Despite lacking a political base, Rao thrived in the capital because he committed himself, in his own words, to ‘masterly inactivity’. His career became a model of fealty to Indira. He supported her during the Emergency and she, appreciative of his erudition and loyalty, rewarded him with safe seats and major portfolios in her cabinet. To his colleagues, Rao remained an enigma, a man who was fluent in twelve languages but, they complained, spoke his mind in none. He shone as foreign minister. Visiting Havana in 1980, he received instructions from Indira to persuade the leaders of the Non-Aligned Movement to move their next summit from Iraq—then at war with Iran—to India. Rao disarmed the gathering by arguing India’s case in Spanish to the Cubans, Persian to the Iranians, Arabic to the Iraqis and the Egyptians, French to a host of African representatives and Urdu to the Pakistanis.5
After Indira’s assassination, Rao transferred his loyalty to Rajiv. Minister of home affairs during the anti-Sikh pogrom, he was nowhere to be seen. And by 1991, he was a spent force in Indian politics. Denied a party ticket, he was marginally involved in the general election campaign that year, issuing the occasional statement ridiculing the BJP’s foreign policy pronouncements. His declamations were buried in the inside pages of newspapers, if they were printed at all. No one listened to him.
Everything changed on the night of 21 May, when an aide arrived with news from Tamil Nadu: at 10.20 p.m., Rajiv Gandhi was killed in an explosion while campaigning in the town of Sriperumbudur.
With the monarch gone, and no successor in place in a party bereft of democracy, Congress collapsed into a hive of intrigue. An effort to recruit Rajiv’s grieving widow, Sonia, was halted only when she emphatically rejected the party’s entreaties to lead it. Every plausible successor to Rajiv had an equally powerful adversary within the party. By a process of elimination, Rao, who was not even on the ballot in the general election, emerged as the consensus candidate to ‘carry forward’ Rajiv’s legacy. No one knew, of course, that Rao had authored an anonymous article castigating Rajiv as an arrogant, insecure force of destruction.6 To his colleagues Rao was a man without ideological leanings or antagonists or friends. Weighty regional leaders such as Sharad Pawar, N.D. Tiwari and Arjun Singh, believing Rao would serve only as a stopgap leader and intending fully to displace him after the vote was in, fell behind his candidacy. Their differences only sharpened when Congress, crested by a sympathy wave, was returned as the largest single party in parliament. The placid, inscrutable man suddenly showed his stripes. None of his backers was given a ministerial department of his choice and their supporters were kept out of government altogether.7
Before the party could fathom his unanticipated ruthlessness, Rao unleashed the unthinkable upon them. He plucked Manmohan Singh from the University Grants Commission and appointed him finance minister. Ten days later, acting on Singh’s advice, he devalued the rupee by 8.7 per cent against international currencies. In less than forty-eight hours, he devalued it again. He then went on national television and delivered what seems in retrospect the most consequential speech since Nehru’s address to the nation at India’s birth in 1947. Rao did not aspire to grandiloquence, but the momentousness of the moment was not lost on those who witnessed it. ‘Desperate maladies call for drastic remedies,’ Rao told his compatriots as he announced an austerity programme, much of it devised by the IMF and Singh. India, he explained, had just recovered from a debilitating balance of payments crisis which had left it without adequate ‘foreign exchange to import even such essential commodities as diesel, kerosene, edible oil and fertiliser’. His solution was to cut the ‘fat in government expenditure’, deregulate industry and emancipate the private sector, pull down the barriers to foreign investment, provide tax concessions to private corporations, slash subsidies to farmers and curb labour activism.8
Rao, his critics grasped, was dismantling Nehruvian India. Congress rose up in opposition. The National Herald, the party’s newspaper, complained that Rao and his finance minister wanted nothing more than to give ‘the middle-class Indian crispier cornflakes [and] fizzier aerated drinks’. ‘That,’ the paper asserted, ‘could never have been the vision of the founding fathers of our nation.’ Parliament erupted in fury. Left-wing members accused Rao of imposing ‘anti-people’ policies on the nation. Dozens of senior Congress members beseeched Sonia to take over Congress and rescue the country.9 Rao’s response was bold and brazen in equal measure. ‘Reversing the policy options is not available to this government any more,’ he said frankly. ‘It is a one-way street and on all sides I have red lights.’ He then gave the rebels a scare by proposing to reintroduce internal elections to Congress. Asia’s oldest political party operated under a system of patronage introduced by Indira. Appointments to party posts were doled out in Delhi. Some of the most powerful politicians in India had no mandate at all. Rao, of course, was the most conspicuous beneficiary of this arrangement (he bolstered his position by contesting a bye-election in 1993, which he won by more than half a million votes). But his suggestion jolted his opponents who, after showing some early signs of rebellion, became submissive.
