Around six years ago, one day while strolling desultorily in
the book market of Daryaganj, I chanced upon The Insider by P.V. Narasimha Rao, the 9th Prime Minister
of India. I had no provident motivations to buy the book except for the facts
that it was a hardcover edition in the best state possible for a second-hand
book and that it was available for a paltry sum (probably because no one had
any predilection to read the musings an oblivious figure in Indian politics who
almost fortuitously became the PM of the country). I bought the book and put it
in my cupboard (for this tome of a book really gave an erudite appeal to my
other lacklustre side-torn paperbacks) and then forgot to even give it a dekko.
Six year forward and now on a vacation from college and being stuck in the lockdown,
I chanced to look upon the book and given the fact that nobody had touched it in
those six years, its quaint appeal in the cupboard hadn’t palled a bit. As I
flipped through the first page (which I hadn’t done in the last six years), I
was dumbfounded to see Rao’s own autograph on the book. The book was either
signed by Rao at a signing event or he had sent it to someone as a gift. I did
a quick google search to check whether the signature was real and was again shocked
to the see that the day was Rao’s birthday (i.e. 28th June). It dawned on me as a
glut of serendipity and these reasons were enough to make me hunker down to the
task of reading through this infamously long (roughly 830 pages) roman à clef
to discover the life of man I hardly knew about. Though I had read extensively
about the reforms of 1991, yet given the fact that our books are written by
those who have worked to make him a forgotten figure, I could never appreciate Rao’s
role in the whole scheme of events and now finally there was a chance for me to
really unravel who was Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao.
The book is a fictionalized chain of events of Anand’s (a
character modelled by Narasimha on his own) life. It marks almost all multifarious
facets of a young politician’s life where he is confronted with tough choices,
conniving and Machiavellian colleagues who consider power as an end in itself
and last but not the least a rocky love affair which has its own special place
in Anand’s journey. Shrouded in the cloak of various real events – such as the
1962 Chinese aggression and Indo-Pak wars of 1965 and 1971; death of Nehru and
ascendance of Indira Gandhi to the Congress high command- Narasimha Rao tells an
entrancing story of a character who loves to think and debate over issues which
many of his power-rapacious colleagues find anachronistic and quixotic. However,
as luck would have in the end, a person like Anand, who doesn’t even hold the ambition
of become a state’s CM ever, goes on to lead the country.
In The Insider
however, Narasimha Rao doesn’t cover that part of Anand’s (or actually his) life
for which he deserves to be remembered. He unfortunately died before completing
a second part of the book- the part in which he suddenly finds himself at the
helm to lead a country which was to default in two weeks and a party which was a
minority government where even his party-men left no stone unturned in their
efforts to topple him. Yet, Narasimha Rao never yielded and strived incessantly
to make sure that this country keeps on surviving. It will not be a hyperbole
to say that if Gandhi, Nehru and Patel are to be credited for the independence
of the country from the throes of colonization, the Narasimha Rao is the one
who gave us financial independence from abortive and parochial policies of the
previous governments which left us in such an annihilated state that the
country had to pledge its gold.
Rao has been famously called Chanakya for his political astuteness
and yet notwithstanding being a minister throughout most of his political life,
his life, as a whole, never stood out before 1991. Despite himself knowing 17
languages, Rao’s political career before the decisive year of LPG (Liberalization
Privatization and Globalization) remains shorn of any peaks. However, in 1991, after
the death of Rajiv Gandhi, he became the Prime Minister (Rao himself would have
been shocked, to a certain extent, over the tide of the time. He had not fought
the 1991 General elections and had even booked packers and movers to shift his
belongings to his home state where he planned to retire- yet luck will not have
it this way). The path of his career somehow cajoles everyone to believe that Rao
was a staunch supporter of Nehruvian socialism and a “family” loyalist (one of
the primary reasons why he was chosen to lead in 1991), yet what Rao did after
coming to power shocked everyone to the core. He destroyed a redundant system,
jolted the country into action, abolished the infamous “license raj”, took
powers from the hands of an inherently corrupt state machinery and gave it (to
a significant extent) to the ordinary people and finally engendered this
country with financial independence.
