When Sonia said 'will miss tantrums' of Pranab

New Delhi: "I will miss his tantrums" is what Congress president Sonia Gandhi said while bidding farewell to Pranab Mukherjee from the Congress Working Committee at a meeting which formally approved his name as the UPA's presidential nominee in June 2012.

"After briefing the meeting on the presidential election, Sonia Gandhi bid me an emotional farewell...Thereafter, with a mischievous smile she looked at me and said 'Along with that, of course, I will miss some of his tantrums'," Mukherjee writes in his just-launched book, 'The Coalition Years'.

The former president's third political memoir gives several accounts of how the UPA chairperson remained reluctant to approve his name for the country's top constitutional post despite often acknowledging that he was the "most suited" for the office.

Recalling the events in the run-up to the presidential elections in 2007 and 2012, Mukherjee said the Congress chief told him that he could not be spared by the party on account of the "crucial role" he played for it in the UPA government and Parliament.

Narrating the sequence of the Congress Working Committee meeting on June 25, 2012, at the 7 Race Course Road residence of the prime minister, Mukherjee noted Gandhi, then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, party office-bearers and chief ministers present at the meeting finally gave him the green signal to run for the presidential office.