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Language: English

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ISBN-13: 978-0670088225

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The Congress denied former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao a

funeral in Delhi, a place in its pantheon of party heroes and, not

surprisingly, an acknowledgement of how dramatically he re-invented

India, at home and abroad. Instead, it cast him as a usurper to the

Nehru-Gandhi throne, virtually castigated him as a conspirator in the

destruction of the Babri Masjid in 1992 and, to this day, holds him

responsible for the erosion of its base in the Hindi heartland.

Indeed, the Congress establishment has all but erased Pamulaparti

Venkata Narasimha Rao from its 131-year-old history.

A just-published biography now seeks to give Rao his rightful place in

the story of the country as the principal architect of economic reforms,

a quarter century after they were launched. Simultaneously, it bucks

the popular view in the Congress and demonstrates (with available

evidence) that he was maligned in the Babri Masjid case. If he was at

fault, the book says, it was an error of indecisiveness (on whether to

impose central rule) and poor judgment (he put too much faith in the

BJP and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad).

In Sitapati’s largely sympathetic portrayal, Rao — the first person

outside the Nehru-Gandhi family to have completed five years as

Prime Minister — emerges as a man who provided transformational

leadership to India at a time of deep financial crisis. For Sitapati, Rao

ranks with “revolutionary figures” such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Deng

Xiaoping, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher

and Charles de Gaulle. But he was not a popular mass leader; he

presided over a minority government; his party colleagues did not

trust him; 10 Janpath kept an eagle eye on him. Up against great

odds and with little power, he yet achieved much.

The Congress has assiduously sought to give much of the credit for

the 1991 reforms to Manmohan Singh, the finance minister at the

time, but Sitapati establishes that it was Rao who was the principal

driver. Nevertheless, his political shrewdness led him to consciously

keep a low profile. So it was Manmohan Singh who often faced the

flak from Congress naysayers. The author not only provides behind-

the-scenes details of how Rao neutralised criticism to the radical

economic reforms both from sections of the opposition and from

within the Congress, but how he assembled a handpicked team and

sought help from a range of people, regardless of their political

affiliations.

Rao, for instance, reportedly spoke to Subramanian Swamy, a

minister in the outgoing government, two days before his swearing-in,

to access documents that the latter had prepared to help him decide

on a way to manage the balance-of-payments crisis. Rao even used

an Intelligence Bureau report to checkmate President Pranab

Mukherjee, since he felt the latter would resist the proposed reforms.

There is an interesting nugget, too, on Manmohan Singh: when he

took a somewhat cautious draft of his 1991 budget to Rao, the latter

dismissed it with a crisp “If this is what I wanted, why would I have

selected you?”

But sympathetic as Sitapati is, this is no hagiography. As it takes the

reader through Rao’s life, from his early years in a village in

Telangana through his time in power to his humiliation in retirement,

the book describes him, warts and all. It explores the deftness with

which he negotiated the Byzantine corridors of the Congress, while

using his friendships across the aisle to advantage; how he used the

IB to spy on colleagues; it stresses his failure as home minister to

check the rise of insurgency in Punjab, and describes how he ceded

authority to Rajiv Gandhi’s PMO in the wake of Indira Gandhi’s

assassination that led to the anti-Sikh riots, “his vilest hour”.

Riveting as the book is, it never descends into salaciousness. Neither

does it leave out any aspect of his life, including his relationships with

women friends, virtually his only confidantes. It skilfully weaves

together Rao’s political life with his personal one, from his troubled

childhood and neglected wife, Satyamma, whom he married at the

age of ten and who bore him eight children, to his essential

loneliness.

As a journalist who covered Rao’s PMO in the 1990s, much of this is

not really new. What makes the book special is that Sitapati is able to

bolster anecdotal evidence because of the exclusive access he was

given by Rao’s family to a treasure trove of personal papers. By

quoting from his diary, the author intersperses events as they

unfolded with Rao’s thoughts at the time. The 100-plus interviews

with principal players also helps flesh out the historic five years.

