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

by Vinay Sitapati

  The India before Rao was also a place without broadcast entertainment. Entire neighbourhoods would huddle around a single television to watch serials of the Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. These would be carried on the nation’s only television channel, Doordarshan, thanks to a state monopoly over broadcasting. Compare that to 2015, where viewers can choose from 832 channels.44

  In terms of the quantum of transformation brought about, Rao ranks with other twentieth-century revolutionary figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Deng Xiaoping of China, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan of the United States, Margaret Thatcher of Great Britain, and Charles de Gaulle of France.

  But these leaders had advantages that Rao did not.

  Unlike Deng, Narasimha Rao operated in a fractious democracy with several limits on his powers. Unlike FDR and de Gaulle, Rao lacked charisma and popular support. And in contrast to Reagan, Thatcher and Nehru, Rao did not control Parliament or even his own party. Scarcely a week went by when he was not challenged by dissidents within the Congress. And Rao’s government survived multiple ordeals in Parliament to become the first minority dispensation in Indian history to last a full term. That he survived is itself noteworthy. That he did much more than survive is nothing short of a miracle.

  A few other Indian leaders have ushered change while working under constraints. Despite being the first non-Nehru-Gandhi prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri won a war, encouraged some private enterprise, and launched the Green Revolution.45 But he was respected within the Congress and enjoyed a dominant majority in Parliament, while Rao had none of these luxuries. Prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda, perhaps as weak as Rao, was able to push through some reforms. But nothing of the scale of Narasimha Rao.

  Understanding how prime minister Narasimha Rao achieved so much despite having so little power is the central puzzle of this book.

  To answer this, it is necessary to know what prime minister Rao did vis-à-vis the economy, welfare schemes, Babri Masjid, foreign policy, nuclear deterrence, and internal security. One must also analyse how Rao managed party, Parliament and Sonia Gandhi.

  One must begin, however, by drawing out the early Narasimha—his childhood in Telangana, early years in the Congress, fight against the Nizam, experience in Andhra politics, disastrous stint as a socialist chief minister, introspection in exile, resurrection as loyal number two in the Delhi durbar, and retirement in 1991 to almost head a Hindu monastery.

  These formative years shaped Rao’s politics and personality, providing him the talents to change India when he became prime minister. Rao’s final words before he died had to do with memories of his mother’s room in his ancestral village.46 This is no coincidence. To understand how Narasimha Rao transformed India, one must begin, as he began.

  In the village of Vangara.

  2

  Andhra Socialist, 1921–71

  He was named after his grandfather, Narasimha Rao.1 Pamulaparti was the family name, and following Telugu convention, preceded his own. In between was god, Venkata, after the presiding deity of Tirupati. A Sufi master knocked on the door of his father’s house soon after he was born. ‘Your son will become a baadshah.’ A king.2

  Pamulaparti Venkata Narasimha Rao was born on 28 June 1921 in British India. His family lived in Vangara, a settlement of rice fields in Karimnagar district, in what is now the state of Telangana. As was custom, his pregnant mother travelled to her parents’ home in nearby Lakinepally to give birth.3 Both villages were in a part of India that was, in Rao’s telling, ‘geographically . . . a bridge between the North and the South’.4 Living on the edge of five linguistic cultures, villagers here spoke Telugu, Hindi, Marathi, Kannada, and even some Oriya. And in this the land of the Nizam, the language of power was Urdu, while the language of courtly life was Persian. Narasimha Rao would go on to speak ten languages.5 These were the tongues he inherited at birth.

  His parents were of the Brahmin caste. Father Sitarama Rao owned 200 acres of dry land. The only other Brahmin family in the village was related to Narasimha’s family in three ways: by blood, a common wall, and a daily routine. This other family owned 1200 acres of rice fields and mango orchards, making them the largest landlords of the village—a fact that would matter to Narasimha, who would soon make this family his own.

  The village where Rao was born was in the princely state of Hyderabad. Its peculiar politics, at odds with mainstream Indian nationalism, is critical to appreciating the influences on young Narasimha.

