Aware that twilight was near, Narasimha Rao began to play elder statesman. On 12 December 1990, he sent public greetings to the young Maharashtra chief minister Sharad Pawar on his birthday. ‘Being from the generation older than Sharad’s, I cannot claim to know him very closely or fully . . . [but] his dynamism was evident . . . and one could have seen in him the makings of a prominence.’88
He also introspected, in private, on the Congress’s recent loss. Amidst his papers lies a handwritten note on the 1989 elections. In typical Rao fashion, it reveals little: ‘There is nothing sacrosanct in being or not being in power. What is important is that out of the 1989 verdict, a complete breakdown should not emerge at the Centre, causing irreparable and permanent damage to the polity. This is the criterion that everyone should keep in mind at this juncture.’89
Even in the security of his personal diary, Rao would not say what he really thought: that Rajiv Gandhi had been a disaster. The truth was that while Rajiv had respected and needed Rao, he was from another social world. Narasimha Rao was a native intellectual, speaking five Indian languages fluently before he even learnt English. He had never studied abroad, and first travelled outside India when he was fifty-three. Rajiv, on the other hand, spoke English as his first language, had studied in elite Indian schools and then at Cambridge, had married an Italian, and moved around in the swish set of Delhi.
These social differences are reflected in a possibly apocryphal story that took place around then. Narasimha Rao was in a meeting with Rajiv and a school friend of the former prime minister. Rao was wearing a dhoti, kurta and leather slippers. Since his feet were aching, Rao placed one foot on the other thigh, and began gently pressing his toes as he spoke to Rajiv. It is a common enough habit among village men in India, but would be considered uncouth in a western setting. The school friend turned and whispered to Rajiv, and on his cue got up and pushed Rao’s foot down to the ground. The sixty-eight-year old was being taught manners.90
Narasimha—half-man, half-lion—had his revenge. In an anonymous essay published in Mainstream in January 1990,91 Rao identified himself only as a ‘Congressman’, and was critical of Rajiv’s ‘naiveté’ in handling Ayodhya. He wrote that while Rajiv may not have made money in the Bofors scam, it was ‘more probable . . . that Rajiv was concealing something or someone’. More stinging was his description of an inept leader blinded by his own election victory in 1984: ‘Thereafter Rajiv Gandhi was right—right all the way, whatever he said or did. So there were no limits any more to what he said or did . . . What he heard day in and day out from his young coterie was nothing but fulsome praise. He became a praise addict. The elders either joined the chorus or looked on, not knowing what to do.’92
Narasimha Rao also examined why a leader with the largest majority in Indian history had ended up being so weak. It was an analysis that would also apply to Rao’s future strategy as prime minister: ‘The other important factor that contributed to Rajiv Gandhi’s downfall was a peculiar sense of political insecurity skilfully induced in his mind by whom? . . . In fact, he should have shown humility and consolidated his position in the first five years of his Prime Ministership, keeping those whom he considered rivals at bay but in good humour within the party.’
Soon after Rao published his unnamed critique of Rajiv Gandhi, the cardiologist K. Srinath Reddy received a phone call in June 1990. It was Kalyani Shankar.
‘Mr Narasimha Rao is having problems,’ she told Reddy, ‘can you come over at once?’ Srinath Reddy, whose socialist father was governor of Tripura, knew Narasimha Rao from his Andhra days. He rushed over to 9, Motilal Nehru Marg, and was shown into Rao’s room by Kalyani Shankar. ‘I found him in front of a laptop typing away. He was in [a] light cotton half sleeves and greenish lungi.’93 Rao turned when Srinath Reddy entered and he complained of chest pain. ‘I realized it was intermittent chest pain, which can lead to a heart attack if care is not given.’ Reddy drove Rao to the coronary care centre at AIIMS hospital. The next morning, the cardiologist paid Rao a visit, and found him sitting up on his bed, with the table meant to serve food placed across him. On the table was a laptop, and Rao, in patient’s gown, was keying away.
Soon after, Narasimha Rao travelled to Houston in the United States for a coronary bypass surgery. Rajeshwara remembers seeing his father in the recovery room, tubes skewering him from all angles. The patient was reading the New York Times. When the doctor asked him what he was doing, Rao replied, ‘You do your job. I am doing mine.’94
Problems with his heart, in the Congress, and with Rajiv, told Narasimha Rao that forty years of public life were drawing to a close. After he returned to India in late 1990, he received a message that spoke to his soul.