When Rao took over, he was inundated with seriously exigent
issues. Country’s fiscal deficit had reached 8.2% with inflation as high as
13.9% and foreign exchanges only worth two weeks of imports. The Gulf war,
leading to the high prices of oil and termination of large remittances, wreaked
havoc on India’s democracy. RBI had already pledged the country’s gold (which
is considered nothing less than an egregiously shameful incident in a country
such as India where gold is a matter of prestige) and the country was literally
on the verge of default. Rao’s minority government too was a bane in itself. There
were many who considered anything against Nehru’s socialistic model a heresy
while others were trying desperately to haggle out as much as they can in this
game of power. If all this was not enough, people’s apprehension that anyone
not having a “Gandhi” as his surname could ever run a government for its complete
term added to Rao’s woes.
That India would be a planned economy was decided even from
India became independent. If one reads the 1949 reports of National Planning
Committee, People’s Plan, FICCI reports or the famous Bombay Plan, it becomes
quite clear that the zeitgeist of the economy was such that almost everyone
wanted to have a planned socialism model in India. In his “Perspectives of
Indian Economy”, C. Rangarajan states that the strong emergence of eastern
Europe and the USSR along with the memories of the gross failure of
laissez-faire neo-liberal policies in the Great Depression paved the way for
the country to become a planned economy. Though this debate can never be settled
whether such a step was right, yet one can assertively aver that Nehru had his
own valid reasons. Emerging from the two hundred years of persecution and
oppression, and then countenancing a macabre partition, the enterprising ability
of the country was nearly cypher. Since Britishers considered India nothing
less than a cash cow to be mulched to death, the Indian economy was nearly
debilitated when the colonial masters left (British Economist Angus Maddison’s
figures expatiate the grim reality of the British Raj. In 1700, India’s share
of the world economy was 22.6%, almost equal to that of the whole of Europe (23.3%)
and in 1952, roughly five years after the British left, it was only 3.8%). Thus,
the whole country believed that a central authority was needed to work as a beacon
until the private sector is capable enough to take things on its own.
The country started with its first five-year plan in 1951,
and though Nehru had lofty dreams of thinking beyond the trifles and aspired to
drive the nation towards education and science, two wars (1947 and 1962), refugee
crisis, constant famines and food insecurity kept on taking their toll on the
economy. On 27th May 1964, the
country faced one of the deadliest blows: Pt. Nehru died. When Nehru died, the
famous “miles to go before I sleep” poem was lying on his pillow side- indeed,
there were miles of go, but unfortunately, he slept.
Lal Bahadur Shastri too died soon under suspicious circumstances
and then country fell into a slump. In The
Insider, Rao also talks about this time with deep poignancy. Now started
the era, when leaders started “really” politicizing the politics. Offices were given,
not on the rubrics of ability, but on the desperation of “loyalty”. Coalition
politics emerged, Indira Gandhi, in one of the deadliest blows to the country,
imposed emergency out of her whims and still rode back to power on her demotic
slogan of “Garibi Hatao.” Various temporary Prime Ministers adorned the 7 RCR (despite
knowing themselves that they were indeed temporary).
In all the years, the country went through a lot, yet Nehru remained
a great symbol. To canvass votes on the name of Nehru, almost everyone had perfect
what Nehru preached, yet no one understood what Nehru wanted. Leaders spoke elegiacally
of socialism and considered capitalism nothing short of blasphemy. Since only
one family had impinged on the political scene of the country, every aspirant
of a party ticket waxed eloquence on Nehruvian socialism without meaning a single
word of it. Even Nehru’s descendants used socialism as a tool to constrict the
country so that it never gets “out of hand” of the party. Hence, the events to
which Rao was a legatee, can be easily explained in terms of the gross dereliction
of duty exhibited by his predecessors. Given the path of the wronged socialism
we were on, someday or the other, we were destined to plummet. However, Rao
could not shirk away, and he did not. Knowing that any action to the
liberalization would warrant ginormous obloquy from the forsooth socialists of
the country, he shrouded every move of his in a guile shroud of Nehruvian ideology.
