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

by Vinay Sitapati

  The Opposition had finally found a link between corruption, liberalization and Narasimha Rao. The BJP and the Left parties demanded that the prime minister resign.

  The latter announced that they were moving yet another no-confidence motion in Parliament. The National Front and the BJP supported the motion. Voting was scheduled for 28 July 1993, and as before, the numbers were not with Rao. The Times of India wrote, ‘In a house with an effective strength of 530, the Congress and its allies account for 255 members, while those belonging to opposition parties . . . number 261.’48 A newspaper commentator told the New York Times, ‘I think the old man is in serious trouble.’49

  The government needed to ‘persuade’ some opposition MPs to switch teams. This posed a quandary for Narasimha Rao. His closest aides swear that ‘personally he was not corrupt’. In his dying years, he even considered selling his house to pay his legal fees.50 But Rao understood that any political party needed money to survive. As Andhra chief minister, he had given his secretary, P.V.R.K. Prasad, a bundle of cash to be given to partymen in Hyderabad. When Prasad realized what the bundle contained and balked, Rao had told him, ‘Such work is equally unpalatable to me. I too suffer from a feeling of guilt. But these days, you can’t be in politics without doing such things.’51

  That was in 1972. By the time Rao became prime minister in 1991, bribe money was measured in crores, not lakhs. From being incidental to politics, money was now central to it. Prime minister Rao’s qualms were no longer ethical, they were practical. The last time he had been part of the Congress organization was in 1976, and he did not now know where the party treasure was buried. To assist the prime minister in managing party funds were treasurer Sitaram Kesri and another Congressman who does not want to be named. This Congressman remembers a businessman once offering Rao a one-crore-rupee ‘donation’ for the party. Rao directed the businessman to the temporary party treasurer, at that time the squeaky clean A.K. Anthony. Anthony refused the money. When Rao heard of this, he said, ‘It’s not for him. It’s for [the] party. This is how it happens.’

  Two days before the no-confidence motion, on 26 July 1992, Rao’s appointment diary shows that he met Subramanian Swamy. ‘I helped break [the] Janata Dal. I had a problem. All these people wanted money. If I gave the money and they complained, I would go to jail,’ Swamy remembers.52 The next day, Swamy met members of the Ajit Singh faction. This meeting, it seemed, had little effect. The twenty-member Janata Dal (Ajit) announced that it would side with the Opposition and support the no-confidence motion.53

  That very day, 27 July, Narasimha Rao met N.K. Sharma at 10.30 a.m. His diary shows that at 4 p.m., he met the director of the intelligence bureau. It is not known what was discussed, but the meeting—just before the no-trust motion—begs the question. Sometime during that day, Narasimha Rao also spoke to the Congressman tasked with ‘winning’ over opposition MPs. Twenty-six years later, this Congressman remembers the conversation with glee: ‘We spoke about vitamin M.’

  On the morning of the motion, Rao made Arjun Singh defend him in Parliament from Harshad Mehta’s allegations. Rao then got up—wearing his silk kurta and dhoti, with a white angavastram twirled round his neck—and gave a lengthy defence of his government. Narasimha Rao was well aware that it was the Left that had moved the motion, and his speech was tailored to their concerns. His economic policies had not resulted in a single job loss; ‘liberalisation here has a human face’. He cited the social schemes his government had introduced, including ‘a sudden jump of four times, 400 percent in rural development . . .’ He then spoke about his legislation meant to prevent the mixing of religion with politics.54 This could have well been his swansong, and Rao sang it well. He finished to loud applause from the treasury benches and left Parliament soon after. Months ago, he had set aside this day to feature in a documentary being made on him.55 And so, on the most precarious day of his government, Rao seemed unconcerned about the outcome of the vote, instead choosing to star in a film about himself.

  The motion was put to vote later that day. Apart from 248 Congressmen and their allies, seven of Ajit Singh’s MPs—itself a breakaway group from the Janata Dal—broke further to vote for Narasimha Rao. Four MPs from the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM)—a regional party from what was then the tribal part of Bihar—also voted for Rao. The government won the motion by 265 votes to 251. It was at the time the narrowest margin of victory in the country’s parliamentary history.56

  The Communist Party of India-Marxist called it a ‘political and moral defeat’, alleging the ‘shameless use of money power and horse trading’.57 Seven years later, Narasimha Rao would be convicted by a special court for his part in a conspiracy to bribe the four JMM MPs. Though Rao’s conviction would be set aside by the Delhi high court,58 the blot continues to stain his legacy.

