Half - Lion: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India

by Vinay Sitapati

  This was the chance his enemies were waiting for. Landlords and high castes, still smarting from being targeted by Rao earlier, provoked, then joined, the agitation. They even demanded an independent Andhra, an ironic reversal of the demand for a separate Telangana. Eight Cabinet ministers resigned.40 Rao’s government crumbled.

  As the state machinery screeched to a halt, the chief minister’s bureaucrats gave him a list of 100 leaders to arrest.41 Rao dallied. ‘What can I do?’ he griped to his secretary. ‘There is no clearance from the High Command. I have been speaking to Delhi once an hour. However only rarely do I get an opportunity to speak to that great lady . . . I am awaiting her clearance because it is a serious political issue.’42

  ‘That great lady’ was rethinking socialism, at least as applied to the state of Andhra Pradesh. The agitation against Narasimha Rao had morphed into a protest against Indira Gandhi herself. Slogans were raised against her. Some leaders even threatened to quit the Congress. The Central minister Uma Shankar Dikshit, who had played a role in Rao’s elevation, now wanted him sacked. Indira’s socialism was a means to power. But in Andhra Pradesh, these policies were eroding her popularity. Ideology and self-preservation clashed. It was the latter that won.

  Indira Gandhi decided to remove Narasimha Rao and impose Central rule on the state. Rao had misjudged his own context, failing to satisfy Indira’s need for a chief minister both powerless as well as powerful. On 16 January 1973, Narasimha Rao was ordered to come to Delhi for ‘urgent consultations’. The Congress president, Shankar Dayal Sharma, told him that the Central leadership was of the view that President’s rule for a brief spell might help.43 Rao disagreed, but did not rebel.

  The next day, 17 January, he took his resignation letter to the governor in accordance with constitutional custom. Then, ‘he got into the car, sighed, massaged his head with his hands, and commented, “Thank God, I am rid of the curse of being the chief minister.”’44

  Rao had been chief minister for two years, state minister for nine, and legislator for sixteen. He was being put out to pasture.

  4

  Exile, 1973–74

  At the same time that Narasimha Rao was being retired in 1973, China’s Deng Xiaoping was making a political comeback. In the late 1960s, angered by the reforms that Deng was championing, communist party chairman Mao Zedong purged Deng from power. He was sent to work at the Xinjiang County Tractor Factory in 1969. Deng was woken up at six-thirty every morning and forced to read the writings of Mao. He and his wife would then walk to the tractor repair station where Deng performed manual labour.1 It took four years in the wasteland for Deng to find favour with Mao again. These years gave Deng the time and distance to recognize the problems of Maoism, and analyse what reform would eventually entail. As Harvard historian Ezra Vogel writes in his magisterial biography of Deng, ‘Like Churchill, de Gaulle, Lincoln, and other national leaders who fell from high positions and then spent time in the wilderness before returning to high office, Deng found that the time away from daily politics allowed him to achieve clarity about major, long-term national goals.’2

  Narasimha Rao spent the first months of his political exile hoping for a comeback. The circumstances of his removal in January 1973—through the imposition of Central rule—meant that the Congress party still retained its legislative majority. He had led his party to a spectacular victory in the 1972 assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh, and many of the legislators—personally chosen by him—remained loyal. Rao assumed he would be back as chief minister once the violence subsided in Andhra Pradesh. State legislators continued to visit him at his house in Hyderabad’s MLA colony.3 A group of forty legislators met prime minister Indira Gandhi and asked her to reappoint Rao as chief minister, to lead a Cabinet filled with ‘weaker sections.4 Some hotheads even declared that if Rao chose to split the party, they would side with him. He shushed them, saying, ‘You do not know [the] power of the PM. We cannot do that.’5

  J. Vengala Rao, Rao’s competitor for chief ministership, also met with Indira Gandhi. In his memoirs, Vengala Rao recalls the prime minister telling him: ‘I made [PV] chief minister hoping that he would work hard. But he has greatly disappointed me. He was so obsessed with Lakshmi Kantamma, that he sits when she asks him and stand when she asks him to . . . His eldest son P.V. Ranga Rao came to me and related all the woes of his family caused by Lakshmi Kantamma.’6 Lakshmi was to dispute this claim when Vengala Rao published his memoirs decades later. ‘Indira Gandhi is not alive to testify to the rot written by this coward.’7