Using his self-developed intelligence to snoop on allies as well as foes to
maintain his coalition government, filliping Dr. Manmohan Singh to go forth
with the reforms, insinuating all measures as if they were just an extension of
Nehru’s socialism and finally liberating this country of the shackles of the “license
raj” which was nothing but a state tool to punish the businessmen through sheer
empowerment of a bureaucracy deeply mired in egregious red-tapism, he turned the
country from a pro-crony state to a pro-business one.
If we can dream of entrepreneurship in India, of setting
industries in India, of entertaining FDI, of enjoying technology, of an
accountable government, of an efficacious bureaucracy, and above all of a respectable
life, it is only because of Rao’s vision. A crude fact that India’s economy
from 1980-91 grew at a pace of 5.6% while from 2007-12 (when the world saw the sub-prime
crisis), the same rate was 8.2%, is enough to have a glimpse as to how much Rao
contributed to the country. He did not use the premiership to stash money (mind
you, when Rao was the Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, to kickstart the land
reforms, he gave up his land of around 500 Acres and had to think about selling
his own house to fund his daughter’s medical studies, all despite winning six Lok
Sabha elections and serving as Union Minister of Home Affairs, External Affairs
and Defence), but instead had a vision of redeeming this country of the minions
of a defunct economic model. Notwithstanding internecine struggles and the
challenges of taking on a well-entrenched complacent bureaucracy and industrial
clique, he came out triumphant and can be described as the most consequential Prime
Minister since Jawaharlal Nehru. Very few people know this, but he is also the man
behind the development of the nuclear program of the country.
However, there is one more thing that Rao gave to this
country, and this achievement of his is even more significant than the LPG
reforms. He showed the country that a “non-Gandhi surname” person could reign decisively
from Delhi, take tough decisions, remain steadfast in his actions and steer the
nation into new directions. His astuteness “shocked” the country to believe
that a person who is not a descendant of Nehru can also run this country; that
it does not take an esoteric breed of people to come and rule us from above; that
leaders can rise from the ground, that individuals could become the masters of
their destiny and that a particular family was not destined by the almighty to
be the master of this country. Atal Bihar Vajpayee razed this notion further by
becoming a non-Congressman for ruling for a full term of five years and finally
Narendra Modi, put the final nail in the notion’s coffin by being a “non-Gandhi
surname holder” and “non-Congressman” and running the government with an
unequivocal majority for a full term. This is indeed what sets Rao apart. He remained
(or purported to be- who knows) a family loyalist for his whole life, yet was
the first person to set the politics of nepotism on the path to gibbets. Despite
having a lacklustre profile throughout his life, his final years were imbrued
in such dynamism that no one could claim not to be flabbergasted. And even though
his party did not let his dead body into the party office (because this would
have immortalized him and hence proven that an outsider could become the
insider) and the nation forgot him, Rao’s legacy is something that every Indian
ought to know and appreciate.
Here was a man in front of whom his contemporaries were mere
dwarf, here was a philosopher-king who wreaked havoc on the system to salvage a
despondent and ramshackle country out from becoming a default nation, here was a
man who remained in power throughout yet did not take power only for the sake
of power and yet, here is a man whose memories have been pushed down to the
rebellion. Though I can talk incessantly about Rao, his achievements and how he
saved us from not only a financial debacle but also a “despotic democracy”
working on the whims of individuals, I would leave it to you to decide whether he
should be remembered as (as many have striven to make him) a forgotten Prime
Minister or an unforgettable Prime Minister.
JAI HIND, JAI BHARAT
JAI MA BHARTI
