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

by Vinay Sitapati

  At 10.30 p.m., Sonia Gandhi, along with Patil and Ahmed Patel, visited the hospital. Sonia sat quietly while Ahmed Patel offered Rao a glass of water. ‘You people accuse me of breaking the mosque,’ Rao told him angrily. ‘Now you give me water.’

  Rao argued with his guests late into the night, complaining about how the Congress had treated him. ‘Who has not done a mistake? Why should I be blamed for something I have not done?’18 Sonia and the others left only at 2.30 a.m., after which Rao was given a sedative. He woke up the next morning and resumed eating. He asked his children, ‘Did I speak more than I should have last night?’19

  Rao began to sink on 10 December. An aide to Sonia Gandhi came to the hospital. ‘Where should we have the cremation?’ he asked. The family was furious. ‘He was still alive.’20

  On 20 December 2004, Rao was visited in the hospital by prime minister Manmohan Singh and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, who had since become President of India. The other visitor that day was Arjun Singh, a man who had done more than anyone to vilify Rao.

  As Arjun Singh entered, Rao rose from his hospital bed. ‘Please don’t strain yourself. I have only come to wish you speedy recovery,’ Singh said. He remembers tears welling in Narasimha Rao’s eyes. ‘Arjun Singhji, I will meet you at your house, since I owe you a visit.’21

  The next day, Rao’s condition worsened. He became unconscious. ‘He was eyes closed, pipes everywhere,’ Rajeshwara remembers. ‘Then suddenly he opened [his] eyes and looked at me.’

  ‘Where am I?” Rao asked, then answered himself. ‘I am in Vangara. In mother’s room.’22

  He died a few days later, on 23 December 2004. Those were Narasimha Rao’s last words.

  P.V. Narasimha Rao’s dying days were of a piece with his tattered legacy in the decade that followed. He has been removed from the pantheon of Congress leaders, criticized for the anti-Sikh riots, accused of letting the guilty escape after the Bhopal gas leak, and above all, blamed for complicity in the demolition of Babri Masjid. He has been portrayed as corrupt as well as communal, vacillating as well as vicious.

  These political attacks on so consequential a figure have not been countered through academic research so far. While there are many explanations for this scholarly inaction, one major reason is that academics tend to discount the role that individual leadership plays in shaping the arc of history.

  As the biographer Nigel Hamilton puts it, ‘Biography is, simply, the orphan of academia.’23 If a leader merely carried out what historical forces made inevitable, it is not the ‘person’ that mattered; it is the moment in ‘time’. Seen this way, Narasimha Rao was simply in the right place at the right moment. It is not his actions that deserve study, it is his historical context.

  This is an argument that deserves to be taken seriously. For, there is no question that India found itself at crossroads in the year 1991. The Soviet Union was in collapse, the balance of payments crisis was severe. India’s social schemes were ineffective, a Nehru-Gandhi had just been assassinated, and separatist violence in Punjab, Kashmir and Assam threatened the integrity of the nation.

  But India had been stuck at these crossroads for a decade before Rao’s ascent. An IMF loan had been negotiated in 1981-82; but that had not jolted prime minister Indira Gandhi into liberalizing the economy. Foreign ministry mandarins knew that the Soviet Union was teetering since at least 1985,24 and India’s détente with the United States had first begun a decade prior to Rao becoming PM.25 By the early 1980s, policymakers could objectively measure that welfare schemes were not reaching the poor, and India’s nuclear programme had progressed steadily. Two Nehru-Gandhis had been killed in this decade, and violence in Punjab and Assam had already peaked. Even the specific ideas for foreign policy and economic reforms had been put down on paper some years prior to 1991.

  Four prime ministers before Narasimha Rao had been presented with the right ‘moment’—in terms of favourable external winds, well-sketched internal ideas, and opportunistic crises—to renovate India. They had been unable to make use of these opportunities.