Rao had his share of human frailties and he made many costly

mistakes. But his record as a reformer, transforming both the

economy and foreign policy, is surely enough to place this scholar,

polyglot and “political genius” in the Congress pantheon of heroes

Former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao’s political journey has

been traumatic and tragic interspersed with invigorating and

challenging aspects. With the shadow of 10 Janpath looming large

at times, he preferred being in the background. Beating all odds in

becoming the Prime Minister, Rao carved a niche for himself in the

country’s history despite inheriting a nation adrift with violent

insurgencies and economic crisis.

Even though the Congress party did not trust him, Rao transformed

the economy and ushered this country into the global

arena. This fascinating book — Half Lion: How P V Narasimha Rao

Transformed India — provides an insight into what all he had to

endure as the country’s Head of Government. His determination and

resolve to undertake economic reforms despite tremendous odds has

been painstakingly put together by author Vinay Sitapati.

Much to the discomfiture of the dynastic, political family of the Nehru-

Gandhis, Rao achieved his objective with the least fuss. In the

process Rao created a scare of upstaging the dynasty. He

constantly invoked the name of Jawaharlal Nehru. This

calculated ploy paid rich dividends. His strength lay in learning

valuable lessons from every obstacle put in his way.

Rao’s end was swift, the fall steep. He was encircled by legal cases

after quitting as Prime Minister in May 1996. When Sonia Gandhi

took over as the Congress president in 1998, she was determined to

erase Rao from the Congress pantheon. ‘That man is not a

Congressman,’ Rahul Gandhi told a senior party leader, ‘because of

him we have lost UP forever.’

Rao ensured his family stayed away from politics. His son

Rajeshwara, complains ‘I have been waiting for a full decade for a

meeting with Sonia Gandhi.’ She refuses. Only a few Congressmen

visited him. Exile was not new for Rao. He had been banished by

Indira Gandhi in 1973 and 1976 and again by Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

In his dying days Rao was criticised for the anti-Sikh riots, accused of

letting the guilty escape after the Bhopal gas leak, and above all

blamed for complicity in the demolition of the Babri Masjid. He has

been portrayed as corrupt and being communal, vacillating and

vicious. These political attacks on so consequential a figure have not

been countered through academic research so far.

As Rao’s biographer Nigel Hamilton puts it: “One major reason is that

academics tend to discount the role that individual leadership plays in

shaping the arc of history. Amazingly Rao was in the right place at

the right time. It is not his action that deserves study, it is his historical

context.” Rao deserves credit for managing a minority government for

a full five-year term. He survived three motions of ‘No Confidence’

against his government.

Former union minister K Natwar Singh praised Sitapati “for an

extraordinary portrait of an erudite and delphic Prime Minister. History

has been unkind to him and the author has resurrected him”. Well

known historian and author Ramachandra Guha observed despite

Rao’s crucial role of opening up the Indian economy, he remains an

elusive and largely unhonoured figure. The author “restores Rao to

his rightful place in modern Indian history.”

Sitapati dexterously combines documentary research with interviews

to bring Rao “vividly alive in his multiple avatars: politician, scholar,

follower, leader, family man, friend,” emphasises Guha. The

transformation that Rao brought about were in the most trying

of circumstances. He worked in a fractious democracy. A usurper of

the Nerhu-Gandhi throne, Rao did not control his own party.

No national leader who achieved his scale of transformation worked

under such constraints. It makes Rao the most skilled Indian Prime

Minister since Jawaharlal Nehru, a twentieth century reformer as

consequential as Deng Xiaoping. His personality is central to the

transformation of India, a shift caused not by historical forces but by

the leadership of one man.

‘You can use a biography to examine political power’ says Robert

Caro, a prince among biographers. ‘But only if you pick the right

guy.’ Sitapati had exclusive access to Rao’s never-before-seen

personal papers and diaries throwing fresh light about the Indian

economy, the nuclear programme, foreign policy and the Babri

Masjid.

