Half - Lion: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India
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Bhuvanesh Chaturvedi, from Rajasthan, was another of Rao’s conduits to the right wing, especially to BJP leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee. When it came to managing Parliament, Rao deployed V.C. Shukla and Subramanian Swamy. And he cultivated M.S. Bitta, Matang Sinh, Kumaramangalam, Rajesh Pilot and Jitendra Prasada as his eyes and ears within the Congress.19
These relationships were as unsentimental as they were instrumental. Jairam Ramesh, whom Rao used only to later discard, says that Rao ‘had contempt for Congressmen. He never had a kind word for anyone.’ As K. Natwar Singh—a friend whom Rao eventually sidelined—put it, ‘[Rao was] capable of radioactive sarcasm. He smiled without a smile.’20
Rao tolerated, perhaps even encouraged, rivalry within his inner circle. A.N. Varma and Naresh Chandra were larger than life, filling any room they occupied. Though Rao knew they did not see eye to eye on many issues, he insisted on retaining both in his ‘room’. Rao encouraged P.V.R.K. Prasad and Ramu Damodaran to compete for his attention, even if it caused tension between the two. The prime minister’s economic team was full of pro-western reformers like Manmohan Singh and Montek Ahluwalia. His welfare schemes, on the other hand, were run by the socialists S.R. Sankaran, K.R. Venugopal and B.N. Yugandhar. Even his home ministry was a nest of conflict. The minister of state, Rajesh Pilot, was forever squabbling with the senior minister, S.B. Chavan. Pilot confided to a friend, ‘Every time I am with Chavan, he [Rao] looks at me and addresses me as “home minister”. [This ensures that] for the next month, Chavan is angry with me.’
Rao even set his godmen against one another. N.K. Sharma and Chandraswami cordially disliked each other. Now sitting in a large house in west Delhi, N.K. Sharma says, ‘When Chandraswami was sent to jail, some Congressmen thought I was behind it.’21 When asked about Sharma, Chandraswami says, ‘I would meet Rao two-three times a day, N.K. Sharma [would meet him] one-two times a month. Who do you think was closer?’
The compulsions of politics left Rao’s political team bubbling in poison. This may have made for clever politics, but it meant that the ageing widower had no one he could completely rely on. He had always kept his family at a distance from his politics; Lakshmi Kantamma had long left him and was now a sadhvi. The solitary Rao needed one person who was completely dependable.
That person was Kalyani Shankar.
Kalyani was a senior political journalist in the country’s capital. It was a position that gave her access to the whispering gallery of Lutyens Delhi. Kalyani and Rao would talk politics. He would also share confidences with her that he told no one else.
Ramu Damodaran recalls their relationship. ‘Narasimha Rao found it hard to trust anyone in politics. Kalyani was one person whom he could trust. When they were not discussing politics . . . once I saw them listening to Hindustani music together.’22
‘She brought him happiness.’
By March 1992, the ‘big bang’ economic reforms of devaluation, trade liberalization and delicensing had become policy; the foreign exchange crisis had passed. The prime minister had survived a ‘confidence’ and ‘vote of thanks’ motion, and his economic, welfare and political teams were in place.
Rao was also fitter than he had ever been. He had left active politics in early 1991, driven away in part by diabetes and heart disease. In the year since, Rao had reclaimed his vigour.23 How had his health improved so noticeably in his one year as prime minister? His doctor, Srinath Reddy—now one of the world’s foremost public health experts—considers the question, then replies, ‘Vitamin P.’ Power.
An energetic Narasimha Rao addressed the Tirupati session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) in April 1992. Ramu Damodaran remembers why the prime minister chose the temple town as venue. ‘By choosing Tirupati, he made it clear that he was proud to be Andhra as well as Hindu.’24 As chronicled in a previous chapter, Rao successfully deployed Nehru’s name and Manmohan Singh’s image to sell liberalization to his doubting party. His attempts at inner-party democracy, however, had mixed results.
The CWC is the party’s apex decision-making body. Its members are conventionally selected by the party president, without ordinary workers ever having a say. Narasimha Rao was pained at how anarchic the Congress organization had become. He ordered that CWC members be elected by party workers. The move was altruistic: the party president was knowingly ceding his grip over the party in order to make it more transparent.