  For more proof that India’s transformation was not ordained, consider the alternatives for premiership. What would have happened if Rajiv Gandhi had lived on? The idealistic reformer of 1985 had malformed, by 1987, into a cynical politician. It is unlikely he would have pursued meaningful change in his second term as prime minister. Had Rao’s party rivals, Arjun Singh or N.D. Tiwari, replaced him, they may have temporarily liberalized the economy in 1991. But their instincts, and proclamations, were consistently against economic reforms or foreign policy changes. They would have likely halted reform after the foreign exchange crisis ended in February 1992. The transformations Rao brought about were far from inevitable.

  They were also carried out in the most trying of circumstances.

  P.V. Narasimha Rao worked in a fractious democracy and ran a minority government (the two before him and four after—all minority—lasted barely a year each). A usurper of the Nehru-Gandhi throne, Rao did not control his own party. He even lacked the charisma to appeal directly to the people.

  No national leader who achieved his scale of transformation worked under such constraints. It makes Narasimha Rao the most skilled Indian prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru, a twentieth-century reformer as consequential as Deng Xiaoping.

  It also makes Rao’s personality central to the transformation of India, a shift caused not by historical forces, but by the leadership of one man. ‘You can use a biography to examine political power,’ says Robert Caro, a prince among biographers. ‘But only if you pick the right guy.’26

  P.V. Narasimha Rao was born a fixer. When something didn’t work, his first instinct was to open it up, figure out what was wrong, and make marginal improvements to solve the problem. As a young man in 1957, he noticed a malfunctioning water pump. He opened it, identified the problem, fixed it, and complained to the manufacturer. As chief minister in 1971, he had observed evasions of his cherished land reform policy. He had tweaked the law in ways that ensured their compliance. Two years later, he noticed that planting rice in his village was not remunerative. He bought more valuable cotton seeds from Gujarat. When he realized that the cotton plants self-pollinated and weakened the new crop, he ingeniously fixed a straw on the plant so that pollen would fly elsewhere. As Ramu Damodaran says, ‘Rao was a jugaad reformer. He made the best of what he had.’27

  What the early Rao had yet to grasp was that all reforms take place under political constraints, and are opposed by interest groups.

  His failure to see this led to his dismissal as Andhra Pradesh chief minister. He had taken on too many enemies, used explosive language, and made his intent to reform clear. He had also misinterpreted his mandate: prime minister Indira Gandhi had wanted a minion both powerless as well as powerful, and that could never be.

  Narasimha Rao learnt from his mistakes while in exile—it was this ability to introspect that made him so rare among his peers. He realized that reform is best carried out in silence, and opponents best countered singly. The arch-socialist also recognized that the state need not be the only vehicle for social reform.

  His years in the Delhi durbar—more court than Cabinet—honed in him these lessons. He never cultivated a coterie, never favoured caste or kin. This was why he had become chief minister of Andhra Pradesh; this is why he rose to become Indira and Rajiv’s factotum. His time in Delhi also gave him a ringside view of the colossal failure of Rajiv Gandhi in combating vested interests who resisted change. A liberalizer by instinct, Rajiv lacked the skills to manage the politics of reforms.

  As prime minister, Rao inherited these same vested interests. The licence raj was upheld by businessmen who had prospered from monopolies, Left intellectuals and Congressmen who clung on to ideology, and unions and bureaucrats worried their sinecures would be threatened. It was not just anti-colonialism that prevented relations with Israel, it was also the unverified fear of losing Muslim votes that bound India to Palestine. Rich farmers, middlemen
and corrupt officials siphoned off money from welfare schemes meant for the poor. They would agitate if their privileges were taken away.

  Prime minister Narasimha Rao’s genius in tackling these enemies of change was that he had learnt to assess political strength and weakness—his own, his opponents’, and of India itself. The fact that Rao had informally accepted monkhood just two months before becoming prime minister shows the mental distance from power he had developed. It gave him an even clearer assessment of its constraints as well as opportunities. It gave him his unique ability to transform India.