Recalling PV’s humiliation in retirement, the author never loses sight

of the inner man, his difficult childhood, his corruption and love affairs

and his loneliness. This political biography written in a lucid style

provides valuable and fresh insight of a man and his remarkable

capabilities which the Congress high command loathed. It is

important that the people at large realise that Rao reinvented India at

home and abroad.

When Rao died in December 2004, his family wanted the body

cremated in Delhi. “This is his karmabhoomi,” Prabhakara told

Manmohan Singh. Sonia’s closest aides would not have any of

it. They ensured Rao’s body was taken to Hyderabad so that Rao is

not viewed as an all India leader.

As a political scientist, journalist and lawyer, Sitapati has

endeavoured in restoring the prestige of Rao and record his

contribution of daring to take the first major steps in liberalising

the economy. The author is emphatic as long as Indians remain half-

lions, so must their representatives. Rao’s legacy lives on. A highly

absorbing and must read book.

*****

Tales of a modern-day Chanakya—P.V. Narasimha Rao

As I begin to write this on a Sunday evening, until a little while ago,

#25yearsofreforms and #ManmohanSingh were trending across India on

the micro-blogging platform Twitter.

All this, because as I write this, it is 24 July 2016—25 years to the

day a bewildered nation stared at the only television channel we

had access to: the state-controlled Doordarshan. Manmohan

Singh, then the finance minister of the country, started reading out

his budget speech. He told us in no uncertain terms the country

was bankrupt. There was a deficit of Rs.7,719 crore in the Union

budget. And that to get things moving, people would have to get

used to a few bitter pills. Like higher taxes, stop getting used to

government subsidies, and accept the idea that foreign

companies would get into India.

He sounded like the kind of man we could trust because he was

very unlike the politicians we had gotten used to. The mild

mannered gentleman studied economics at Cambridge and had a

doctorate on the theme from Oxford. He was an academic, who

used to teach at the Delhi School of Economics before he was

inducted into governance.

I am a child of the economic reforms. Then in my first year at St.

Xavier’s College in Mumbai, most of my time was spent peering

through microscopes and all of this sounded like gobbledygook.

My counterparts in the economics department looked and

sounded flustered and excited all at once. Nothing made sense to

me then and I tried to go through newspapers. Not that it made

much sense either.

A headline in The Indian Express, for instance, said: “Fiscal

correctives to reverse inflationary trends: Manmohan”. Whatever,

I muttered, and plodded on.

Political leaders across all parties condemned him. George

Fernandes called it a “…budget that would benefit scoundrels”.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee, then a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party,

which is now in power, said: “It will fuel the fire of inflation and the

rise in fertilizer prices will hit farmers hard whereas higher support

prices have never benefitted farmers. The common man will

suffer.” But to be fair to him, he had filed a caveat. “I like the

budget but not many of the proposals.”

Not just opposition parties, even those within the Congress

thought of him as an unfettered man on the loose. Forty members

of Parliament from the ruling Congress party sought an audience

with Singh’s boss, the newly inducted Prime Minister P.V.

Narasimha Rao.

It was facilitated by Ghulam Nabi Azad, then minister for

parliamentary affairs. Rao was grilled by all of them with the vocal

Jayanti Natarajan, a close confidante of Sonia Gandhi, leading

the brigade. He dodged their questions by telling them he was just

a politician like them and was simply doing what a qualified man

like Singh was telling him to do.

What they didn’t know, what I didn’t know, and what most of us

didn’t know, until now, is that all of this was actually being

orchestrated by the diminutive, uncharismatic prime minister

whom we all thought owed his job to the Gandhis, India’s so-

called first family. This story started to unravel through the pages

of Half Lion: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India, by

Vinay Sitapati, a book that has now got everybody’s attention.