The Siddheswari peetham—or Hindu monastic order—was founded in 1936 in Courtallam (or Kutralam), a spa town in Tamil Nadu. The founder, Mouna Swamy, wanted to establish a centre for religious knowledge in the tradition of the eighth-century Hindu theologian, Adi Shankara.95 For decades, Narasimha Rao had been a devotee of this monastic order, making regular trips to Courtallam. He would pay obeisance to the head of the peetham, as well as take part in its charitable activities—from medical care for the poor to free food.
By late 1990, the Siddheswari peetham was look for a new head. P.V. Narasimha Rao was its most well-known devotee; he was also known for his Sanskrit and religious writings.96 The monks who ran the peetham decided to offer the religious post to Rao. In a coincidence, Lakshmi Kantamma had by then left politics to become a sadhvi. The Siddheswari monastery demanded that Rao relocate to Courtallam and give up politics, as well as the trappings of worldly life, its material and emotional bonds.
Rao did not agree to the offer. Nor did he straight away refuse.
6
Monk to Monarch
It was the afternoon of 2 April 1991. P.V. Narasimha Rao made the five-minute car journey from his Delhi home on Motilal Nehru Marg to the expansive bungalow at the intersection of Janpath and Akbar Road. The hereditary ruler of the Congress party was distributing tickets for the coming national elections. Rao was nervous.
Over the last few months, courtiers close to the Family had hinted that Rajiv Gandhi was finally planning the transition to a younger Cabinet.1 These whispers resonated with Rao’s own exhaustion with politics. He had won eight consecutive elections, and at sixty-nine, was getting old for the ingratiating namaste. In the aftermath of his 1989 election victory from Ramtek in Maharashtra, he had written to his childhood friend in Warangal of an ‘extremely tough . . . last lap of the campaign’.’ ‘In the process,’ he complained, ‘my blood sugar shot up very high and I am in need of complete rest and regulated life for several months now. I don’t know what to do.’2 His health, often perilous when out of power, plummeted. After his open heart surgery in 1990, he had told his youngest son that ‘God has given me a second lease of life’.3
Rao had by now developed a finely tuned sense of political timing. He perceived that his own time was running out.
In the private confines of his diary, Rao wrote that in politics, everyone has a destined level:
‘In my case, both with Indiraji and Rajiv, it was the level of a Central Minister—and no Higher. There was talk about the post of Congress President, Rashtrapathi, Vice-President, etc. . . . but every time they eluded me. And this happened several times. Yet, I did not bother, personally, since I still suffer from that phenomenon called lack of ambition.’4
Rao must have been rehearsing these thoughts when he was ushered into the meeting with Rajiv Gandhi. Also present in the room was a senior official from the intelligence bureau. This bureaucrat remembers Rao requesting Rajiv to offer his Lok Sabha seat to someone else, because ‘I am too sick to campaign again.’ That it was Rao who anticipated Rajiv was confirmed by two of his sons and a Family loyalist present in the antechamber.
Subramanian Swamy, a Cabinet minister at the time, tells a different story.5 ‘I was with my friend Rajiv,’ he remembered in 2015 in his office in Delhi. �
��[Rajiv’s secretary] Vincent George walked in and said, “Narasimha Rao has been waiting for a long time.” Rao came in and Rajiv said in my presence, “Mr Narasimha Rao, you have become very old. I don’t think you should contest Lok Sabha. I will bring you eventually to the Rajya Sabha.”’ Rao’s confidante Kalyani Shankar adds, ‘Rao wanted to switch places with Rajya Sabha MP N.K.P. Salve, but Rajiv refused.’6 The conversation apparently ended with Rajiv cajoling Rao into drafting the party manifesto for the coming election, a face-saver, since manifestos are rarely read by party workers, let alone the average voter.
Rao returned home, changed into a checked lungi and short cotton kurta, and ruminated in his bedroom. News began spreading in Lutyens Delhi that a lengthy career had just ended. It reached Ronen Sen, a young diplomat who was already an insider. Sen had worked with Rao the foreign minister and would go on to become prime minister Rao’s ambassador to Moscow.