Backbenchers and the cabinet dealt with, Rao began cultivating the BJP. Heading a minority government, he feared a floor-test in parliament. He frequently invited L.K. Advani, the BJP’s president, to dinner at his residence. A Hindu refugee from the Pakistani province of Sindh, Advani was the most poisonous figure in Indian politics at this time.10 In 1990, he led a massive rally in a motorised chariot—modelled on prototypes in the Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata—from Somnath, where a majestic Hindu temple had repeatedly been ransacked by Muslim invaders, to the ancient town of Ayodhya, where the founder of the Mughal empire had erected a mosque by bringing down a Hindu temple. Hindu nationalists, buoyed by Rajiv’s surrender, recast the old building into an emblem of Muslim despotism and Hindu defeat. Protecting the mosque from Hindu nationalists now became the measure of the non-confessional state’s commitment to secularism.
Even though his decision to court the BJP was driven by pragmatic considerations, Rao extracted assurances from Advani that Babri would not be harmed. A year later, on 6 December 1992, Advani led another march to the mosque. This time, his supporters brought it down. The police did not so much as attempt to stop them as they went about butchering Muslims in Uttar Pradesh, the site of the worst violence that swept through India. The unthinkable had happened—and it had happened on Congress’s watch. This was the greatest affront to India’s secular core since the foundation of the republic. Rao, napping as the mosque was being demolished, dismissed all four BJP-run state governments in India when he woke up. He banned Hindu religious organisations, threw Advani in prison and made a solemn pledge to rebuild Babri. Addressing the nation over the radio, he warned Indians of the ‘grave threat’ now faced by the ‘institutions, principles and ideals on which the constitutional structure of our republic has been built’.11 Indian cities were placed under curfew. Heavily armed paramilitary forces patrolled the streets.
Rao’s response may have been proportionate to this moment of terror, but it could not wipe clean the stain left by the demolition of Babri. The mood everywhere was sepulchral, full of self-loathing. Yet it was possible to detect relief, even rejoicing. India had, finally, crossed the rubicon.
For many in the expanding Hindu middle class—demoralised for decades by Congress’s betrayals and being rapidly unshackled, by Singh’s liberal economic policies, from Nehruvian shibboleths about self-restraint—the barbarism in Ayodhya contained a self-empowering, even redemptive, message: an ancient civilisation had purged itself of the shame inflicted by history by razing the monument to its subjugation. The past, so many felt, had been avenged.
The promise of a violent release for the resentments and confusions incubated by Hindus’ unresolved feelings about their history is what gave Hindu nationalism its visceral appeal. The anti-colonial nationalism pioneered by Congress, cohering in opposition to the British, had applied a romantic gloss on pre-colonia
l India: it was Eden vandalised by satanic Europeans. But had the British really ruptured India’s historic continuity? Or was it India’s decline, precipitated by centuries of conquest, that enabled Britain so swiftly to overpower the subcontinent? The conceit of the freedom movement led by Congress was that a fully developed national consciousness existed in the subcontinent before the British arrived, smashed it and divided the natives. Singling the British out as uniquely disruptive villains proved a convenient way for republican India’s secular intellectuals to bypass awkward questions that ought, in the long-term interests of the country, to have been confronted head on. The airbrushing of the pre-colonial past was intended to deny ammunition to all those who cited the creation of Pakistan to intensify their clamour for a Hindu rashtra.
