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

by Vinay Sitapati

  Where Narasimha Rao deserves credit is for improving India’s public finances, ensuring higher revenue, which has, in turn, improved the scale of welfare schemes. Compared to the heyday of Indian ‘socialism’, absolute—and percentage46—amounts spent on education, health, food and rural development increased during his tenure. The trend persists. The health budget in 1996 was double what it was in 1990.47 Food subsidy has risen from less than 50 billion rupees in 1991 to more than 800 billion rupees in 2013.48 Budgetary allocation for six major social protection programmes increased from 5 per cent of revenue in 1991–92 to 13 per cent in 2008–09.49

  This expenditure—as well as the direct impact of growth—has reduced the ill-health, illiteracy and poverty levels50 of the average Indian. Poverty among scheduled castes and tribes has also lessened,51 and reforms have increased income levels across almost all percentiles.52 The change in attitudes and opportunities for entrepreneurship (hitherto confined to the Bania, or mercantile castes) is typified in the rise of Dalit entrepreneurs.53 Tax reforms have ensured that the poor pay less towards government revenue, compared to the middle class and the rich. The evidence also suggests that general inequality has worsened only marginally during the reform period54—though some kinds of inequality (for example, malnutrition levels) are more worrying than others. The claim that ‘neo-liberal’ growth has made Indians worse off is not borne out by data.

  Critics such as the economists Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze are, however, right to point out that India has a long way to go.55 What is particularly egregious is that while social protection schemes (like employment guarantee) have improved, preventive schemes (such as on health and education) have been less impressive.56 For example, even after two decades of economic growth, malnutrition rates among India’s children are twice those from sub-Saharan Africa.57 This is unconscionable, and shows that liberalization-generated funding alone—while essential—does not guarantee social outcomes. No less vital are committed officials, smartly designed policies, and ‘last mile’ delivery.

  This ‘last mile’ is controlled by state and district officials, not the Central government. As a result, the implementation of central schemes has varied vastly between regions. States with competent local bureaucracies and political will—such as Tamil Nadu and Kerala—have converted increased funding into individual well-being, while Uttar Pradesh and other sloppily managed states continue to implement the same schemes poorly. This variation within India shows that the problem is not only at the level of prime minister. But Rao and his successors must accept their share of blame.

  Narasimha Rao did understand the importance of ‘decentralisation and micro-level planning’ to prevent corruption.58 His passage of the 73rd and 74th amendments to the Constitution, devolving power to village-level panchayats,59 was an attempt to create what he called ‘a bypass model’ where money directly reached the poor. But this decentralization has given power to both virtuous as well as venal local politicians, exacerbating inequalities between regions.

  Even worse, the Rao years saw a decline in public recruitment, from doctors to teachers.60 While it is not clear why this happened, one explanation could be that Rao and other politicians found it easier to shrink the inefficient public sector by curtailing future employees rather than firing well-entrenched current ones. These frontline bureaucrats are indispensable to improving the well-being of India’s poor. Their dwindling has rendered the state machinery understaffed as well as corrupt.

  Where history will judge Rao more kindly is for being the first Indian premier to attempt a genuinely social democratic vision—one where the state encourages private entrepreneurship, and pours the resultant revenue into the social sector. This vision persists not just in the economic reforms that later governments have followed, but in the well-funded schemes they have crafted. The sheer size of schemes (possible only because of high growth) has enabled them to touch the ordinary Indian, even after leakage on the way. This has turned the quality of development programmes into election issues—especially at the regional level—in a way that did not happen before Narasimha Rao. Like Willy Brandt, Rao was his country’s first social democratic leader, the first to realize that growth and redistribution were not in conflict. They were, and are, necessary for the other.

  10

  Surviving Party and Parliament

  Narasimha Rao would wake up at 5 a.m. in bungalow number three on Race Course Road, his official residence as prime minister. Still in checked lungi and white banyan, his sparse, white hair ruffled upwards, he would walk to the adjoining room and fiddle with his computer until the newspapers arrived at 6 a.m. An hour later, his personal physician, Dr Srinath Reddy, would arrive to take the prime minister’s pulse, blood and urine samples.1 Rao would then walk on the treadmill for half an hour, and breakfast by 8.30 a.m.