Ronen Sen drove to Rao’s house to see him.7 Normally bustling, 9 Motilal Nehru Marg was empty, the front gate unguarded. The mannerly diplomat made his way through the house to find Rao slouched in a chair in his bedroom. Feet extended, chin upwards. Sen had come for a short ‘courtesy call’, a fleeting non-event that is the babble of bureaucratic life. Instead, he listened for hours as a lonely Rao reflected on his youth, his fight against the Nizam, and his early years in the Congress. He interspersed this with details of where the best vadas in Andhra Pradesh could be found. These ramblings were more reminiscence than self-pity. Rao did not mention the conversation with Rajiv earlier that day. Instead, he regaled Sen with stories of how the Mexican diplomat Jorge Castañeda Álvarez ‘loved chillies’ and would compete with the Telugu Narasimha Rao on who could swallow more. The sun was setting by the time Sen left. An old man was adjusting to the twilight alone.
Rao began to plan for a life outside politics. A life outside Delhi. Worried that he would soon be short of a place to stay when visiting the capital, he had applied to that genteel hospice for geriatrics in the heart of the city, India International Centre.8 When he was swiftly admitted to the select club, the former defence, home, health, education, culture, and foreign minister of India, the former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, was beside himself with joy.
Rao busied himself with Congress meetings to prepare the manifesto. Otherwise, his appointment diary shows that few sought his counsel during this month.9 On 16 April, he met Congress president Rajiv Gandhi at 4 p.m., and half an hour later was part of the manifesto release at 24 Akbar Road. Ten days later, when Congressmen filed their nominations for the coming elections, Rao, who already knew he was out, nonetheless recorded his bitterness in his private diary: ‘26-4-91. At 3.00 P.M. today, a gap has appeared in my legislative career for the first time in 34 years. I am feeling extremely dejected.’10
In early May, Rao began packing his bags. He hired Roger Removals, moving men for Lutyens’ elite. The workmen, used to lifting weighty assets beyond known sources of income, were grateful that this old man wanted no furniture or decorations moved. What he was fussy about were books, thousands upon thousands of them. Rao made the workmen reopen already sealed boxes to ensure that his books were carted away correctly categorized.11 The only other objects that Rao was particular about was his computer and printer models, companions for seven years now. Hardware and hardbound were transported in forty-five cartons to a large truck,12 which was then driven 1500 kilometres to Hyderabad, into the attic of his second son Rajeshwara’s house. The departure of his books from Delhi depressed Rao. A bureaucrat friend who doubled up as an amateur astrologer tried to lift his spirits. ‘Leave them here. I predict you are coming back.’13
Books were central to Rao’s retirement plans. In Hyderabad, he spent hours holed up in a book-lined room, typing away on his beloved computer. He was adding colour to the outline of a novel he had first drawn up in 1973, when, freshly deposed as the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, he was living in political wilderness. When Rao was drawn back into national politics in late 1974, he abandoned the novel. Now, out of the political scene once again—cynical once again—Rao began adding flesh to those buried bones.
Rao also used his time to rent an apartment in Bombay, since the possible Rajya Sabha seat from Maharashtra would require proof of residency. To confirm to himself where he belonged, Rao sent fifteen cartons of books—recently moved to Hyderabad from Delhi—to his new home in Bombay.14
While a part of Rao was hankering after the temporal sinecures of fading leaders, another part was contemplating deeper engagement with the divine. When the Courtallam monastery had first offered Rao the post of head monk in 1990, he had put it off.15 But now, with few prospects for real power or influence, the life of a monk seemed apposite. He wrote to the monastery indicating that he was considering accepting.
In the run-up to the elections on 20 May, Rao flitted in and out of Delhi, listlessly campaigning for the Congress. On 11 May, his appointment diary shows that he was in Delhi, doing a ‘radio recording for Congress party’.16 His speech was soporific, even by the anodyne standards that Rao set himself. He made no mention of the economic crisis engulfing India or the troubles of her foul-weather friend, the Soviet Union. Instead, he mouthed the platitudes of Congress socialism, promising that if they won the coming elections: ‘[The] Eighth Five Year Plan will be finalized . . . The welfare of kisans, khet mazdoors and workers will continue to be the main concern.’ On 16 May, he left again for Hyderabad on the state-owned Indian Airlines. Taking off at 6 p.m., Rao was flying into the sunset.