  For, the princely states of colonial India were a world unto themselves. By the early 20th century, they comprised more than 500 principalities6 and covered a third of the subcontinent.7 Some kingdoms were no more than a handful of villages; the state of Hyderabad was close to the size of England, Scotland and Wales put together. Ruled at the time by the ornately wealthy Nizam, Asaf Jah VII, Hyderabad state’s mostly Muslim officials administered a population that was 85 per cent Hindu.8

  Along with this religious bias came a second inequity. Land ownership in Hyderabad state was skewed even by the standards of colonial India. British treaties with the Nizam had guaranteed that ‘a political and social structure from medieval Muslim rule had been preserved more or less intact’.9 This ensured many middlemen between the tiller of the land and the Nizam. Formal ownership of land was in the name of jagirdars. But actual power over tenant and tiller was with the village agents, known as deshmukhs, or doras. The Nizam often had a direct relationship with these doras, who paid him a share of the land revenue, a portion of which was then passed on to the British. Many doras were Hindus—from the Reddy, Velama and Brahmin castes.10 The Reddys and Velamas would typically deal with village administration, while the Brahmins would handle revenue collection.11 Narasimha Rao’s ancestors, Brahmins from Telangana, were also doras,12 and as such, embedded in this structure of exploitation.

  By 1921, pan-Indian nationalism was challenging these injustices. Mohandas Gandhi had just given a call for ‘non-cooperation’ against the British, transforming the Congress from a debating club of the Indian elite into a mass movement. A panicking Nizam responded by banning political meetings and entry of outsiders into his state without prior permission.13 This was the political situation at the time of Narasimha Rao’s birth—a surge in both nationalism as well as political oppression.

  While they would shape his adolescence, his baby years in Vangara were unwet by these waves. The other castes in the village were Yadavs, Gouds, Reddys and Dalits who lived alongside a few Muslim families blessed with royal benefaction. Narasimha would run around the village, mixing, touching and playing with all their children. Some of his closest friends were, in fact, Muslims. The entrance to Vangara today is a tarmac grey road that snakes past green fields of paddy shoots standing to attention.14 When Rao was a child, this road was a narrow embankment that cut through a pond. Narasimha would swim, leap out and dry himself by running in the sun.

  His earliest memories were of stories from the Mahabharata and Ramayana. The monkey god Hanuman was a favourite, and Narasimha would hop from chair to table, setting fire to the evil Ravana’s city of Lanka.15 Ritual chanting in Sanskrit, recitation of epics, and religious holidays were all permitted, perhaps even encouraged, by the Nizam16. It was a secularism as much about principle as it was about self-preservation. As Rao observed years later, ‘Where no political expression was permitted, cultural preoccupation became dominant, of necessity.’17

  At the age of four, Narasimha—the first of four surviving siblings—was given in adoption to his Brahmin neighbours. They had no children of their own, and were afraid their heirless lands would be seized by the Nizam.18 The adoption made Narasimha heir to the richest couple in the village. It was a legal fiction. His birth parents still nurtured him; he still ran around between both houses.19 When Rao’s biological father lay dying fourteen years later, he would remind his wealthier firstborn: ‘Just because you are adopted does not mean you can forget this side . . . take care of your mother a
nd siblings.’20 Rao never forgot, always treating both families as one.

  The only thing Rao did not adopt from his new family was the air of a dora. He would always identify himself as ‘middle class’, and years later, would pioneer land reform laws that reduced his own holdings.

  While adoption arrangements meant to preserve land were not unusual in the region, what was unusual was the child Narasimha’s abilities to read, write and memorize. Southern Brahmins had habitually been clerks or colonial officials, adapting religious learning to a modern education. This was not possible in the state of Hyderabad, where government service was the preserve of Muslims. So there was little motivation for Narasimha to study, especially since his family was tied to land rather than temple.

