Chidambaram(top); Pranab

New York, Sept. 25: If anyone expected fireworks or even tension or bad blood at finance minister Pranab Mukherjee’s meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh today, they were severely disappointed.

Mukherjee arrived at Singh’s suite in the New York Palace hotel carrying a bouquet of flowers to greet him in advance on his birthday, which falls on Monday. He told the Prime Minister he had sought the meeting while in transit through New York because he would briefly touch down in Delhi on his return from the US and immediately proceed to Calcutta for pitri tarpan ceremonies in his village which he had not missed for decades.

Thereafter, he will travel elsewhere to dedicate a huge power plant to the nation. Mukherjee told Indian reporters there were matters that came up at last week’s annual meetings of the World Bank Group, which could not wait till he returned to New Delhi after almost a whole week.

By the time Singh returns to India on Tuesday night, Mukherjee would already be in Calcutta and, therefore, he took the opportunity of a transit halt in New York to discuss fears of a second global financial meltdown that came up during last week’s meetings, the finance minister said.

As expected, he parried all questions relating to the controversial finance ministry note on 2G allocation which has been rocking national politics since the Prime Minister travelled abroad last Wednesday.

Ahead of his return home, Mukherjee, however, offered an olive branch to home minister P. Chidambaram by publicly describing him as a “valued colleague”. He also donned the traditional Congress mantle of a disciplined soldier of the party by insisting that he must “talk to other party leaders” before he could express any opinion on the latest twists to the 2G controversy.

While that may be Mukherjee’s public stand, other sources privy to the talks between Singh and the finance minister said the two men agreed on the need to exercise extreme caution and discretion on the latest in the string of crises creeping up on the UPA government.

Any move or decision that smacked of rashness and was not backed by a careful consideration of the implications of the finance ministry’s note could land the government in trouble similar to the mishandling of the Anna Hazare fast, the two men agreed, according to sources privy to their discussions.

Mukherjee is understood to have said at today’s hour-long meeting that the existence of the finance ministry’s note was well known throughout his ministry, indeed in all of North Block and in parliamentary circles as well.

Yet the finance minister, whose experience in statecraft is much wider than that of the Prime Minister, is understood to have said that caution should be the watchword since the note had now been presented in court. With the courts monitoring the 2G cases and judicial activism being the norm, any mishandling of the latest twist in the telecom scandal could have far-reaching and unpredictable consequences.

Even as he refused to discuss the note that is now with the court, Mukherjee peripherally touched upon some of its legal implications in his conversation with Indian reporters.

“Unless I talk to the law minister, unless I talk to Chidambaram, who is my valued colleague, unless I talk to other party leaders and I go through all the relevant papers, what comments I will make and why should I make a comment on domestic issues outside India?”

The finance minister added: “I am not a lawyer, I have to consult expert legal opinion on a matter that is sub judice.”

Inevitably, some quarters will interpret this as a dig at Chidambaram who has frequently flaunted his legal prowess in public and does so in private to a greater degree.

Mukherjee went so far as to say that the only reason he was meeting Indian reporters in transit was to apologise for ignoring a swarm of them when he arrived at his hotel last night from Washington. “I apologise for being rude. But I am not giving any earth-shaking information to you.”

Like the Prime Minister yesterday, the finance minister’s public disposition today was one of nonchalance. He did not see any pressing need to discuss the 2G note that has created a political crisis in India until he got home. “I am not a fugitive. I am not leaving the country for any long time.”

He shared Singh’s view that it is the Opposition’s job to create discomfiture for the government whenever possible.

If the events of the last few days had, indeed, created any unpleasantness in the highest quarters of the government, Mukherjee appeared to have ensured that it evaporated considerably with his disarming gesture of greeting the Prime Minister ahead of his birthday with a bouquet of flowers.

They talked about the coming Puja celebrations in Bengal to break the ice before approaching weightier matters.

The finance minister is understood to have conveyed to the Prime Minister the concerns he heard in Washington about the pace of reforms and the need to make legislative changes in banking and insurance regulations.