  This ignominy would come later. For now, Narasimha Rao had survived his third formal test (the fifth, if one counts all challenges) in Parliament. He would continue to be beset by party, but his government would never again be threatened from outside. Soon after the vote, ‘surrounded by jubilant party men in his Lok Sabha office, the prime minister gestured with both hands but offered no comments’.59

  In November 1993, state elections were held in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi. Voters were more likely to be influenced by local factors during state elections. But they were inevitably seen—by the media, by the Congress and by Parliament—as a referendum on the prime minister in Delhi. A poor result for the Congress—or a strong showing by the BJP—might have even forced Rao, exactly midway into his term, to resign.

  When the state elections results were announced, the Congress had won in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Himachal Pradesh. Even though the Congress had lost Uttar Pradesh, N.D. Tiwari had been humbled, and so had the BJP. The results were seen as a victory for Narasimha Rao. India Today put a smiling Rao on its cover, with the heading, ‘Rao’s Revival’. They wrote, ‘After sort of having fizzled in two years ago with a majority thinner than his own hair, the man has begun to pop and crackle. He seems to have broken the cyclical curse and is enjoying a political rebirth in his mid-term.’60

  Narasimha Rao’s political renaissance coincided with the revival of India’s economy, as we saw in an earlier chapter. The stock market was booming by 1994, exports and industrial production were up, and the foreign exchange crisis seemed a faint memory. N.D. Tiwari had been chastened in Uttar Pradesh—and other party rivals had been unable to displace him. Narasimha Rao, it seemed, was going to lead the first minority government to complete five years in office.

  Sometime during this second wind, the special RAX phone rang at Dr Srinath Reddy’s residence. It was 10.30 p.m. Reddy picked up the phone and realized that his VIP patient was on the line. ‘Doctor gaaru, can you come over? I am not feeling well.’61

  Reddy rushed to Race Course Road. Rao was sitting in a chair in his room. ‘I am feeling numb in arm and side of the face,’ he said. Reddy examined him. His motor movements—speech, hands, and vision—were all clear. But when Reddy pricked the right side of Rao’s face and right arm, there was no sensation. The prime minister of India had just suffered a stroke.

  Rao had been a diabetic for many years, and also had high blood pressure and heart disease. Months before his stroke, he had felt fleeting sensations, warm and prickly, on the right side of his face. When Reddy realized that Rao had undergone only a sensory stroke and his other vital parameters were normal, Reddy consulted a senior neurologist on the phone. It was decided that Rao’s condition would be reviewed in the morning. For the remainder of the night, Reddy slept in the sofa in Rao’s bedroom, while the prime minister continued to sleep on his bed. The next morning, a range of doctors trooped in, followed by Rao’s son Prabhakara62 and Kalyani Shankar. The consensus was that Rao had been lucky. He had only suffered a sensory stroke, not a motor one.

  Narasimha Rao ordered that his illness be kept hush-hush (it remains secret to this da
y). If news spread that the seventy-two-year-old prime minister had experienced a stroke, the din to replace him would reach a high pitch. So Rao spent the next few months in meeting after meeting, speech after speech, with a face without sensation. A friend joked, ‘[Rao’s] face anyways looked unmoving. Who would know when it really was?’

  If 1994 was Rao’s most successful year as prime minister, it was also the beginning of the end. State elections were held in Andhra Pradesh in December of that year. Narasimha Rao campaigned extensively in his home state. It made no difference. The Congress lost to the TDP. The results emboldened Rao’s critics, from Arjun Singh to N.D. Tiwari. If the prime minister could not carry his own backyard, of what use was he? Rao had had enough. In December 1994, Arjun Singh was asked to quit the Cabinet. He was soon suspended from the Congress party.