  The months dragged on. When Central rule was lifted in December 1973, Indira Gandhi appointed Vengala Rao chief minister. A Cabinet colleague of Narasimha Rao recalls why Indira chose one Rao over the other. ‘Vengala Rao was born in coastal Andhra, settled in Telangana. He would be able to convince the Andhras and there would be no upheaval.’8 The elevation of Vengala Rao, from the landowning Velama caste, ended any possibility of land reform.

  The Congress high command was sending a message, and the rats below took notice. Rao’s house, once suffocated by favour seekers, now breathed emptiness. The only audience that remained were Telugu writers who would spend hours occupying Rao in literary criticism.

  Narasimha Rao felt the loss of status keenly. ‘It gave him perspective,’ his son Rajeshwara remembers. ‘The moment you step down, people do not take much notice and are not bothered about you. Father saw all that.’9 The fifty-two-year-old started complaining of blurred vision and toothache.10 He developed diabetes and had to cut down on after-dinner sweets, and stick to a regimented diet of soup and vegetables.11

  He retreated to New Delhi, to the state guest house, Andhra Bhavan.12 While hungry locals would come to gorge on the thalis served in the ground-floor cafeteria, Rao lived and ate frugally in a suite on the floor above. National leaders, only a few kilometres away, ignored him. State politicians would visit Andhra Bhavan without paying their respects to him. Lakshmi Kantamma, then an MP in Delhi, would join them in card games that would go on late into the night. Rao would wait in an adjacent room while Lakshmi played cards with his rivals. When he asked her to hurry, she would put him down. ‘PV, atla kuuchoo.’ (‘PV, sit here.’)13

  With the public man in forced retirement, the introvert turned to paper and pen. Rao would wear a thin cotton kurta with a blue or green ‘Madras checks’ lungi, and sit on a small chair in front of a desk crowded with books and files. ‘If we tried to move it, he would get angry, saying, “No, no, no. I have marked them,”’ recalls his daughter Vani Devi.14 The files would be piled so high that Rao, at a little over five feet, could barely be seen as he sat reading. The assortment of papers reflected his interests. Government reports competed for space with Telugu, Hindi and Marathi literature, all marked in red ink in flowing hand that survive to this day among his private papers.

  Rao began scribbling away at an idea for a novel. It would be the story of an impassioned boy who leaves his village, joins the anti-Nizam movement, enters politics, and becomes the chief minister of the fictitious state of Afrozabad. The idealism of the protagonist would be tested by a party hollowed out by cliques, cash and personal ambitions. Though names and dates were veiled, the reader could easily part it to glimpse the author’s own life.

  The semi-autobiographical nature of the plot, neither faithful fact nor fully fiction, revealed something of Rao. As writer and former governor of West Bengal Gopalkrishna Gandhi put it: ‘He was too shy of his own truths to put them straight, but he was too honest to hide them. He was too proud to be a hypocrite.’15 The book ended with a question that troubled Narasimha Rao during these years out of office. Why was a devout chief minister, protected by Goddess Durga, sacrificed for implementing her holy writ? Rao moped over this question in Delhi, in Hyderabad, in Vangara village. The answer would give Prime Minister Rao the dexterity to navigate the politics of reforms twenty years later.

  Narasimha Rao realized that Indira Gandhi had wanted a chief minister who was both powerless a
nd powerful—and that could never be. ‘If you consider the hurdles the nominated chief ministers had to face precisely for the reasons for which they were chosen, and only the limited extent to which they could . . . be underwritten by the High Command eventually,’ Rao explained some years later, ‘you will not be surprised that their regimes proved to be short lived.’16 Ruminating in his suite in Andhra Bhavan, he complained to M. Narayan Reddy, a young legislator from Andhra Pradesh: ‘Even though I did all, Madam Gandhi treated me so badly.’17

  Rao brooded over his failed attempt at land reform. He told Narayan Reddy, ‘I never expected so much opposition from [the] landlord section.’ Forty-two years later, Reddy remembers, ‘He was prejudiced against Reddys and Kammas. That was too open. If he had maintained good relations with them, he would not have been removed.’18

  Rao had also provoked multiple enemies at the same time. He had coupled land reform with the removal of high castes from his Cabinet. He had simultaneously supported sops for the Telangana region, angering other parts of the state. When his enemies made common cause, chief minister Narasimha Rao had been unable to manage the fallout.