Indian national elections are always historic. Each iteration is the largest in the world. The 1991 election was no different: 262 million men and 237 million women were on the electoral rolls, 58 per cent of whom eventually cast their vote in 5,76,353 polling booths across the country.17 Because it is hard to simultaneously conduct and protect elections all over the country, they are divided into phases, allowing officials and security men to move from hill to valley to plains. The 1991 elections were divided into three phases. It still turned out to be one of the most violent in Indian history, and voting had to be postponed in the militancy-hit states of Kashmir and Punjab.
On the morning of the first phase, Narasimha Rao left for his old constituency in Maharashtra, for the awkward task of campaigning for his replacement as Congress candidate from Ramtek.
The next day, 21 May 1991, Rao woke up at the residence of a local, one Prabhakar Kamble. Rao’s appointment diary shows that he left to campaign in nearby Parbhani and Mansar, had lunch at a local engineering college, answered questions in fluent Marathi for a local newspaper, and spoke at a few more public meetings.18 He returned to Nagpur to have dinner at the house of a local benefactor at 9 p.m., exhausted. Dinner done, Rao made his way to the house of Congress leader N.K.P. Salve to spend the night. Rao had opted out of a Lok Sabha ticket to avoid the strain of campaigning for himself. But here he was, canvassing hard for someone else.
At the exact time that Rao was leaving from dinner in Nagpur, Rajiv Gandhi was at a campaign stop in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, 1162 kilometres away. Rajiv, whose mother had been killed by separatists, had only a few guards to protect him. At 10.21 p.m., a young Sri Lankan Tamil woman mingled with the Congress supporters swarming around Rajiv.19 She was a member of the LTTE, and the terrorist group was worried that Rajiv Gandhi would send back Indian troops to northern Sri Lanka if re-elected prime minister. As she approached the son and grandson of prime ministers, and a prime minister in his own right, she bent down to touch his feet, detonating the explosives strapped to her belt.
Narasimha Rao had just entered his bedroom when he was told that Rajiv Gandhi and fourteen others had been killed by a suicide bomber. Rajiv’s body had been blown to such shreds that the police were struggling to identify the pieces. Rao recorded his reaction in a terse diary entry: ‘. . . Just when I was preparing to retire for the night, this news came . . . I was perhaps not looking too well, so they called the doctor for a check-up. However, I was fee
ling all right and had taken the shock reasonably well. Anyhow, I tried to sleep for a while, but could hardly sleep for about two hours.’20
A few hours later, the sun barely up, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, grandson to Mohandas Gandhi and C. Rajagopalachari, was woken up in Delhi by a trunk call.21 A bureaucrat, Gandhi was at the time joint secretary to the President, R. Venkataraman, and had already heard of Rajiv’s death. ‘Gopal, what has happened?’ lamented Narasimha Rao from Nagpur airport, in Hindi. ‘Itihaas ne karwat badal di hai,’ replied Gopal. ‘History has shifted itself.’
‘Yes, this is correct,’ said Rao before asking for an appointment with the President, an old friend. Conscious of the immense burden he carries, Gopalkrishna Gandhi is a man who weighs his words before pronouncing them. On Rao’s dawn phone call, he only says, ‘I am sure his coming to Delhi was not just an act of political etiquette.’ The pieces of Rajiv’s body barely assembled into a respectable corpse, the game to replace him had begun.
An air force plane carrying Rajiv’s remains landed in Delhi airport some hours later. It was brought to 10 Janpath, where Rajiv had lived with his wife, Sonia. As soon as he landed in Delhi at around 10.30 a.m., Rao made his way there. ‘It was more a coffin than a body,’ he noted in his diary later that evening. ‘The body had been blown up out of recognition.’22 Rao was not the only man thinking ahead. As he records in his diary: ‘. . . while we were hanging around the dead body in 10 Janpath, Pranab [Mukherjee] took me aside and told me that there was general agreement on my being elected C.P [Congress president] and it would be good to clinch it today itself, so as to forestall rumours of internal struggle etc.’23
Half - Lion: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India Page 9