  A few months later, the Congress split with the formation of the All India Congress (Tiwari). N.D. Tiwari was made the president of the breakaway party, Arjun Singh became its working president.63 Singh organized a rally at Talkatora stadium in Delhi, where speaker after speaker attacked the leadership of Narasimha Rao, his role in the demolition of Babri Masjid, mortgaging of the ‘nation’s economic sovereignty’ and compromise ‘on Nehruvian principles’.64

  Amidst Rao’s private papers are a series of secret letters that report on Arjun Singh’s every move at the time. One such letter was from an informant who wrote to Rao that Arjun Singh had arrived in Indore to meet the state’s chief minister, Digvijay Singh. ‘In the meeting, Arjun Singh categorically asked Digvijay Singh to announce once and for all whether he was standing by him or his opponent PV Narasimha Rao. [Digvijay replied that] he had no other option but to stand by the central leadership . . . Sir, this entire episode was narrated to me by the chief minister Digvijay Singh.’65 Another ‘white paper on Arjun Singh’ was sent to the prime minister by a lawyer in the Supreme Court. In sixty-five lurid pages, it levelled a series of allegations against Singh.

  It is not known how Rao acted on this information. But the evidence is clear that after mid-1995, Narasimha Rao began to slow down reforms. His focus shifted to unifying his party—as a litany of letters sent to him during this period reveal.

  On 22 July 1995, the chief minister of Kerala, A.K. Anthony, wrote a short complaint to the prime minister. ‘Respected Congress President, AICC General Secretary Sri Madhav Singh Solanki visited Kerala yesterday. He addressed two party meetings and left for Delhi the same day. I was not informed of his visit. I am bringing this to your attention.’ The Bengal Congresswoman Mamata Banerjee wrote him a fiercer letter on the 19th of that month ‘to lodge a formal complaint with you and to inform you about the manner in which I was deliberately sidelined . . . In the selection of Congress Candidates.’ Veteran Congressman H.K.L. Bhagat wrote a whining letter to his party president in October. ‘I am sorry to bother you about [the] Delhi Congress. Unfortunately, it is a ramshackle Congress with dozens of office bearers, and the PCC under the present president is defunct.’66

  Of all these letters, the one that best shows Rao’s new focus after mid-1995 was written by ‘Mahesh & Sons, manufacturers and suppliers of Flags & Election Publicity Materials’. They wrote to tell the prime minister of India that the Congress owed them Rs 1,95,000 for election publicity. ‘I met Shri Rajiv Gandhi too and he promised to get these bills paid just after the 1991 General elections. But unfortunately he died during those elections, and could not honour his promise.’

  This was neither lion, nor fox, nor even mouse. Prime minister Narasimha Rao had officially become a lame duck. All reforms on the economy—and even foreign policy—had stopped, and Rao’s attention was now on the national elections scheduled for May 1996. Opinion polls suggested a resurgent BJP, with the Congress certain to fall from its current position. Would Narasimha Rao quietly waddle out of power, as seemed likely, or did he have any more tricks up his kurta sleeve?

  On 16 January 1996, four months before the national elections, the solicitor general of India rose to address the Supreme Court.67 He announced that the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI)— run directly from the prime minister’s office—was filing charges against several politicians in the hawala case. Those named included many Union ministers, the BJP’s L.K. Advani and Arjun Singh. There was commotion in court and tumult across the country. Corruption was everywhere, it seemed, and here was a prime minister finally acting on it.

  These CBI charges were a long time in the framing. In 1991, two arrested Kashmiri militants had revealed, on interrogation, that they had received foreign funds through an alternative system of bank remittances known as hawala.68 Investigations into this hawala network led to the businessman S.K. Jain. The CBI raided Jain’s farmhouse on the outskirts of Delhi soon after. Ninety lakh rupees in cash was recovered, as well as a diary recording bribes worth 60 crore rupees paid to various politicians and bureaucrats.69 Here the matter rested, with the CBI unwilling to act.

  Two years later, India was enthralled by another corruption scam that implicated the political class. Harshad Mehta had accused the prime minister of accepting a bribe, and newspapers breathlessly speculated on corruption in high places. In this atmosphere, the journalist Vineet Narain filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court, asking it to directly monitor the hawala investigation.

  In few other countries would a case like this have directly reached the Supreme Court. But judicial activism the world over is closely tied to the fragmentation of legislative power.70 Correctly assessing that Parliament was too divided to unite against the judiciary in 1993, the Indian Supreme Court took control over judicial appointments, held that the Centre’s decision to impose President’s rule must be subject to judicial review, and began directly monitoring the hawala investigation.