  All reforms take place under constraints and involve battling entrenched interests. Rao’s mistake was that he had misjudged the opponents of change.

  He would introspect on these missteps in an academic paper he wrote in the late 1970s. It was on the role of chief ministers in India, and Rao identified a range of roadblocks to reform. He called them ‘unforeseen problems of the time’, ‘opposition from vested interests’, and ‘politics of the street’.19 He deplored in particular the tendency to ‘depose chief ministers by resorting to large-scale violence on the street . . . if force is used, it is condemned as repression; if it is not used . . . the chief minister [is] dubbed as inept.’20 The trick, he was learning in his time out of power, was that to have the impact of a ‘wild boar’, one must have a light footprint.

  The chief minister’s other gaffes had been verbal. He had given inflammatory speeches, endorsed vigilante justice against landlords, and threatened violence. He had also spoken out of turn when the Supreme Court judgment on the validity of mulki rules was delivered. His words had been misinterpreted to imply favouritism towards his region of Telangana. From now on, Rao would say little. As prime minister two decades later, his silence would be lampooned as ‘analysis until paralysis’ and ‘when in doubt, pout’. But as Narasimha Rao was learning in the lonely months after his removal as chief minister, silence was sometimes the ideal decoy to distract from radical action.

  While Rao was licking his political wounds in early 1974, family beckoned. Daughter K. Saraswathi, now living in the United States, was pregnant. Rao had a barbed relationship with his children. They had grown up in Vangara village, away from their busy father. Rao had wittingly kept his family away from politics, and his ambitious eldest son, Ranga, felt neglected. By 1974, father and son were not on talking terms. Rao had a healthier relationship with his daughters, and now, with time on his hands, he decided to travel to New York for the birth of his grandchild. It was his first journey outside India.

  A medical doctor, Saraswathi was part of the early wave of Indian professionals to be allowed into the United States. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 had replaced national (i.e. racial) quotas with professional ones, allowing educated foreigners entry into the United States.21 With wounded veterans returning from the Vietnam War, the demand for doctors was acute. By the early 1970s, India-born physicians like Saraswathi were much in demand in the United States.

  Rao landed in New York, went to Saraswathi’s house, and when his grandchild was born, wrote a perfunctory letter back home. ‘This was the first time I got a letter from him,’ Rajeshwara remembers. ‘He wrote that Saraswathi has been blessed with a son, and that mother and child are good.’22

  In what was becoming a pattern, Rao’s laconic façade was covering the modifications within. In New York, he would spend the day reading local newspapers—the New York Times was a favourite—and watching US politics on television. He saw an America being transformed. The long noon of American liberalism had since given way to a Republican President, Richard Nixon, who had shaken up the verities of the Cold War. Nixon opened up relations with China, which had defeated India in a border war. He even signed an arms reduction treaty with the Soviet Union. And in early 1973, peace accords were reached between the United States and Vietnam, ending a decade of misadventure. The Nehruvian alignments that had guided foreign policy in the early years of the Indian Republic were being subtly redrawn, and Narasimha Rao—who would someday be foreign minister—was seeing them first hand.