  His cook, Rajaiah, a Yadav by caste, had lived in Rao’s ancestral village, Vangara, and benefitted from chief minister Rao’s land reforms in the 1970s. When Rao became prime minister, he craved the upma and pitla of his childhood, and brought Rajaiah to Delhi.2 The prime minister could now relive his favoured Andhra and Maharashtrian tastes for breakfast.

  Rao would then bathe, don a silk kurta and white starched dhoti, and leave for the day’s work. He would return for a 5-p.m. snack—sugarless tea, noodles and pasta. Rao would reappear for dinner, then retire to his room. With Hindustani classical music playing in the background, the prime minister would type his thoughts into his laptop before turning in for the night. On occasion, Rao would invite his closest for a one-on-one dinner. Prabhakara, Rajeshwara, P.V.R.K. Prasad, A.N. Varma, Ramu Damodaran or select others were at various times treated to okra, dal fry, and rice. If they were lucky, they would sample Rao’s favourite dish, karela—a vegetable with an acrid taste, which is good for you nonetheless.

  Through his five long years as prime minister, Narasimha Rao was a ship that sailed out every day into a storm. In pushing economic reforms or welfare schemes, he would routinely encounter gales in Parliament or gusts from his own party. The fixed routine at home—familiar food, familiar faces—was his safe harbour, giving Rao a few hours of happiness before he floated off.

  That the ship of state remained afloat for five full years was itself a wonder. In the Lok Sabha elections of 1991, Narasimha Rao’s party had won only 232 of the 521 seats on offer. Even with allies, the Congress was around ten seats short of a majority. The parliamentary opposition was split between the right-wing BJP and the left-wing National Front (a coalition of parties headed by the Janata Dal). If they voted together against Rao even once, he would have to go. No minority government in India had ever completed a full term in office; the previous two governments, both minority, had collapsed within a year. This wobbly mandate presented Rao with challenges no other democratic reformer had ever faced. Ronald Reagan, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher and Jawaharlal Nehru were all voted in with substantial majorities. History foretold that Rao’s collapse was only a matter of time.

  To add to his political impotence, Rao had been chosen as prime minister because he was politically weak. The public scarcely knew who he was, and no faction rooted for him within the Congress. He threatened no one: not Sonia Gandhi, not his rivals Sharad Pawar, Arjun Singh and N.D. Tiwari, and not Rajiv’s sycophants. Narasimha Rao had been made chief minister of Andhra Pradesh in 1971 for this very quality. That Rao had lasted little more than a year.

  Another political constraint for the new prime minister was that his party organization was a shadow of its former self. The Congress of the 1950s and ’60s had penetrated every village. It was now a shell at the village level, with the party’s ground associations—the Seva Dal, for example—having long ceased to attract idealists. While the grass roots had dried up, the leadership had become ‘a railway platform’, in Narasimha Rao’s words. ‘Anyone can come and go as he likes, and can push others aside to place himself in a better position.’3 Any semblance of inner-party democracy had also long been dis
placed by a ‘high command’ hand-picked by the Nehru-Gandhis. The conversion of the 106-year old party into a family enterprise had resulted in its ‘de-institutionalisation’.4 It had also diminished its regional leadership. Mindful of a glass ceiling above, state bosses either chose to leave or plotted in the shadows. A final feature of the Congress of 1991 was that the party ‘system’5—where ideological debate would take place through opposing groups within the Congress—had since been replaced by personality-centric factions squaring off at the state and Central level. These struggles involved very little principle; they were simply squabbles over patronage.

  This was the organization that Narasimha Rao inherited: absent in the periphery, bloated in the middle, hollow to the core.

