent 340-roomed Rashtrapati Bhavan, marks the culmination of Mukherjee’s 40 years of survival and prosperity in the treacherous corridors of power in the national capital. On July 22, following his 69 percent vote of an electoral college of MPs and MLAs nationwide, Mukherjee was sworn in as India’s 13th president. Way back in 1982 as founder-editor of Businessworld, your correspondent was the first journo — courtesy Aveek Sarkar, chief editor of the Ananda Bazar Patrika group — to interview Mukherjee after he was plucked from obscurity by prime minister Indira Gandhi and appointed Union finance minister. I was dismayed that every cliched sentence he uttered was qualified by a complicated contradiction. In short, the interview as recorded made little sense. Shortly thereafter, it became clear that Mukherjee had been recommended as finance minister by Dhirubhai Ambani who had substantially bankrolled Mrs. Gandhi’s return to power in New Delhi in 1980, following the disastrous Janata government experiment after the Emergency. And soon enough Mukherjee — whose Union budgets of the time were reportedly dictated by the powerful tycoon — became widely known as the minister for Reliance, rather than finance. After Mrs. Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, he went into obscurity and even started his own political party which was an abysmal failure. But he was readmitted into the Congress and government by prime minister Narasimha Rao, and once again climbed up the greasy pole of the party’s hierarchy to emerge a senior minister in the Congress-led UPA-I government of 2004-09. Committed to obsolete socialist politics, he wasn’t notably successful, but in a coalition of mediocrities he emerged as a troubleshooter and savant. Perhaps Mukherjee’s best qualification is that he is a committed representative of the control-and-command political class which has profited mightily from confused Nehruvian socialism. In Rashtrapati Bhavan, Mukherjee — a conspiratorial and waspish politician who feels he was done out of the prime minister’s job — is unlikely to be a rubber stamp; he’ll settle scores. Stand by for some nasty surprises. Legal inferno In a nation which has a unique record of muddling through every crisis and calamity and whose loud declamations of amazing progress and social justice are in inverse proportion to performance, a sacred cow to whom wily politicians, gullible media pundits and hyper-vocal television anchors pay ritual obeisance, is the country’s independent judiciary which nonchalantly presides over the largest caseload arrears mountain (30 million) in recorded history. A grim reminder of the law’s routine delay in this benighted republic is an appeal in a conspiracy and murder case filed in 1975 which came up for hearing before a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court on July 25 — 37 years after the offence was allegedly committed. More pertinently, the victim in this case wasn’t just an anonymous citizen. It was L.N. Mishra, Union minister of railways and prime funds collector of the then ruling Congress party…