  While his three months in the United States seems to have been spent absorbing American politics, Rao would occasionally wander the streets. One day, he walked into a Manhattan restaurant and asked for vegetarian cuisine. The waiter did not understand, so Rao had to explain that it was food without any animal meat in it. The waiter nodded and came back with a plate of raw corn, bhutta. When he returned to India, Narasimha Rao would narrate this story to his children, ending with a laugh.23

  The one visit Rao made outside of New York was to the University of Wisconsin in Madison.24 The university, nestled among the cheese factories of the American Midwest, was famous for scholarship on India. Velcheru Narayana Rao is today one of the world’s experts on Telugu literature and early modern south Indian history. In 1974, he was a young lecturer at the University of Wisconsin. He remembers meeting Narasimha Rao on that trip.25

  ‘We spoke about literature. He [Narasimha Rao] had very original ideas. I remember thinking to myself even then: he should be a professor in a university.’ The books that Narasimha Rao was attracted to are revealing. ‘He was particularly interested in the sixteenth-century Telugu text Raghava Pandaveeyam,’ Narayana Rao recollects. ‘One can, with the same set of words, read the story about either Ramayana or Mahabharata. The same words are capable of dual meaning. [Narasimha] Rao kept talking about the importance of dual meaning . . . how the same words can mean different things.’

  In an interaction with other Indologists at the university, one professor asked Narasimha Rao a detailed question on caste in Andhra Pradesh. Rao replied, in part humour, ‘You are talking of the things that we have already forgotten [in India].’ Narayana Rao, who was part of the conversation, remembers, ‘He was pointing out that the way India was studied in the US was not right.’ For dinner that night, Narayana Rao and his wife hosted the former chief minister in their small apartment in Madison. They ate flavoured rice, spicy powders and other staples of Telugu cuisine. Narasimha Rao wondered how these ingredients, so hard to find even in north India, were available in pastoral America.26

  When he returned to India, Rao carried with him electronic equipment—a lifelong hobby—and stories of American technological prowess. His youngest son, Prabhakara, was an engineering student at the time. Rao bought him a calculator made by Texas Instruments.27 When Rao’s lackeys gathered in his Hyderabad home to greet their US-returned leader, Rao showed off the calculator to them. So enamoured was he by the United States that he even delivered lectures in Telugu on three occasions, telling his perplexed audience of American industrial success. When he travelled to America once again in 1979, for the birth of Saraswathi’s second child, he was an old hand, explaining the working of mixies and dishwashers to his eldest daughter who had accompanied him from India.28

  Jawaharlal Nehru, schooled in the West, was an Englishman who had moved back to discover India. His idea of India was moulded by this reverse journey. Narasimha Rao’s path was more straightforward. In the words of K. Natwar Singh, ‘[Rao’s] roots were deep in the spiritual and religious soil of India. He did not need to Discover India.’29 It was the West he was noticing, at the age of fifty-three, and he liked what he saw.

  Most Indian leaders of the nationalist period had been schooled in the United Kingdom, shaped by the Fabian socialism of the time. Peculiarly enough, this formative experience had le
d many to a fascination for the Soviet Union and its model of state controls. As state minister and chief minister, Rao had internalized this Nehruvian ideology as the only route a traditional society could take to modernity. His 1974 visit to the United States was to subtly change his mind.

  Over the years, Telugu-speaking migrants to the US would reshape the relationship between their lands of origin and work. By 2015, they would account for the single largest group among Indian immigrants to the US.30 This migration would have, what the scholar on migration Devesh Kapur calls, a ‘cognitive impact’ on what Telugu speakers back home thought of America.31 Narasimha Rao’s own interactions with his American family members—a second daughter was to migrate a decade later—would deepen his admiration for American capitalism. The economist Montek Singh Ahluwalia, himself a product of Washington, remembers a briefing on the global economy when the prospects for oil prices came up. Prime minister Narasimha Rao asked his assistant to connect him to a ‘Mr Rao’ in New York, explaining, ‘He is someone I know very well and he knows a lot about oil.’32

  Soon after his return from the United States, and hardly welcome in Hyderabad, Rao returned to Vangara village to look after his ailing mother.33 For much of the remainder of 1974, he would live in the mud house he spent his childhood in, working on his book. The house, designed to Hindu architectural rules, was hardly suited for a former chief minister, a US-return. Rao made plans to replace mud with brick and mortar, the hay roof with tiles.34 Rao could have simply broken down the house he had grown up in and built it anew. Instead, he chose to stick to the old measurements, shifting the walls not an inch. While modernizing the house, Rao chose to keep tradition intact.