The CWC elections were held during the Tirupati session. Rao expected his hand-picked nominees to win anyway. To his surprise, his competitor Arjun Singh won by the largest margin. Sharad Pawar was also elected to the CWC.
Arjun Singh was the heavyset former chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, every kilogram a looming Thakur from the plains of North India. He spoke, however, in a soft voice that emerged from a mouth always set to half-smirk. Sharad Pawar, on the other hand, was direct and aggressive. They were dangerous in their own ways.
Rao responded to the triumph of his rivals with a masterstroke. Some of his supporters had also been elected to the CWC. He made them resign, on the grounds that the elections were flawed since not a single woman or Dalit had won. These staged resignations forced both Arjun Singh and Sharad Pawar to also step down; after all, they could hardly risk appearing to condone social exclusion. Rao explained his actions in a newspaper interview: ‘Nobody wanted the Scheduled Caste candidates to be kept out but the method of election itself, and the pressure of election resulted in that. As Congress president, I was under an obligation to tell the AICC that this is not good.’25 Rao then reconstituted the CWC the old way, by selecting the members himself. He picked women and Dalits; he also shrewdly chose both Arjun Singh and Sharad Pawar. This time, however, they were not elected leaders in their own right; they were mere nominees of the party president. Arjun Singh accepted the appointment, announcing, with heavy irony, that he was ‘doubly blessed’.26
Before the Tirupati session, Narasimha Rao’s upayas had been performed backstage. This was the first upfront evidence that the diminutive prime minister was thoroughly Machiavellian. ‘Until [the] Tirupati session,’ P.V.R.K. Prasad says, ‘[Rao’s enemies] were sure that they would get rid of him.’ They now realized that the happenstance prime minister was here to stay.
After April 1992, Arjun Singh began attacking Rao openly, even as Sharad Pawar continued to bide his time. Singh, who met Rao several times a week as his Cabinet minister, began writing him public letters on matters as damaging as threats to the Babri mosque and problems with economic liberalization. He was also rumoured to have paid priests in Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, to cast a spell on Rao. When the prime minister heard about this from his network of informants, he laughed out aloud. ‘Who worshipped which forces and made me prime minister. Would I lose my position if somebody propitiates evil forces today? And if I am destined to lose it, can I prevent it by resorting to rituals?’27
A year into Rao’s premiership, the opposition parties were coming to the same conclusion as Arjun Singh: the prime minister was not going to fall on his own; he needed to be pushed. On 30 June 1992, the National Front and Left parties decided to bring a ‘no-confidence motion’ against the government for ‘all round’ failure and ‘anti-people’ economic policies.28 Rao had already survived two opposition votes in Parliament. This was to be the first of three official ‘no-confidence motions’. The BJP joined in. The numbers, it seemed, were stacked against Narasimha Rao. After days of debate, the motion was put to vote on 17 July.
Against the odds, Narasimha Rao won by fifty-two votes.29 Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK had voted for Rao, along with sections of the TDP, and four of Ajit Singh’s MPs. The parliamentary affairs minister, V.C. Shukla, was active in splitting the Opposition. ‘I had made [an] informal arrangement with [Ajit] Singh that he would never issue whip. He kept his word and I used to draw from his 20 MPs,’ Shukla later said.30
Around the same time, the five-year terms for the President and vice president of India ended. Though the posts were largely ceremonial
, a prime minister as weak as Rao could have done with a friendly Raisina Hill. The vice president, Shankar Dayal Sharma, was the obvious choice for the presidency.
The problem was that, by 1992, vice president and prime minister, thick friends in the past, had grown weary of each other. Sharma—a senior of Rao’s in the Congress hierarchy—expected the prime minister to brief him regularly when it came to affairs of state. A former professor, Sharma had a long-winded and didactic style of conversation; Rao had grown tired of wasting entire afternoons over tea with the vice president. Sharma had noticed. An aide to Rao says, ‘Sharma knew he was being ignored. He resented it.’ On the occasion that the prime minister would phone on some official work, Sharma would sometimes refuse to answer, demanding that the prime minister call in person. Rao’s archives contain snappy exchange of letters between the two of them.31 Rao was tempted to offer the presidency to someone else. But he considered the alternatives, and eventually realized that he could not refuse the man who had turned down the chance to be prime minister before him.