  Prime minister Rao’s first move was to choose his Cabinet. In a rare act of courage, he appointed the reformers Manmohan Singh and P. Chidambaram as finance and commerce ministers, and appointed himself industry minister. After that, Rao took care to accommodate the party’s various factions. Congress old-timers Balram Jakhar, B. Shankaranand, C.K. Jaffer Sharief and S.B. Chavan were included in the Cabinet; as were Rao’s rivals for prime ministership, Arjun Singh and Sharad Pawar. For ministers of state, Rao chose younger faces like Madhavrao Scindia from Madhya Pradesh and Salman Khurshid from Uttar Pradesh. Khurshid remembers, ‘Mr Narasimha Rao was more than generous with those from the younger generation. But he felt a degree of comfort with those he had worked with in his own time.’6 Rao appointed fifty-three ministers in all,7 prompting a comment from BJP leader L.K. Advani that it was odd for a minority government to have such an outsized ministry.8

  While Rao pandered where he had to, he was also firm enough to assert his authority. Arjun Singh wanted to be home minister—the effective number two in the Cabinet. Rao made him human resource minister instead. He turned down Sharad Pawar’s demand for deputy prime ministership. Instead, the Maharashtra chief minister was given defence. Rao also refused to include N.D. Tiwari (another claimant for the top spot) in his Cabinet, on the grounds that Tiwari had just lost his elections from Uttar Pradesh. This delicate balancing act calmed the Congress while upholding the prime minister’s authority.

  Rao’s work was just beginning. Every new prime minister has to prove through parliamentary vote that he enjoys the confidence of the House of the People. The confidence motion was set for 15 July 1991. Five days earlier, astrologer N.K. Sharma received a message that the prime minister wanted to see him. Narasimha Rao was meeting with his Cabinet when Sharma was driven in. Rao interrupted his meeting to talk to Sharma in an antechamber. ‘When the ministers saw that,’ Sharma remembers with a chuckle, ‘they asked, “Who is this pandit N.K. Sharma whom the prime minister listens to?”’9

  Sharma then left for Calcutta to meet Jyoti Basu, the communist chief minister of West Bengal. He says he spoke to Basu about the upcoming confidence motion. He then returned to Delhi and briefed the prime minister.

  On the morning of the confidence motion, MPs streamed into the circular Parliament building. Narasimha Rao rose to speak from the front row of the treasury benches. He had a clear message for the Opposition: ‘So, let us start with consulting each other. In the process of consultation we will immediately find out, we will come to know what is to be discussed, what is to be kept aside. The area of agreement we will concentrate on, the area of disagreement we will keep aside, if possible.’10

  Narasimha Rao’s seemingly humble attitude to the Opposition, not-so-humble deal with Jyoti Basu, and the National Front’s distaste for fresh elections, worked. While the BJP voted against the government, the National Front and Left parties abstained. The Rao government won the confidence motion by 241 votes to 111.11

  Soon after the confidence motion, the Janata Party politician and former commerce minister Subramanian Swamy says he got a call from the prime minister. ‘I don’t like the tag “minority government,”’ Swamy remembers Narasimha Rao saying. ‘You have to help me get a majority. You did it for Rajiv Gandhi, you broke the V.P. Singh government.’ Swamy replied, ‘Janata Dal is rudderless. V.P. is a failed leader. You can break it. But it will cost you.’ ‘That is not a problem,’ Rao replied.12

  Soon after, a document was placed on the prime minister’s desk. It was titled ‘Record of discussion with A.S.’ Ajit Singh was a senior leader of the Janata Dal, and was at odds with his party leader, V.P. Singh. The paper is unsigned, and forms part of Rao’s archives.13 It reads:

  ‘AS said that he was absolutely clear in his mind that the parting of ways of VPS has reached the final stage and even though conciliatory efforts were going on at different levels. . . he had decided to bid good-bye to VPS and have an understanding with Cong(I). AS then mentioned the following points on which an understanding had to be reached before the announcement: 1. mode of joining—coalition or merger; 2. share of power; 3. common programme; 4. finance help; 5. long term arrangements, such as allotment of tickets etc at the time of next elections.’

  Two months later, in November 1991, Rao contested from the Nandyal Lok Sabha seat in Andhra Pradesh. Following Rajiv’s orders, Rao had not fought the May elections. In order to continue as prime minister now, the law required him to become a member of Parliament. Rao could have avoided the rigmarole of campaigning by being nominated to the upper house of Parliament, the Rajya Sabha. Manmohan Singh would choose this unelected route through his decade as prime minister. But Rao had won seven consecutive elections, and considered himself a people’s politician. Given his lack of control over party and Parliament, this would be his one claim to legitimacy.

