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

by Vinay Sitapati

  Rao was delighted. But more than four decades of surviving snakes in the pit of politics had taught him to hide ambition. ‘I knew that his report was too good to be true. Either he was himself a dupe or he was party to some kind of design and was trying to lull me. He had done this role many times in those crucial years of Indiraji. I did not want to react . . . I mentioned about my health and said I feel a bit diffident. I suggested NDT [N.D. Tiwari] instead, taking care to add that I was not refusing, yet it would be good if he came up after a better consensus. I also knew that NDT would be as unacceptable as, or more so than, myself, in the scheme of things.24

  Rao was wise to be cautious. Seven years earlier, Pranab Mukherjee had broken the queue when prime minister Indira Gandhi was killed, setting himself up as successor. For the sin of a commoner claiming a dynastic right, Pranab was sent to the back of the line. He was only now being rehabilitated. The same Family right was being reasserted, as Rao heard ‘the loud slogans and shouts of some fellows on the road, asking for Sonia Gandhi to be made C.P’. Rao realized he was being upstaged. ‘The picture was complete in my mind.’

  He returned to Motilal Nehru Marg to take stock. As his diary entry says: ‘Coming home, I first established contact with K and she agreed to come for lunch. She had almost bought the rumours of my being made C.P. [Congress president] that was making the rounds everywhere. She wouldn’t have any of my hesitations. I didn’t say anything, as I knew it was only a few hours before the cat would be out of the bag.’

  At 4.15 p.m., Arjun Singh—who had been chief minister of Madhya Pradesh during the Bhopal Gas Tragedy—and Congress leader M.L. Fotedar paid Rao a visit. They suggested that Sonia be made Congress president to harness public sympathy for the remainder of the elections.

  Rao hated the idea, but in his diary claims he revealed nothing. Rao’s version is at odds with his bête noir Arjun Singh’s own memory of the meeting. On hearing the suggestion to make Sonia Congress president, Arjun Singh claims that Rao ‘burst out in anger and virtually yelled out . . . whether it was essential that the Congress Party should be treated like a train where the compartments have to be attached to an engine belonging to the Nehru-Gandhi family or were there other alternatives.’25 Even if Singh was putting words into Narasimha Rao’s mouth, he was echoing Rao’s thoughts.

  An hour later, the CWC, the apex decision-making body of the party, began its emergency meeting with a condolence resolution. On cue, Arjun Singh pressed for Sonia to be made party leader. It was not just Rao who opposed Sonia. The ambitious chief minister of Maharashtra, Sharad Pawar, wanted to make clear that the posts of Congress president and leader of the party in Parliament (i.e. prime minister) should be distinct. ‘His reasons were obvious and also valid,’ Rao wryly notes in his diary. But the rest of the room was chanting Sonia’s name, demanding that she contest from the Family pocket borough, Amethi. Sitaram Kesri, a Rajiv acolyte, went so far as to suggest that Sonia be made prime minister. Rao said little, while ‘both Sharad and Kesri revealed their thinking’.

  Inwardly, Rao seethed. His crown was being placed on another head. He detected a larger conspiracy by a clique led by Sonia, since—in his own words—‘such a proposal could not have come without a reasonable certainty of being able to obtain her consent eventually’. Rao felt that he ‘had been thoroughly outsmarted by the interested persons, aided no doubt by Pranab’.

  The clique that Rao suspected did exist. After the decimation of the party structure by Indira Gandhi in 1969, what remained was an almighty family at the centre, and regional satraps who supplied votes from the states. Nestled in between were unelectable advisors, M.L. Fotedar and Indira Gandhi’s stenographer, R.K. Dhawan, among them. They drew their power not from the masses, but from access to the Nehru-Gandhi family. For them to manoeuvre their way into the middle, they needed the dynasty at the top.