  But personalities are not always explained by structural conditions, and despite having no incentive to learn, Narasimha proved a precocious student. His father would place Narasimha on his chest and ‘recite verses from the Bhagvata in a long chain’. Within a few weeks, Narasimha was chanting those stanzas from memory.21 The unschooled Sitarama Rao had a reverence for knowledge, and when he noticed his eldest son surpassing the lone village teacher, he sent Narasimha away to the nearest village which had a full-fledged school.

  The separation of seven-year-old Rao from his family would haunt him for the rest of his life. Shaken from the settled rhythms that centuries of cultivation had given his family, he was now on his own, visiting his parents only once every five months. Education would propel Rao from village to town to city. Into politics and into power. It would make him prime minister of India. But it would also cut him off from clan and community. It would make him remote, squirrelled away amongst ideas and words from which he could never be sent away. He would develop a distant relationship with his children, a beleaguered one with his eldest son, Ranga.

  The early separation from his parents would torment him seventy-six years later, when he lay dying in a hospital bed in Delhi. ‘I am walking on the bund in [the] village,’ the semi-conscious former prime minister told his children, ‘Father is wearing white and [is] on the other side. He is beckoning to me. Let me go. Let me go to him.’22

  In 1931, Rao was married off. He was ten. His wife, Satyamma, was related to his adoptive mother, a calculation meant to keep his lands within that family line.23 She would bear and raise eight children, remain in Vangara to take care of the family lands, and show little interest in Rao’s political career. Rao would later describe his arranged marriage as an act beyond his control, as so much of his later life would be. He was ‘disappointed but not shocked’; his ‘inner self remained unaffected’.24

  By the age of ten, Rao had experienced adoption, separation and marriage—all thrust on him without his choice. It gave him, early on, the serenity to accept the things he could not change. As Rao later wrote, ‘As he went through life, he found that less and less of his self determined his action.’25

  In 1937, Narasimha Rao completed high school, ‘higher secondary education’ as it was called back then. He had stood first in the entire state of Hyderabad.26 It was an achievement so singular that it vindicated—to Rao and to others—his decision to study further rather than cultivate land.

  The year 1937 was also a time of political unrest in Hyderabad state. In elections held that year in (directly-ruled) British India, the Congress came to power in Madras and Bombay presidencies, both of which shared boundaries with Hyderabad. This gave a fillip to movements working against the Nizam. Marathi, Telugu and Kannada associations began organizing to protect their linguistic groups within the state. The conservative Hindu Mahasabha as well as the reformist Arya Samaj began working together to end the Nizam’s rule. The Hyderabad State Congress was formed that year with the aim of ‘attaining responsible government under the aegis of H.E.H. the Nizam by peaceful and legitimate means’.27 In 1938, the state Congress organized a satyagraha on the very same day that the Arya Samaj and Hindu Mahasabha launched theirs. They were countered with uncommon ferocity. The Nizam was determined to protect his temporal power. He also wanted to shield Muslim rule from a national movement that was largely Hindu.

  Nothing symbolized this latter concern more than the song ‘Vande Mataram’. Written in 1882 by the Bengali poet Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the song used Hindu imagery of a mother goddess as an allegory for India. Religious Muslims refused to worship another god, while the Congress adopted it as a secular creed. Singing the song was banned in the state of Hyderabad.

  Narasimha Rao’s tryst with India’s destiny began during the 1938 satyagraha, when the seventeen-year-old Rao sang ‘Vande Mataram’ with other Hindu students in his college in Warangal. The Nizam’s officials ordered them to stop, since the song was associated with the banned Congress party. When they persisted, 300 students—including Rao—were expelled by the principal.28 Rao’s resumé until then had been a carefully crafted ticket to a secure government post. That had ended on a song.

  The expelled students scrambled to complete their degrees elsewhere. The chancellor of Nagpur University, a nationalist, agreed to take in the brightest of the bunch. Rao was, of course, among those selected.

  His Nagpur years were the start of a long association with the region. Rao brushed up on his Marathi, and by the time classes began, was speaking like a native.29 Forty-six years later, his Marathi skills would be put to use when Rao left his constituency in Andhra Pradesh to stand and win from Ramtek in Maharashtra.