  Telugu pride trumped electoral maths, and Andhra opposition leader N.T. Rama Rao chose not to oppose the prime minister’s candidacy from Nandyal. Rao won by 5.8 lakh votes, at the time the largest-ever margin for a Lok Sabha victory.14 By-elections had also been held in several other constituencies. The Congress won a majority. A few months later, Congress also did well in the Punjab elections, which had been postponed due to the threat of violence.

  By March 1992, Rao had not only lasted nine months in office, he had ended the foreign exchange crisis, overseen elections in Punjab, and—as we shall see in a later chapter—steered India through the collapse of the Soviet Union. His party had also increased its numbers in Parliament. Rao had also sought to build consensus within Parliament, briefing them on key economic changes, and offering the Padma Vibhushan (India’s second-highest civilian honour) to the BJP’s Atal Bihari Vajpayee and the communist leader E.M.S. Namboodiripad.15 His was still in a minority government, however, and Rao’s situation remained rickety.

  He faced his second parliamentary hurdle that very month. After the yearly President’s address to Parliament, convention required a ‘vote of thanks’. This was usually a routine event, but so precarious were the government’s numbers that even this nicety turned into a referendum. If Rao lost, or if anti-government amendments were successfully introduced by the Opposition, he would have to resign.

  The debate over the ‘vote of thanks’ began on 9 March 1992. Narasimha Rao stressed the seriousness of the economic crisis, squarely defending his government from charges of selling out to the IMF. Less eloquently, he ensured that seven Janata Dal MPs close to ‘AS’, Ajit Singh, as well as nine Telugu Desam MPs, skipped the vote.16 It is not known what allurements were offered. Suffice to say that their absence helped Rao sail through. The front page of the Times of India the next day announced: ‘Rao govt. wins first test of strength’.17

  The secret to Narasimha Rao’s steady climb up the Congress ladder was simple and bears repeating. He lacked a power base, a coterie that threatened others. As he told a confidant, ‘You have known me for so long. The party and party leader are supreme to me. Never have I attempted to build a base of my own . . . I have never drawn anybody closer or kept anybody at a distance.’18

  Now that he was finally at the top of the ladder, Narasimha Rao realized that he needed a team of his own.

  His economic line-up had been assembled in the
first months of his premiership, as we saw in the chapter on how Rao rescued the economy. By March 1992, his political team was taking shape. Principal Secretary Amar Nath Varma and Cabinet Secretary Naresh Chandra were as central to Rao’s politics as they were to his economics. He also brought back two advisors from the past. P.V.R.K. Prasad had served chief minister Rao in the 1970s. Twenty years later, he was appointed the prime minister’s voice to mediamen, businessmen and godmen. Prasad would go on to administer the Tirupati temple, become the monk that Rao never could, and remain on good terms with Rao’s children in Hyderabad.

  If Prasad represented the older, Hindu world that was central to Rao’s disposition, Ramu Damodaran embodied Rao’s more modern side. Damodaran had previously served under foreign minister Rao in the 1980s. He was scrupulous, urbane, and had spent years working in New York. He came back to work as the prime minister’s private secretary. ‘Ramu was like family,’ Prabhakara Rao remembers. While Rao treated Damodaran as his son, he was careful to insulate his earnest protégé from his more Machiavellian schemes.

  In the durbar culture of Delhi, blessed are the gatekeepers. Jawaharlal Nehru’s secretary, M.O. Mathai, controlled access to India’s first prime minister. Indira Gandhi’s stenographer, R.K. Dhawan, rose to power because he was in charge of her appointments. So it was with Vincent George, secretary first to Rajiv, then Sonia Gandhi. Narasimha Rao’s gatekeeper was R.K. Khandekar. Given to wearing safari suits and thick, black-rimmed glasses, Khandekar was entirely loyal and utterly discreet. He was an officer from the Maharashtra civil service, and knew leaders from across the political spectrum, including the RSS.