  Facing defeat with victory so near, Rao managed to remain analytical. Before sleeping that night, he typed a long diary entry, describing the day’s events. Though bitter, Rao was still able to objectively analyse his missteps. He had underestimated the court politics around the Family, since as a senior Congress leader, ‘I was only dealing with the boss directly. I did not have to bother about the rat race.’ More remarkable was his openness to the core argument of the Sonia clique. Though dynasty was ‘on the face of it abhorrent and unacceptable’, he wondered whether it was, in practice, a vote winner.26

  While Rao was correct to pretend disinterest, he was wrong in suspecting Sonia Gandhi. The clique was acting on its own. Sonia had always detested the life of politics, and had implored her husband not to become prime minister in 1984. She rejected the CWC resolution, preferring to privately grieve rather than play the public role of party leader. The actor Amitabh Bachchan, then a confidant of the Gandhis, was said to have dissuaded Sonia, and ‘In fact,’ another close friend recalls, ‘it was considered extremely insensitive on the part of the CWC to have made such a gesture when Rajiv’s funeral had not taken place.’27

  Sonia’s refusal began a second round of politicking for party leadership. Rao sent a message to P.C. Alexander on 23 May 1991 that he ‘should meet him immediately’.28

  Alexander was a bureaucrat among politicians, and a politician among bureaucrats. An IAS officer from Kerala, he rose to become a powerful principal secretary to both prime minister Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv. He was with Indira when she had considered, then rejected, Rao for President in 1982. Alexander knew every turn in the Congress labyrinth, making him an ideal guide for a prime ministerial aspirant who had last navigated the party organization (as general secretary) in 1976.

  That night, after paying respects to Rajiv’s body at Teen Murti, Alexander met Rao, who played the reluctant statesman. ‘However,’ remembered Alexander, ‘he told me unambiguously that since Sonia was not agreeable to becoming Congress president, many people had already requested him . . .’29 Rao asked Alexander to remain in Delhi and imperceptibly canvass other Congress leaders on his behalf.

  The next day, Rajiv Gandhi’s body was cremated in front of more than 1,00,000 people.30 Also in attendance were leaders from sixty-four countries,31 including Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto—who would herself be assassinated at a political rally sixteen years later. They watched while a twenty-year-old Rahul Gandhi sprinkled water from the Ganga on his dead father lying on a bed of sandalwood. Rahul then circled the pyre seven times and, with a burning torch, set it to flames.32

  A day later, Rajiv’s widow was asked to choose his successor as party leader. With two phases of elections to go, it was likely that a sympathy wave would carry the Congress to power. Even though Sonia was numb with grief, she realized she was choosing the next leader of India.

  She also knew the players. Maharashtra chief minister Sharad Pawar, young and pushy, had access to the pockets of his industrialist friends in Bombay. But he had shown disloyalty to the family before, splitting the state Congress to become chief minister in 1978. N.D. Tiwari was in some ways the natural choice. A former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, he represented the Brahmin face of the north Indian Congress. But, as Rao astutely noticed in his diary entry, N.D. Tiwari was ‘unacceptable’. This was because he had displeased Rajiv by disobeying his order and contesting the ongoing national elections (worse yet, he would end up losing).33 Arjun Singh and Madhavrao Scindia, royals from Madhya Pradesh, were opposed by rival factions within the party. Each one of these regional bosses was polarizing enough to split the party, powerful enough to sideline Sonia and take charge.

  There are varied versions of what happened next. The one narrated by K. Natwar Singh (by then a senior Congressman and close aide of Sonia) is believed to be most plausible by Rao’s family, Congress leader Jairam Ramesh (reputed to be one of Sonia’s speech-writers) and another Congressman so close to Sonia that it is assumed he speaks for her. The story goes like this.

  A day after Rajiv’s funeral, K. Natwar Singh was summoned by Sonia and asked who the new party leader s
hould be.34 Natwar suggested she seek advice from P.N. Haksar, Indira Gandhi’s virtuous principal secretary who had since had a tempestuous relationship with the Family. Haksar, aged seventy-seven, walked into 10 Janpath. His first suggestion was Shankar Dayal Sharma, the vice president of India. A Brahmin from Madhya Pradesh, Sharma was the most senior Congress leader alive. He had been chief minister of the erstwhile Bhopal state as early as 1952, and was well liked and inoffensive, virtues Haksar felt were the need of the hour. Natwar and Congress leader Aruna Asaf Ali were dispatched to ask Sharma.

  He astonished them by declining, resisting the allure of leading the world’s largest democracy. ‘The prime ministership of India is a full-time job,’ he explained. ‘My age and health would not let me to do justice to the most important office in the country. Kindly convey to Sonia-ji the reasons for my inability to take on such an awesome responsibility.’35 A bureaucrat close to Sharma hinted that he preferred the ceremonial pomp of the presidency of India, a post to which he was eventually elevated in 1992.