Historiographers tasked by the secular Congress establishment to clarify India’s past, motivated by the desire to do good, caused immeasurable harm by blurring it. They applied recondite techniques and treatments to source material, ladled their prose with jargon and, lost in disciplinary sport, neglected the needs of the lay persons outside the priesthood. Students emerged from exposure to their output without a rudimental apprehension of their difficult past. Medieval India, despite all the evidence of its methodical disfigurement, was depicted in schoolbooks as an idyll where Muslims and Hindus coexisted in harmony and forged an inclusive idea of India which the British came and shattered. This fable was so wholly internalised by the secular establishment which dispensed it that, as late as 1998, K.R. Narayanan, India’s first Dalit president, was able to tell an audience in Turkey that the most ‘amazing fact’ about his homeland before it was defiled by ‘European intrusion’ was ‘that the interaction between the old civilisation of India—the Hindu civilisation—and the Islamic civilisation was a friendly experience’.12 Such a thesis was always going to struggle against the overwhelmingly contradictive evidence—from the ruins of Hindu liturgical buildings to the ballads of dispossession passed from generation to generation—arrayed against it. The chronicles of the subcontinent’s medieval rulers are full of pornographic descriptions of the horrors with which the place teemed. Here is the Persian historian Vassaf relating with elation the reduction of Cambay in Gujarat by the forces of Alauddin Khilji:
The Muhammadan forces began to kill and slaughter on the right and on the left unmercifully, through the impure land, for the sake of Islam, and blood flowed in torrents. They plundered gold and silver to an extent greater than can be conceived … They took captive a great number of handsome and elegant maidens, amounting to 20,000, and children of both sexes, more than the pen can enumerate … In short, the Muhammadan army brought the country to utter ruin, and destroyed the lives of the inhabitants, and plundered the cities, and captured their offspring, so that many temples were deserted and the idols were broken and trodden under foot, the largest of which was one called Somnat, fixed upon stone, polished like a mirror, of charming shape and admirable workmanship. The Muhammadan soldiers plundered all those jewels and rapidly set themselves to demolish the idol. The surviving infidels were deeply affected with grief, and they engaged to pay a thousand pieces of gold as ransom for the idol, but they were indignantly rejected, and the idol was destroyed, and its limbs, which were anointed with ambergris and perfumed, were cut off. The fragments were conveyed to Delhi, and the entrance of the Jama Masjid was paved with them, that people might remember and talk of this brilliant victory. ‘Praise be to God, the Lord of the worlds, Amen!’13
The general retort of the ‘secular’ historian confronted with writings of this vein tended to be that they were an exaggeration meant to impress the rulers—without any meditation on the nature of the rulers who might be flattered by such graphic descriptions of gore staged in their name—or to read into them motives the text did not support, or to discredit them as British propaganda. Unfortunately for them—and for the national project they were serving—the grand mosques of northern India are decorated with stone tablets in which you can still see traces of the pre-existing liturgical monuments that were razed to furnish the building materials for them. But pick up a history textbook taught at state institutions and you will find no explanation of what happened. It was the mission of ‘secular’ historians and public intellectuals of India to locate mundane causes for carnage by religious zealots. And when those reasons could not be found, they papered over the gruesome deeds of the invaders with nice-nellyisms and emphasised their good traits. A standard history textbook written for Indian schoolchildren by Romila Thapar follows up the admission that the Ghaznavid ruler Mahmud was ‘destructive in India’—a phrase that omits so much—with the mitigation that ‘in his own country he was responsible for building a beautiful mosque and a large library’.14 All imperialism is vicious, but that is not the standard adopted by India’s secular historians. The Portuguese, the same textbook tells us, ‘were intolerant of the existing religions of India and did not hesitate to force people to become Christian’. Indeed, they ‘did all that they could to make more converts’.15 On the other hand, Islamic invaders, in a sentence that catches the breath if only because of its contrast with the candid assessment of the Portuguese, ‘did not produce any fundamental change in Indian society but they did help to enrich Indian culture’.16 Babur, the founder of the Mughal empire whose campaigns made Portuguese pacification look like a picnic, ‘enjoyed playing polo’.17 Imperialism, in other words, was destructive only when Europeans did it. When Asians did it, it was a cultural exchange programme.