  This 360-degree view of politics means that, before initiating any reform, Rao had the measure of his opponents. When the prime minister invited Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for an official visit in January 1992, he understood that India needed to normalize diplomatic relations with Israel without upsetting the Arab world. He also knew that Arafat, who had supported Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War, was politically weak. While advocating reforms to industrial policy, Rao knew that the principal critique would come from with his own party. In developing a nuclear deterrent, Rao grasped that he had to protect Indian national security without antagonizing the West (whom he needed for economic reforms). While facing Parliament, Rao saw that the right-wing BJP and left-wing National Front needed to stay disunited for his government to survive. While opening up the airline sector, Rao knew that if he attempted to disinvest Air India, well-entrenched unions might threaten his entire liberalization policy. In attempting to reform the public distribution system, Rao saw that rich farmers would agitate to protect their interests. The list could go on.

  This cold-eyed assessment of his enemies gave Rao the ability to pick his disguises. He understood that the range and variety of his foes—indeed the contradictions of India itself—required him to occasionally retreat, sometimes fight, and often deceive. This ability to assess the situation and play mouse, lion or fox—as need be—was Rao’s paramount political skill.

  On industrial policy—Rao’s supreme economic reform—he was able to assess the mood of his party, ensure the policy draft was peppered with enough references to Jawaharlal Nehru, play the cunning fox, and get his party behind his reforms. Before opening up to Israel, Rao first pampered Arafat, got his consent, then announced it to Parliament as a fait accompli. When opening up monopoly sectors like airlines, Rao simultaneously played lion in permitting private competition while playing mouse when it came to protecting state employees from retrenchment. On the PDS, he simply increased the price paid to both farmers and consumers, thereby subtly starving the system.

  Rao’s precise assessment of political context gave him not just a sense of role, but also a sense of timing.

  He was horror-struck when he heard of Rajiv’s death on 21 May 1991. But even in the disorienting hours following tragedy, Rao was able to see his stars realigning. After the fall of Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992, Rao realized he could use the tragedy to rally ‘secular’ forces around him and consolidate power. And perhaps most remarkable of all, it took the lifelong economic protectionist only a few hours on 19 June 1991 to see that the time had come for the economy to open up.

  Contrary to the caricature of Narasimha Rao as chronically indecisive, he could make rapid decisions when he felt the timing was right, including choosing to alter long-held beliefs. Where he dithered, it was because he judged that the right decision was at the time not politically feasible.

  It is this judgement that led Rao to conclude that certain reforms, while necessary, were not possible during his time as prime minister. These were on agriculture, labour, the bureaucracy, and welfare. Given his weak mandate, Rao estimated he would have lost office had he soldiered on. Critics accused him of underplaying his hand, but the fact that no prime minister after him has been able to implement these reforms proves Rao’s calculation to be correct.

  The few occasions where prime minister Rao misunderstood his role and misjudged the timing was when his analytical mind and unflinching eye failed him. His decision to not impose President’s rule in Uttar Pradesh in November 1992 was an overestimation of his own strength in dealing with Hindutva activists. Where he had to play lion, he played fox. Rao’s determination to play lion and ignore Sonia after 1993 overrated his own hold over the Congress party. And his decision to play fox and impose hawala charges on friend and foe earned him more enemies than it did votes.

  These missteps blot Rao’s record as prime minister. But they remain aberrations in a long line of correct calls. Most of the time, P.V. Narasimha Rao got the timing and role right.

  Where did Rao obtain this sense of time and role? To answer that question, this book delved deep into Rao’s political experience, information sources and personality quirks.

  When Rao became prime minister, he had been in Congress politics for more than fifty years. Unlike Manmohan Singh, Rao had won eight consecutive elections before he became prime minister. For a man to campaign in three languages and win from three states, speaks of a grass-roots connect with the ordinary Indian. Unlike Rajiv Gandhi (who knew Delhi but not state-level administration) and Deve Gowda (who had worked at the state-level but never in Delhi), Rao had served as chief minister as well as Union minister. It gave him a sense of how Central as well as state politics worked. Rao had also held an unusual number of ministries—foreign, defence, home, education, health, law, to name a few. This range of experiences—and roles—afforded Rao multiple perspectives that informed his decisions as prime minister.