  Natwar and Aruna returned with empty hands. Haksar was called for again.

  This time, he suggested Pamulaparti Venkata Narasimha Rao. Rao had spent decades in party and government, Haksar argued. He was an intellectual who lacked enemies, someone who could keep the party united. The other contenders, Haksar hinted, might split the party. Sonia said little, but saw that there was a logic to Narasimha Rao. While no favourite of her husband, Rao knew his place; he had never dissented nor mutinied. With elections ongoing, the party needed someone who could balance the various power equations in the party. No one else fit that bill.

  Two decades earlier, similar logic had propelled an improbable Narasimha Rao to the chief ministership of Andhra Pradesh. As a southern Brahmin, he came from a caste too small to usurp state power. Ajathashatru—one whose enemies are yet unborn—had also been careful to avoid factions within the party. This meant no group would fight for him, but it also meant no group would fight against him. In a land of cliques and coteries, castes and communities, Narasimha Rao’s greatest virtue was his loneliness.

  The next day, Satish Sharma, Rajiv Gandhi’s pilot pal and troubleshooter, received a phone call. ‘Satish, I want to come over and have tea with you in your farm today evening,’ Narasimha Rao said. Sharma did not know that Sonia was considering Rao’s name. ‘I was most surprised,’ Sharma recalled many years later. ‘He is not that kind of guy.’36 That afternoon, at 2.30, Sharma met the grieving widow of his best friend. ‘Sonia,’ he said, ‘I got a call from Narasimha Rao. It is the first time he has called. He is coming to the farm to have tea.’ ‘I have a suggestion,’ Sharma continued. ‘There are two people lobbying [for prime ministership]. One is Pawar. The other is Arjun Singh. My suggestion is that you ask Narasimha Rao. He has been Andhra Pradesh chief minister, cabinet minister with Indiraji, cabinet minister with Rajiv. He is a linguist, a scholar with a clean image. Should I ask him when I meet him today evening?’

  Sonia Gandhi nodded. ‘She agreed.’37

  Soon after Satish Sharma left, another person visited Mrs Gandhi. This person, currently a senior functionary of the Congress, agreed to speak on the condition of absolute anonymity. ‘When I met Sonia, Narasimha Rao’s name came up. Sonia had just one concern: Bofors.’ Sonia felt that Bofors had led to her husband’s loss in the 1989 elections, making him vulnerable to assassination. This Congressman hastened to add that Sonia was not suggesting impropriety; she believed her husband to be innocent. But she wanted Rao to be told that his prime ministership was contingent on his sensitive handling of the Bofors investigation.

  Later that evening, Satish Sharma drove to his farm on the outskirts of Delhi. As he entered, he saw P.V. Narasimha Rao talking in Telugu to his mother, who had lived in Hyderabad before. He also noticed another man in the room. This was Chandraswami, wearing a flowing saffron robe, a dark-orange third eye sunk into his temple. ‘It was obvious that Chandraswami was playing a key role in making Rao prime minister,’ Satish Sharma remembers. Sharma, who prefers the directness of a Boeing pilot to a politician’s babbling, cut through the small talk. ‘Okay, Rao-ji, let’s not waste time.’ On that day, in that farmhouse outside Delhi, Narasimha Rao was offered party presidentship, the prelude to becoming prime minister. He wasted no time in agreeing.38

  On 29 May, at a CWC meeting, Narasimha Rao was elected president of the 105-year-old Congress party. The decision was unanimous—i.e. once Sonia had decided, the rest fell in line. Rumours swirled that Rao, a heart patient, was only a seat-warmer for Sonia. When the election for the next President of India took place in 1992, they said Rao would be finally elevated to irrelevance. Kalyani Shankar remembers, ‘The group that was keen on Sonia’s selection thought that Rao, who was almost in his seventies, could be a stopgap prime minister until Sonia decided to take over.’39 Subramanian Swamy puts it more bluntly. He claims that ‘Sonia knew that Rao would die soon, and she could take over.’40