That selection left open the post of vice president. Rao was keen to offer it to P.C. Alexander, who had played a key role in turning the monk into monarch a year earlier. But since the Congress was in a minority in Parliament, they needed the support of opposition MPs in filling these posts. The communists agreed to support Sharma for President, but wanted K.R. Narayanan, a left-leaning diplomat and a Dalit, as vice president.32 To add to the clamour, V.P. Singh swore he would resign from Parliament unless a scheduled caste was elected vice president.
Narasimha Rao reluctantly appointed Shankar Dayal Sharma as President and K.R. Narayanan as vice president. He was to have a tense relationship with them both.
Parallel to these failed negotiations over constitutional appointments, Rao was negotiating in secret with Ajit Singh and his faction of Janata Dal MPs, hoping to muster a permanent majority in Parliament. These parleys were more successful. By 7 August 1992, a series of defections had reduced the Janata Dal from fifty-nine seats to thirty-nine.33 This meant there were now around twenty floating MPs who could prop up the Rao government if enticed. Subramanian Swamy worked hard to engineer these defections.34 Helping him was a familiar tantrik from Rao’s past. ‘I worked with Subramanian Swamy to get to Ajit Singh [and] his group,’ Chandraswami remembers. ‘I was in touch with the Janata Dal MPs.’35
Narasimha Rao had behaved less than honourably in Tirupati, as well as in dealings with the Janata Dal. He had also chosen to retreat from the battle over the presidency and vice presidency. It is a measure of the complexity of the man, however, that once in a position of strength, he could be high-minded—even when his party preferred otherwise.
In October 1992, the Andhra Pradesh chief minister, N. Janardhana Reddy, was censored by the high court for corruption in the granting of permissions for private engineering colleges.36 Though the prime minister insisted that Janardhana Reddy resign, he had no wish to name his successor. Two decades earlier, chief minister Rao had been a victim of the Congress ‘high command’ culture; he had no desire to now victimize others. The party, however, was still in feudal mode. The Congress general secretary Janardhana Poojary called up Ramu Damodaran to check who the prime minister had chosen as the new chief minister of Andhra Pradesh. Ramu communicated the response back to Poojary: ‘You decide, even if it is any man on the street.’ The next day, Poojary sent Ramu a follow-up. ‘Does he have any particular man on the street in mind?’37
At the end of that month, October 1992, a crisis was in the making that even Narasimha Rao seemed unable to solve. On 30 October, a BJP-affiliate, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), announced that it would perform prayers near Babri Masjid on 6 December. As we shall see in detail in a later chapter, the threat to the mosque was real.
Rao’s rivals in party and Parliament sensed this was the perfect opportunity to topple the prime minister. Arjun Singh wrote several public letters to Narasimha Rao, warning him about dangers to the mosque. The letters were cleverly worded. While expressing concern, Arjun Singh stopped short of recommending Central rule in Uttar Pradesh.38 Narasimha Rao tried hard to shift the responsibility for the decision to others, from the Supreme Court and National Front leaders to his rivals within the party. But they were playing the same game that he was, and refused to make the decision for him. When the mosque fell on 6 December 1992, it seemed Rao’s reign was over.
The BJP immediately brought a no-confidence motion against the government. Over four days of acrimonious debate in Parliament, Narasimha Rao blamed his inability to impose Central rule on a ‘lacuna’ in the wording of the constitutional provision which allowed for Central rule in states—‘It has to be made good.’39 Worried that fresh elections might help the BJP, as many as forty-seven members of the National Front abstained from voting, while most of the remaining non-BJP opposition sided with Narasimha Rao. The no-trust vote was defeated on 21 December, 334 votes to 106.40 Like he had done with his post-Babri economic reforms, Narasimha Rao was able to turn the tragedy into a secular rallying cry.
