Baba blamed himself for Gandhi family's impact on Congress

They would wonder how and when they would become public.

- Sharmistha Mukherjee

A senior journalist once asked Mukherjee when he would publish his diaries, and he simply said he would leave the diaries to his daughter, Sharmistha.

He left 51 volumes of his diaries to Sharmistha Mukherjee. The earliest diary dates back to 1973. The diaries have been in Sharmistha’s custody since 2012, when Mukherjee had moved to Rashtrapati Bhavan. However, he forbade her from reading the diaries till he was alive. Three years after Mukherjee’s death, Sharmistha has come out with her book, Pranab, My Father: A Daughter Remembers, that brings to the fore unknown facets of the Congress veteran’s political career, based on the diary entries and also her own conversations with her father.

For 58-year-old Sharmistha, the process of going through her father’s diaries was an emotionally daunting task and she broke down often while reading them. Sharmistha, who has been a Kathak dancer and has had a brief stint in the Congress, says there is a wealth of information in the diaries and not everything could be brought into one book.

In an interview with THE WEEK, Sharmistha talks about some unknown aspects of her father’s politics as gleaned from his diaries, which range from what he thought was the real reason why he could never become prime minister to how he looked at the Gandhi family’s hold over the Congress to his opinion of Rahul Gandhi as a politician and also his rapport with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Edited excerpts: 

Q/ You begin by writing about the time Pranab Mukherjee became president. But we know becoming prime minister was his unfulfilled desire.