  Genuflection followed. Two days after becoming party leader, Rao got a letter from former Congressman and current foe Devi Lal. ‘Though it is an internal affair of your party,’ the letter began, ‘as an ex-Congressman, I am genuinely interested in the smooth and amicable resolution of the leadership issue in the aftermath of the untimely demise of Sri Rajiv Gandhi.’ A politician of a rather different order wished him a week later. In early June 1991, Rao got a congratulatory letter from Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Aware of the import of the message from India’s close ally, Rao replied immediately, assuring Gorbachev that he would work to strengthen Soviet-Indian relations.41

  There was still an election to be fought, the final two phases of which had been rescheduled by the election commission for 12 and 15 June. Rao, who had opted out of the 1991 elections partly because of the rigours of touring a single constituency, now faced the task of campaigning in more than a hundred. He also had no money.42 As an aide confided, ‘Rao did not know about finances and funding sources of the Congress . . . he was last in the party organisation years ago . . . much had changed since then.’ Party treasurer Sitaram Kesri had to scramble to pay for his travels.

  Perhaps Narasimha Rao’s main shortcoming as party leader—in Jairam Ramesh’s words—was that he had ‘the charisma of a dead fish’.43 Engaging in print or in scholarly gatherings, Rao’s intellectual parries were lost on a large crowd. The contrast with the man he had replaced, a man with the sex appeal and lineage of John F. Kennedy, was stark.

  Salman Khurshid, son of a Union minister and grandson of a president, was at the time a young politician contesting from Farrukhabad in Uttar Pradesh. As part of his campaign, the Oxford-educated Khurshid had originally planned an outdoor rally for Rajiv Gandhi in his constituency. But when the dour new party president turned up to canvass, Khurshid was forced to corral 500 people into watching Rao pout within the safety of a closed compound.44

  On 15 June, the final vote was cast and the results were due in three days. The Congress expected to win. As party president, Rao was the default candidate for prime minister. But a month earlier, Sharad Pawar had spoken of a distinction between party leader and prime minister. He now began to act on that distinction.

  Pawar plotted from Delhi, his henchmen guaranteeing a steady supply of grilled chicken and paneer tikka from the nearby Pandara Road.45 Pawar was also buoyed by the fact that when the results were announced on 18 June, his Maharashtra Congress provided the single largest share to the party’s national kitty.46 To be fair to Pawar, his strategy was quintessentially democratic: to push for a vote by all MPs, preventing party elites from anointing behind closed doors.

  Amidst Narasimha Rao’s private papers lies an unsigned yellowing document. It is titled ‘CPP leadership’ and though no date is mentioned, it was likely written between 16 and 18 June 1991. The letter begins: ‘It is becoming increasingly clear that the aspirant from Maharashtra, Sharad Pawar, is keen and may insist on a secret ballot . . . A lot of backstage work has to be done with immediate effect.�
� It then goes on to recommend: ‘The state Congress leaders from all over the country, including the Congress Chief Ministers and members of . . . Working Committee, should be contacted on the consensual proposal for electing PV Narasimha Rao as the CPP [Congress Parliamentary Party] leader.’

  Rao took the letter seriously. He met P.C. Alexander, by now his chief advisor, sometimes two to three times a day.47 A few days before the results, Subramanian Swamy, a Rao supporter, says he chanced upon Sharad Pawar at a diplomatic dinner at the President’s estate on Raisina Hill. ‘I told him clearly to withdraw. I had intelligence dossiers on him.’48 Swamy was also making public allegations against Pawar in the press. Another Rao acolyte sent to dissuade Pawar was the astrologer N.K. Sharma,49 one among the many Hindu godmen and soothsayers who served as the cerebral Rao’s eyes, ears, and occasionally, voice. While Rao was deploying the stick on Pawar, he was all carrots for Arjun Singh. Worried that Arjun Singh and Pawar, the two most powerful leaders in the Congress, would reach a deal that would cut him out, Rao sent Alexander to reassure Singh.

  Anxious to avoid a protracted fight with power within grasp, the party began rallying behind Narasimha Rao. That signal was sent on 17 June 1991, a day before the election results, when most of the Congress leadership showed up at 9 Motilal Nehru Marg. Rao’s appointment diary records that at noon, he was ‘Meeting with Sh. Arjun Singh, Ghulam Nabi, Mukherjee’. Then, from 4.30 p.m. to 7 p.m., he met party leaders in one-on-one meetings.50