Having survived his own demolition in Parliament, Rao turned his attention to his party. The Congress was terrified that it had lost the Muslim vote in north India. M.L. Fotedar—a Nehru-Gandhi loyalist—had shouted at Rao during the Cabinet meeting on 6 December 1992. This was a Lakshman rekha, an uncrossable line, even for the unflappable Narasimha Rao. He decided to shuffle his Cabinet.
Among Rao’s private papers is a large chart, the combined size of four A4 sheets. Written in green felt-tip pen is a cost-benefit analysis of each of the ministers in Rao’s Cabinet. There are fourteen names. Some of them have a ‘reputation for corruption’, others are inefficient. Under the heading, ‘Ministers to be Dropped’ the chart lists ‘M.L Fotedar’, and under “reasons” it says ‘Political’. It also names ‘Rameshwar Thakur and Uttam Bhai Patil’, and provides as reason, ‘political no utility’.
Rao met Captain Satish Sharma just before he announced his new Cabinet. Sharma was Rajiv Gandhi’s best friend, the sitting MP from Amethi, and had played a role in prime minister Rao’s anointment. ‘I want you to be in my government,’ Rao said. ‘It should have happened long time ago.’ Sharma, a former pilot, wanted the aviation ministry. Rao cut him short. ‘No aviation. [This is the] first time you are holding a ministry. Half the time, the airhostesses you knew will waste your time. Other half your pilot friends. So what work will you do?’41
In the final Cabinet reshuffle, announced a month after the demolition of Babri Masjid, Satish Sharma was made petroleum minister.42 Pranab Mukherjee, once Rao’s equal in Indira’s Cabinet, was brought back as commerce minister. Apart from sacking Fotedar, Rao dropped several other Cabinet members. Partymen wondered who was next.
The destruction of Babri Masjid led to riots across India, turning the financial capital Bombay into a war zone. Narasimha Rao turned even this crisis into an opportunity. He told his defence minister, Sharad Pawar, to go back to Bombay as chief minister. Amidst Rao’s private papers lies a set of stapled pages. It contains a note from Rao declaring that ‘by virtue of the resolution passed by the Maharashtra congress legislative party, I nominate Shri Sharad Pawar to be the leader of the legislative party’. He continues, ‘For almost a week, I have had detailed consultations and discussions with several important leaders of Maharashtra as well as AICC observers.’43 Rao then scratched out this sentence in blue ink, replacing it with, ‘I appeal to everyone in the Congress to unite behind Shri Pawar.’ Though Pawar realized that Rao was getting rid of a rival, he could not refuse to help his city in its hour of need. Ramu Damodaran says of Rao, ‘He knew how to make an offer you could not refuse.’44
That same month, March 1993, Narasimha Rao headed to another Congress session in Surajkund, Haryana. Unlike at Tirupati the previous year, the prime minister was now firmly in control. He ignored protests at the venue from dissenting Congressmen, angry that the prime minister had not kept his promise to step down as president of the party.
The Surajkund session marked the moment when Narasimha Rao became his own man in the Congress. He had cajoled or cut down rivals, while deploying Nehru and secularism to win the support of his party. His economic reforms were chugging along, and new social schemes on RPDS and employment were being announced.
Ramu Damodaran remembers the moment of change.45 ‘The first time I got a sense of how self-assured he was becoming was when he started referring to himself in third person. He would say, “This is a situation where the prime minister has to act.” That’s when I knew.’
On 12 June 1993, Narasimha Rao was basking in his new-found power when he received a call from N.K. Sharma, his astrologer and firefighter. ‘I have information that Harshad Mehta is going to hold a press conference,’ Sharma predicted. ‘He is going to say that he gave you a bribe.’46
The banking scam of 1992 had not only hit the headlines, it had hit Rao’s liberalization policies as well. The man himself, however, had so far escaped taint. That changed on 16 June 1993 when Harshad Mehta told a packed press conference that he had paid the PM one crore rupees in return for ‘political patronage’. Mehta claimed that Sat Paul Mittal (then a Congress MP from Haryana) and his son Sunil (now the chairman of the telecom company Bharti Airtel) had accompanied him to the prime minister’s house. Mehta alleged that Rao was given a suitcase full of cash.47