Defeating Congress in 1967 West Bengal polls: Pranab Mukherjee had an idea, it worked!

He wriggled Congress out of many a crises in the past over four decades but the execution of an idea mooted by him for 'Bangla Congress' through which he entered the world of politics actually spelt doom for the Grand Old Party in the 1967 Assembly elections, ending its uninterrupted rule in West Bengal since Independence.

Mukherjee was a late entrant into politics in the mid-1960s and from the 1950s, the Bengal unit of Congress was a divided house with veterans Atulya Ghosh and Prafulla Chandra Sen on one side and Arun Kumar Guha, Surendra Mohan Ghosh and Prafulla Chandra Ghosh on the other. In 1966, the party split again with Ajoy Mukherjee forming the Bangla Congress and Mukherjee joined him, his first active stint in a party.

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Though not a Congress regular, Mukherjee attended the first meeting of Ghosh group in February 1966 prior to the split and forming of the new party on 1 May, 1966.

A month later on June 8 when Mukherjee was accompanying Ghosh on a tour of the state when he suggested the idea -- a United Front to take on the Congress. "Ajoy-da, if we want to defeat the Congress, we have to unite all parties...If we fight the elections on a common platform, we could defeat the Congress," he told his leader, who initiated talks on this front.

Rest was history, the UF dethroned the Congress government in West Bengal, which had won the three Assembly polls in independent India. Mukherjee had identified the split in Bengal Congress and the growing anti-Congress sentiment in the state, which he believed could be in advantage of the opponents.

Though all non-Congress parties did not join and three fronts fought polls with Ghosh managing to bring CPI and RSP on his platform while CPI(M) led a second group. The polls saw a fractured mandate and the front led by Bangla Congress and the CPI(M)-led group joined hands on an 18-point programme to keep the Congress away with Ghosh becoming Chief Minister and Jyoti Basu his deputy.

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As a close confidante of Ghosh, Mukherjee had worked behind the scenes to stitch the alliance and formulate the common programme though it was not an easy sailing for the front, whose government was dismissed by the then Governor following a split in Bangla Congress.

It was Mukherjee's first tryst with coalition politics and he would be doing the same for Congress in the later years. It was this association with the CPI(M) in his early political carrier that was used by his rivals in Congress accuse him of playing second fiddle to the Left in Bengal.

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Mukherjee's entry to Congress was courtesy to the second speech he made in Rajya Sabha in 1969, the year he entered the Upper House on a Bangla Congress ticket, which the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi took notice of. After his speech on bank nationalisation was over, Indira turned to Congress Chief Whip Om Mehra asking who this last bencher was.

Mehra did not have an immediate answer but as Mukherjee walked out of the House, he bumped into Indira. Then the veteran Parliamentarian Bhupesh Gupta introduced him and she told Mukherjee, "you spoke well." In her reply to the debate, Mukherjee wrote in 2011, Indira mentioned his speech and occasionally used to call him.

Just before the 1971 Lok Sabha elections, there were attempts to merge Bangla Congress with Congress but it did not work. Mukherjee even arranged a meeting of Ghosh with Indira during the campaign but it was too late then.

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However, later in 1971 Indira once again asked them "why don't you join the Congress? Merge." Though some Congressmen opposed the idea but she overruled them and the parties merged.

In 1973, Mukherjee was inducted in Indira's Council of Ministers as a Deputy Minister of Industries and moved to Finance a year later. He stood like a rock with Indira during and after Emergency and he was inducted into the Congress Working Committee in 1978, where he remained till he was nominated to contest the Presidential election in 2012.