The Nehru Gandhi family is infamous for not recognizing the contribution of non-family members in the building of the nation as well as Congress party. The family wants the people to worship the family icons and see them as the saviour of the nation. Recently the Modi government awarded Bharat Ratna to the veteran Congressman Pranab Mukherjee for his service to the nation.
Mukerjee, popularly known as Pranab Da has served as President, Finance Minister, Defence Minister, External Affairs Minister, Leader of Lok Sabha, Leader of Rajya Sabha, Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission and represented various Lok Sabha and Vidhan Sabha constituencies many times. As a loyal member of the Congress party, he served the nation very well in 5 decades-long public career. Pranab Mukherjee held almost every top political post in the country and was even considered for Prime Minister’s chair many times.
The service of Mukherjee to the nation and Congress party is unmatchable. But the dynasts of the Congress party have no time to attend the award ceremony. Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, and former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh under whom Mukherjee served as Finance, Defence and External Affairs minister skipped the event at Rashtrapati Bhavan despite the invitation from the government.
Mukherjee is not the first Congressman to be abandoned by the party. There are thousands of other Congress leaders who served the country and died but they have no place and respect in the Nehru Gandhi family’s memory and most prominent among them is PV Narasimha Rao- the man who transformed India and gave the people of the country economic independence but never got his due place in history books.
In a speech to mark the 125th anniversary of the INC in 2009, the party president Sonia Gandhi, praised contributions of all Prime Ministers from the Congress except those of PV Narasimha Rao. All his contributions were ascribed to either Rajiv Gandhi or Manmohan Singh.
When he died, there were no arrangements made to receive the body and place it atop a platform for public darshan. No flowers were provided by the Congress government. There was no shamiana and there were no carpets. There was no one to control the mourning crowds. The Congress president appeared for a couple of minutes and vanished. To top that, the former Prime Minister’s mortal remains were not even allowed in the AICC office in the capital, New Delhi.
PV Narasimha Rao changed the name of the Congress Party from Indian National Congress (Indira) to Bhartiya Rashtriya Congress (Indian National Congress) and rejected the candidature of Sonia Gandhi as the Congress President with hard-hitting words as recorded in late INC leader Arjun Singh’s biography- “Suddenly, he burst out in anger and virtually yelled out words to the effect that whether it was essential that the Congress Party should be treated like a train where the compartments have to be attached to an engine belonging to the Nehru-Gandhi family or were there other alternatives? I was dumbfounded by Rao’s outburst but kept quiet.”
Pranab Mukherjee is just another leader in the long list of Congressmen who never got their due respect because they chose not to be sycophantic to the members of the Nehru Gandhi family.