By the time I was through with it, I thought Sitapati had blown a

few notions in my head. So I connected with him and asked if he’d

engage in a conversation. I wasn’t interested in the machinations

of what happened in Delhi. The book covers all of that in much

detail. But I got the impression Sitapati had left a lot many things

unsaid. What is it that he left unsaid in his book?

I asked if he’d be open to talk about it. He was game. What

emerged out of it was a riveting conversation that contained

insights on how leaders operate—not just in politics, but in pretty

much any domain.

Insight #1: Leaders can be evil.

Leaders can be evil for reasons explicable and inexplicable. That

is why I started out telling Sitapati that while his book did change

my impression of Rao as a diminutive man, I also wondered

whether or not he was too sympathetic to Rao.

Sitapati didn’t argue with me. Instead, he went deeper and said

there are footnotes and literature on the theme in the book,

11,000 to be precise, that will stand up to any scrutiny and

provide evidence of three things.

1. P.V. Narasimha Rao started as a foot soldier who rose to

become the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh. He then held

various portfolios in the central ministry that made him familiar

with how Delhi operates before he assumed office as prime

minister. Not by a majority vote, but by consensus, and he was

acutely aware of it.

No other prime minister in the history of contemporary India,

including Narendra Modi, holds this distinction. While Modi was a

foot solider and chief minister, he was catapulted as head of state

before getting familiar with politics at the centre. This left him

confounded for a while and it is taking him time to get used to the

place. But not so with Rao.

2. Then there is his highly despicable role in the Sikh riots. Like

every other Congressman, he got a clear message from Rajiv

Gandhi’s office to back off. Rao was in a unique position then. He

was home minister and the Constitution of India conferred upon

him the power to ignore Gandhi’s orders. The police reported to

him, and not the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO). But why did Rao

listen to his party? Why did Rao choose to stay mum and let

innocent Sikhs be butchered after Indira Gandhi was

assassinated?

All of Sitapati’s research and poring over Rao’s notebooks and

archives did not yield anything on why Rao behaved the way he

did. History will never forgive his silence, whatever his reasons.

Was it an unstated lust for power because he knew he didn’t have

the charisma to acquire power on his own terms?

3. Then there were his personal relations. He could be mean and

petty in his interactions. He had a reputation as well to use people

around him to further his own interests. Contrary to popular

perception that he was a Gandhi family loyalist, fact is, he used

them to get into power. But Sonia Gandhi got the snub when he

thought the timing was just right and did what he had to do. This

is morally ambiguous territory. On the one hand, he had to use

the family to acquire power. On the other hand, if he had to

implement his vision of India, she had to be snubbed. Will history

condemn him for that? It depends on what set of lens you decide

to apply. Because the idea of morality has no singular definition.

Insight #2: Leaders do it quietly

In hindsight, a quarter of a century after economic liberalization

was initiated, everybody from the Congress party to his

opponents now in power want to claim credit for it. Fact is,

everybody back then, beginning with Indira Gandhi, Atal Bihari

Vajpayee, and even Manmohan Singh, who was on the fringes of

power, knew what needed to be done. It was all there in draft

papers for everybody to see. India needed a social democrat at

the helm. But it would come at a huge personal cost. Who would

carry the cross? Nobody had the muscle in them.

It took a fundamentally lonely man to do it. He figured he’d need

to keep a low profile, use the Gandhi family for air cover and the

face of a credible Manmohan Singh even as he pretended to be

part of the old guard. He worked his way back into favour and

made himself indispensable. He had to be seen as a nobody, look

himself in the mirror and admit every day credit may not come his

way. He was comfortable with that.

In hindsight, there is now consensus liberalization created growth

and an increase in income levels. Even the poorest Indian is

better off after Narasimha Rao than before him. Sitapati says he

isn’t sure yet what the extent of inequality was before

liberalization. But his research makes it clear that in terms of

absolute prosperity, Indians are better off after Rao than they

were before him.

To do that, he had to micro-manage things. That is why there are

as many mobile phones in the country now. For instance, when

Rao took over as PM in 1991, there were no mobile phones.