  Rao also developed a world of informants that helped him determine when to play mouse, lion or fox. Curious as a child, his archives provide a glimpse of just how curious the older Rao continued to be. He kept notes on everyone—friends, enemies and rivals. As chief minister, he had relied on Lakshmi Kantamma and the tantrik Chandraswami. As prime minister, Rao deployed a more extensive range of informants. He had intelligence bureau reports on Sonia Gandhi, as well as every member of his party when it came to economic reforms. Rao also cultivated astrologers and godmen, brokers and journalists, friendly politicians as well as opponents. In his methodical mind, each nugget of data—a peccadillo about a Cabinet member, an enemy of an enemy—was tagged and filed. To be used at the right time.

  Rao possessed a third trait that helped him weigh political context. In addition to learning from varied experiences and artfully cultivating sources, Rao was a man comfortable with extremes as well as ambiguity. His was a paradoxical personality.

  In an essay written in 1860, the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev compared the two most famous fictional characters of the western world: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Cervantes’s Don Quixote.28 These contrasting personalities represented ‘the fundamental forces of all that exists’.29 Hamlet, educated and sensitive, is the epitome of the man who thinks so much that he cannot act. He is inward-looking, selfish even, and utterly sceptical of everything around him. Don Quixote, on the other hand, credulously believes the simplest of ideals and, motivated by selflessness, acts to achieve them. Hamlet was thoughtful and lethargic, Quixote an unthinking revolutionary.30

  As a young man, Rao’s personality contained both Hamlet as well as Don Quixote. Childhood loneliness—from his early adoption, arranged marriage, and separation from family—persisted into adulthood. An intellectual, he preferred books to actual friends, confidential diaries to confidantes. To his wife Satyamma, he tasked the care of their eight children and acres of village lands. Emotionally, he was a loner.

  It is a measure of the contradiction of the man that such a personality was also an idealistic revolutionary. In Andhra of the 1960s, the young socialist was action personified, unsettling the ministries he took over. As chief minister, Narasimha Rao had unthinkingly charged at the windmill of land reform, uncaring of the stability of his saddle.

  What was remarkable about the later Rao was that these contrasts merged into what became—at the best of times—a man who could be contemplative as well as action-oriented, cynical as well as idealistic. Rao coul
d play for time, as he did with the nuclear programme in the initial years of his government. He could also act swiftly, as he did in a single day on economic reforms. He could project powerlessness, as he did when Sonia Gandhi chose him as prime minister. He could also project power, as he did after 1993.

  When it came to God, Narasimha Rao reflected the contradictions of his guru, Ramananda Tirtha. He was a religious Hindu as well as a secular Congressman. He was devout enough to be offered the chance to head the Courtallam peetham; catholic enough to be versed in Urdu, Persian and Koranic scripture. His view of Hinduism may have given him a naïve view of the BJP, but he refused to split the Congress and support them in May 1996.

  Narasimha Rao did not see these two parts of his personality as incompatible; he saw them as rooted in Hindu tradition. He loved the sixteenth-century Telugu poem Raghava Pandaveeyam that could be read as both Ramayana and Mahabharata, as the situation demanded. He even translated a book featuring Ardhanareeeshwara—the Hindu god who is half-man, half-woman.

  Rao’s dual disposition enabled him to be at once principled, at once immoral. Personally honest, he was no stranger to political corruption. Though the courts acquitted him in the JMM bribery case, the evidence available to this author suggests he was in on the conspiracy. While Rao could be sensitive to those he loved, he could also be petty to subordinates, distant to family, instrumental with friends, and vicious to his enemies.

  Even Rao’s association with women reflected a certain opacity. He lived away from his wife for much of their marriage. He had a relationship with Lakshmi Kantamma for more than a decade. From around 1976 till his death, he had a close friendship with Kalyani Shankar. ‘He liked that people around him couldn’t quite figure out the exact nature of these connections,’ a friend of Rao says. ‘He liked the ambiguity.’