  When he finished his degree, he moved to another Marathi-speaking city, Pune, to study astronomy. Marathi-speakers were at the forefront of the intellectual currents of the time. Rao swam in them with ease. He read the works of the Hindu nationalist V.D. Savarkar, and also subscribed to the communist weekly New Age, where P.C. Joshi was acclimatizing Karl Marx to the specific misfortunes of the Indian peasantry.30 But it was to the mainstream of the national movement that he was most drawn. He read the moderate Gopal Krishna Gokhale as well as the radical Bal Gangadhar Tilak.

  In 1938, Rao also attended a session of the Indian National Congress in Haripura, Gujarat. The session was pertinent to Rao, for it marked an emboldened Congress attitude towards princely states such as Hyderabad. The party resolved that ‘Purna Swaraj or complete independence, which is the objective of the Congress, is for the whole of India inclusive of the States’.31 The Congress ‘Left’—headed by the young Jawaharlal Nehru—wanted to act on that declaration, and organize protests in the princely states. But the ‘moderate’ Mahatma Gandhi was worried that an escalation might stretch the party. He ensured that the resolution also stated that ‘under existing circumstances, the Congress is not in a position to work effectively . . . within the States’.32

  The only memory of Narasimha Rao’s that survived from Haripura was of hearing Jawaharlal Nehru speak ‘with his earnest voice, now halting with emotion, now surging like a river in flood’.33 Nehru’s advocacy of militant action in the princely states must have resonated with the impressionable seventeen-year-old—and goes some way in explaining his early association with the left-wing of the Congress party.

  In 1940, Narasimha Rao’s wife, Satyamma, gave birth to their first child, Ranga. They would have seven other children: two sons and five daughters. Satyamma could barely read and write.34 But she possessed an earthy practicality that the intellectual Rao lacked. Satyamma chose to remain in the village, looking after Rao’s lands as well as their children. Until her death in 1970, she was to provide for the family, leaving Rao free to pursue his dreams.

  Meanwhile, Rao graduated from Pune with a first class, and was tempted by a career in law. He also considered pursuing astronomy in England, the terminus of the Empire. Years later, when disenchanted with politics, he would tell his youngest son, ‘I never wanted to be a politician. I wanted to go to the UK to settle as an academic, in Oxford or Cambridge.’35 There was also pressure to return to the family business, to join his wife and look after his acreage in the village.

  These career options reflected the contra
dictions already visible in the young Narasimha Rao’s personality. The inward gaze of a five-foot-short scholar was coupled with curiosity about the ways of the world. In the scuffle between the introvert and the extrovert inside Rao, the latter won. He chose to pursue a law degree in Nagpur.

  The decision imposed financial costs on Rao, and Vangara’s largest landlord began working part-time as a food-rationing inspector, living on the fifty rupees he earned.36 But the legal profession unlocked to Rao a universe that stargazing never could. A black coat and white neckband was the costume of anti-colonialists across the British Empire. The Indian freedom movement was brimful with lawyers, among them Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Ambedkar and Jinnah. After Rao stood first in his law exam, he returned to Hyderabad to begin legal practice as a junior to Burgula Ramakrishna Rao, a Brahmin lawyer and future chief minister of Hyderabad state.

  With World War II over, the British were keen to leave India. They faced two knotty questions. What to make of the princely states that had enjoyed autonomy within the British Empire? And how to address the demands of Muslim politicians for a separate country? The state of Hyderabad posed both questions at once. It was one of the largest princely states, complete with its own insignia, air force, army and police. The Muslim Nizam also wanted the right to choose where he belonged. Soon after the announcement of Partition on 3 June 1947, he declared that he preferred independence,37 ignoring the detail that his subjects were mostly Hindu, and his kingdom surrounded by India. When the rest of India became independent in August 1947, negotiations between the state of Hyderabad and the Union of India remained unresolved.