  At the heart of this judicial coup was Justice J.S. Verma. Unlike Rao, Verma did not inhabit grey areas and had a clear, even zealous, sense of right and wrong. He accused the government of shielding politicians. He even ordered the heads of the CBI and enforcement directorate to attend court.71 Verma told them, ‘Who are you to decide whether there is clinching evidence or not. Your job is to have filed the chargesheet against all the suspects going by the entries in the diaries. Why are you not doing it?’72 The CBI filed its charges soon after, in January 1996.

  Four BJP leaders were named in the case, L.K. Advani and Yashwant Sinha included. As we shall see in a later chapter on Babri Masjid, Advani had given Rao his word that the mosque would remain standing on 6 December 1992. When the mosque fell, Rao assumed that Advani had lied to him. Corruption charges against its top leader put the BJP on the defensive. The party with a difference was now ‘tarred with the same brush’.73

  Advani resigned from the Lok Sabha. An associate—now estranged—remembers sitting in Advani’s living room the day he was named. ‘[Advani] paced up and down . . . we were all there . . . some of us said not to resign . . . the old man was adamant.’ This may have been one reason why Advani did not push his own case for prime minister in 1996, instead propping up Rao’s friend Atal Bihari Vajpayee.

  The principal shock from the CBI chargesheet, though, was felt by the Congress. The CBI had named Arjun Singh, who swore to ‘fight it legally’.74 Government ministers were also implicated. On 16 January 1996, an opposition leader said, ‘Now, nobody will be able to say that Rao shields his corrupt colleagues. What he has done today is bound to stand him in good stead in the elections.’75

  Narasimha Rao met with the CBI director, Vijaya Rama Rao, regularly during this period. His appointment diary shows that at 9 p.m. on 1 February, the CBI director, along with P.V.R.K. Prasad, met the prime minister. The two Raos met again on 9 February at 7.30 p.m. and again on 18 February at 9 p.m.76 Newspaper reports quoted sources saying that Narasimha Rao was not just monitoring the investigation, he was clearing raids and the interrogation of suspects.77

  The hawala case sullied many political careers. The case turned out to be a fabrication, as the courts themselves woul
d say later. Whatever the CBI’s motive, their decision to file charges must have surely been approved by the prime minister—who controlled the CBI, and who was monitoring the case closely. Why did Narasimha Rao agree to the filing of charges, on such flimsy evidence, against his colleagues and rivals? Two competing answers have emerged over time.

  The first is that the CBI was bullied by the Supreme Court, and ‘[Rao] did not want to be seen as soft on corruption . . . so close to elections.’78 This answer is favoured by every one of Rao’s aides. Rajeshwara Rao, Prabhakara Rao, Chandraswami and P.V.R.K. Prasad are adamant that Rao was compelled by circumstance rather than opportunity. Even Arun Jaitley of the BJP says, ‘I think [Rao] had lost control over the case. Because, by that time, the case was being managed by Justice Verma.’79 In an interview to a journalist—a copy of which lies in Rao’s archives—Narasimha Rao called the hawala cases ‘a millstone round my neck’. ‘I could neither suppress them [the cases] nor allow them without harming the interests of so many colleagues who perhaps felt that I did not save them. Even now, I cannot see what I could have done,” Rao said, ‘except leave the matter to Providence.’80

  A second theory is less providential and more Machiavellian. In the run-up to the national elections, Rao wanted to portray himself as a crusader against corruption. That he was still furious with Advani for misleading him on the Babri Masjid demolition provided added motive. The claim is not that Rao falsified the Jain diaries. Rather, he made cynical use of this minor evidence to foist cases against his opponents. The fact that the CBI director was a fellow Andhra man, selected by Rao, adds credence to this claim.

  There is no conclusive way to privilege one theory over the other. But hindsight does tell us that the move boomeranged on Narasimha Rao. As P.V.R.K. Prasad writes, ‘It is PV who suffered the most because of this decision, by losing a number of loyal supporters within the party, and that too, just before the elections.’81 Those named in the chargesheet kept their vendetta against Narasimha Rao alive even after his death, ensuring that the memory of Rao is anathema to the Congress party today. His own son Rajeshwara says that ‘Hawala was a total miscalculation. You can fight with one party. But you can’t fight inside and outside [the] party.’82