After Indira Gandhi's assassination, Pranab Mukherjee was expecting to become the next prime minister, says a book 'Beloved Witch Returns' authored Ipsita Roy Chakraverti. Ipsita is a renowned Wiccan priestess besides being a family friend of the President Mukherjee .
The author also claims that, Pranab, the then finance minister, began to receive congratulations over fax and phone as India's next prime minister.
However, things took a different turn when anti- Pranab faction rallied behind Rajiv Gandhi as the next Prime Minister. In a further setback to Pranab, he was dropped from Rajiv's cabinet of ministers.
Mukherjee was removed from his position even though he was rated as the best Finance Minister in the World that year according to a survey of Euromoney magazine.
The author also says when he was having a rough time with Rajiv, Pranab told her that Indira had died and left him a "zinda laash", a "living corpse".
Describing Mukherjee of having qualities to become a good prime minister, she mentions that Rajiv and Sonia never trusted him for he knew too much about family.
What seems like a barb on Pranab's ambition of becoming PM, Rajiv had once told Mukherjee, "Just look. A few days ago crowds of MPs would be following you. Today, there's not one. What a change."
It is well known that Pranab, after his expulsion from Congress, floated his own party in 1986, only to merge it with the parent party three years later after his reconciliation with Rajiv.