Such well-intentioned sanitisation of the past was never, in the long run, going to be able to withstand the awakening of people to their history or sustain an inclusive nationalism. The encounter between ‘the strictest and most extreme form of monotheism’ and ‘the richest and most varied polytheism’, Octavio Paz wrote in his luminous study of India, left a ‘deep wound’ on the psyche of its people.18 The secular establishment squandered a rare opening in the early decades of the republic to heal that wound by supplying Indians a forthright accounting of their history. Had India been honest about its past—about the atrocities that were perpetrated and the heritage that was ravaged—it might have desiccated the appeal of Hindu supremacism. It might have reconciled Indians to their harrowing past, provoked a mature detachment from it and denied Hindu nationalists the opportunity to weaponise history. To come to terms with the past, to move on from it, we must first acknowledge and accept it. A thousand years of Indian history were obfuscated. The reasons were lofty; the consequences of the well-meaning distortions, alas, baleful. Secularists endangered the extraordinary religio-cultural synthesis India arrived at by airbrushing its unbeautiful genesis. No Indian individual or community bears any responsibility for what happened in the pre-colonial era. By downplaying and denying what happened, secularists unwittingly implied otherwise.
Rao embodied the conflict between private knowledge of the past and public ideals of the republic. Unlike other Congressmen of his generation, his personality was forged in opposition not to the British but to the Nizam of Hyderabad. The overthrow of the sovereignty of his native state’s Telugu-speaking Indians, who have a continuous history of more than 2,000 years, predated British rule of the subcontinent by painfully long centuries. It was only with the arrival of the British—and only in those territories ceded to them in the late eighteenth century by the Asaf Jah dynasty which had taken possession of much of the Telugu country—that an intellectual revival of sorts began to occur. The coastal east of the state (Seemandhra) and the jagged south (Rayalaseema) went to the British. Telangana, the arid inland that Rao called home, remained under the Nizams as part of Hyderabad. The former modernised; the latter stagnated. Telugu, which had fallen into catastrophic decline, was rescued and revitalised in the British-held areas by English civil servants such as Charles Phillip Brown.19 A literary ferment erupted in coastal Andhra between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The possession once again by the natives of the means with which to assess the past gave rise
to some of the Telugu language’s most extraordinary poets, novelists and playwrights—Gurajada Apparao, Dharmavaram Ramakrishnacharyulu, Vedam Sastri.
The contrast with Telangana could not have been starker.
By the time of India’s Independence in August 1947, Hyderabad’s Muslim overlord was the world’s richest man, and his subjects numbered among its poorest people. Rao’s fiction contains poignant descriptions of the terror visited upon the natives by the Nizam’s mujahideen—villages torched, men hacked apart, women molested—as they sought to subsume Hyderabad into Pakistan. Rao witnessed the carnage and would have known the people who became its casualties.
Babri’s demolition haunted Rao for the rest of his life. Yet the acute emotional distress that leaps from his fictional writings set in Muslim-ruled Hyderabad makes it impossible to shake off the sense that his mystifying conduct in the run-up to that fateful day—neglecting the gathering storm, deceiving himself with the assurances given to him by Advani, going to sleep as Advani alighted at Ayodhya—was in some measure animated by a subliminal yearning for closure. But trouble with those who search for personal consolation in bloody retributions against the past is that they do not bring history to a terminus: they endow it with an insoluble fury. Someday, the victims of Rao’s dereliction of his high office’s sacred duty to safeguard all Indians may seek a similarly sanguinary resolution for the wounds inflicted on them by the Hindus who stormed Ayodhya to correct the past. And another day the victims of the victims …
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