What existed were five million landline connections on the back of

a network created by a man called Sam Pitroda, a friend of Rajiv

Gandhi’s, whom the Congress party’s textbooks describe as the

father of the telecom revolution in India.

Fact is, after Rao took charge and opened the economy up, as

things are, over one billion Indians use mobile handsets. His own

party has tried to obliterate this achievement of his. In fact, Sukh

Ram, his communications minister, was dead against allowing

private and foreign investors. But Rao outmanoeuvred him

politically despite having no support.

This is not to suggest he made no mistakes. He did. But he set

India on a trajectory. The astute politician in him though removed

his fingerprints because “reforms” were a dirty word in the

nineties. And he never let himself forget he was a man without a

mandate.

This level of self-awareness is what drove him to co-opt his

fiercest opponents. That is why he receded into the background

and invited Sukh Ram to place the first cellular phone call to Jyoti

Basu, Rao’s fierce Marxist political rival in West Bengal.

Then there is the idea of the welfare state. Education, health and

rural development schemes during Indira Gandhi’s tenure were

poorly funded. In fact, during her reign in the sixties, poverty

actually increased. That her policies were disastrous was obvious

to Rao. Mrs Gandhi did nothing about it. When he took over,

Rao’s experience in all of these ministries and as chief minister

came in handy. He quietly upped funding to education, health and

rural development schemes from Indira Gandhi’s period.

The reforms he crafted during his tenure and which continue are

in sync with Indian realities. The credit never went to him.

Clamour and claimants continue to wrangle over it.

Then, take foreign policy. The Soviet Union, until then India’s best

friend, was disintegrating. Rao had the foresight to see India had

to move towards the US and shake hands with Israel in an

emerging unipolar world.

If he did that though, traditionalists would baulk and the large

Muslim community would go against him. In a master stroke, he

invited Yasser Arafat as a state guest to India, hugged him in

public, had the images published widely in the media, and

described him as a “household name” in a speech he personally

crafted over at least four drafts. In public he heaped Arafat with

praise.

Privately though, he told Arafat that if he wants India to help his

cause, the only way out would be for India to resume talks with

Israel. That would involve resuming diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv.

The crafty man that Arafat was, got the sub-text and conceded

ground. Everybody was appeased and a few days later on 29

January 1992, India resumed formal ties with Israel.

Few world leaders inherited the toxic economic, political and

internal catastrophes that Rao did. That he dealt with them and

didn’t choose to take credit is unparalleled, argues Sitapati.

Insight #3: Leaders are lonely

Sitapati was reluctant to talk about this. But I pushed him hard to

imagine what Rao would do if he were in Modi’s shoes. Like I’ve

mentioned earlier, there is one fundamental difference between

Rao and Modi in how they assumed power. Modi has lost time in

understanding Delhi.

Sitapati also thinks Modi has misunderstood the scale of his

mandate. A majority in the Lok Sabha is not enough. You have to

win in the Rajya Sabha as well. In a democracy of the kind that

India is, you cannot be seen as a domineering figure. It is

important to take the states, the judiciary and the bureaucracy

along. The Indian government is full of players who can veto

every move of yours. The stalled goods and services tax (GST)

bill is a case in point.

And finally, Modi is surrounded by people he trusts. As opposed

to that, Rao surrounded himself with people whose abilities he

trusted. But he trusted nobody, except himself. He was a loner.

Rao didn’t have a faction or a coterie. That made him an ideal

consensus leader. He didn’t come across as threatening and

converted loneliness into a virtue.

Modi may do well to learn from him. As Eleanor Roosevelt, the

former first lady of the US, put it so eloquently: “It is necessary for

us to learn from other’s mistakes. You will not live long enough to

make them all yourself.”

Listen to the full podcast and coverage on liberalization at

www.foundingfuel.com.

Charles Assisi’s Twitter handle is @c_assisi.

Charles Assisi

Topics: P.V. Narasimha RaoManmoha Singhliberalization1991

reforms25 years of reforms

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