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

by Vinay Sitapati

  In Vangara, Rao loved walking in the fields and talking to villagers.35 Since he was the largest landowner in the village, his own law expropriating excess land from landlords had been used against his own fields. Of his 1200 acres, he had surrendered 1000 to the district magistrate, who had then distributed it to the landless. Almost every villager received two acres. These villagers, who had earlier bowed to their landlord, now learnt to love their saviour.

  As their euphoria subsided, Rao saw something disconcerting. Villagers had used their new land to grow rice, a food crop with little market value. Two acres of rice fed a family for a year, but did not earn much money in the bazaar. While land reforms had provided dignity to the landless, it had not increased their disposable income.36

  Narasimha Rao advised the villagers to move from growing rice to cash crops that would give them higher returns in the market. From Gujarat he sourced cotton, which he then planted all over his land. Cotton came with its own problems. Since the male and female parts are in the same plant, there is a chance of self-pollination, sometimes resulting in weaker new plants. The risks were considerable for poor farmers with no access to insurance or credit. In order to encourage his villagers to use the cotton seeds he had procured, Rao turned to his talent for innovation.

  Captain Lakshmikantha, a relative, remembers how Rao solved the problem. ‘He put a straw on each cotton plant, so the pollen would only fly to the next plant, not the same plant.’37

  Rao’s success in growing cotton set the other villagers thinking. Mallaiah lives next door to Rao’s ancestral house in Vangara. He was one of many landless farmhands who gained two acres from Rao’s largesse. Learning from Rao, Mallaiah started to grow cotton in his fields, and began earning three times what a rice grower would.38

  For a socialist who had staked his career on land reform, the insight unsettled Rao. Handouts to the poor did not solve their problems unless it also connected them to the market.

  By the end of 1974, calm had returned to Andhra Pradesh. Things began looking up for Narasimha Rao. Uma Shankar Dikshit, the Central minister who had supported Rao’s elevation as chief minister in 1971 only to bring him down in 1973, now lobbied for Rao to be brought into national politics in Delhi.

  Rao abandoned work on his confessional novel in anticipation of the discretion that a political future entailed. Meanwhile, Lakshmi Kantamma felt her own career had stalled. A Lok Sabha MP for the past twelve years, she had not yet been made Union minister. She complained publicly of being ignored by prime minister Indira Gandhi. Lakshmi would eventually leave the Congress to join the rival Janata Party. Their political estrangement caused her to spend less time with Rao.

  Around this time, Narasimha Rao met a young reporter working in Hyderabad.39 The soft-spoken Kalyani, whose husband worked for a nationalized bank,40 would never betray her sources. K. Natwar Singh says of Kalyani, ‘She is utterly discreet, utterly loyal. Your secrets are safe with her.’41 She would remain Narasimha Rao’s closest confidante for the rest of his life.

  In October 1974, Narasimha Rao’s fortunes turned. He was called to Delhi as Congress general secretary, an influential national position within the party. Like with Deng in 1973, Rao was heading back to the centre of power, a changed man. And as with Deng, these changes would reveal themselves only later—once Narasimha Rao became his own man.

  5

  Delhi Durbar, 1975–91

  Delhi has been capital of empire through much of its history. For centuries, its ruling dynasts controlled Delhi-wallahs through a mixture of patronage and fear. This grease and acid seeped into its stones. Threat, flattery, hierarchy—and above all, power—defined the contours of the city.

  For a brief while in the 1950s, it seemed as if Delhi would have to change to accommodate the ideals of newly independent India, as reflected in the democratic sensibilities of the new prime minister. The Delhi durbar seemed to be closing down.

  But habits of ancient cities die hard, and Indira Gandhi brought to Delhi none of the egalitarian impulses of her father. By 1974, she was more monarch than leader, with total power over party and Parliament.

  Almost imperceptibly, the Old Delhi returned. Rather than representing India, the city regressed to its historical self. Courtiers fawned, brokers promised access, and the writ of the queen ran unchallenged across the empire. When Narasimha Rao was appointed Congress general secretary in October 1974, it was to this Old-New Delhi that he moved.

  Rao was listening to the radio in New Delhi on the morning of 26 June 1975 when ‘there was a sudden interruption in the All India Radio programme with a special, grim sounding announcement. Some unfamiliar terminology, called Emergency was heard.’ These words are part of Rao’s private diary that remain undisclosed to this day.

  On hearing the announcement, Rao ‘found himself completely confused’. He couldn’t, ‘at least at first, identify any compelling reason that could lead to the invocation of the Article [352 of the Constitution, that allows for a national Emergency]’.1 When he ‘reached the meeting hall, it looked like Sanjay Gandhi’s durbar, not Indira Gandhi’s . . . he was shooting off questions in an aggressive and intolerant tone, and all others meekly answered them.’ Rao ‘was shocked beyond belief, to find Indira Gandhi giving a halting, diffident explanation to every question the young prince fired at will. So much for Durga and Kali.’

  This sudden announcement of the Emergency was, in fact, long in the making. Indians had begun to notice that their prime minister was more unresponsive ruler than accountable representative. For all her talk of ‘garibi hatao’, poverty in India had actually increased since the 1960s, from 33 to 40 per cent in villages, and from 49 to 50 per cent in cities.2 Student movements in Bihar and Gujarat began demonstrating against their chief ministers, agitations that devolved into remonstrations against the prime minister and her younger son, Sanjay. Government employees, unhappy with their work conditions, joined in. From early 1974, the movement was led by Jayaprakash Narayan, a seventy-one-year-old veteran of the freedom struggle. One of the many groups aiding the protesters was the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a convenient fact that allowed Indira to mischaracterize the entire movement as a vast right-wing conspiracy.

  In order to emphasize that the struggle was merely ideological, Indira restructured her party in late 1974 to appoint overtly left-wing Congressmen to senior positions.3 Narasimha Rao had dual claims to a high-ranking post. As chief minister, he had been an orthodox socialist—exactly the kind of fig leaf Indira needed at the time. Rao had also demonstrated that personal loyalty meant more to him than ideology. When Indira Gandhi had removed him as chief minister, he had not rebelled, despite his own fury and the initial support of state Congressmen.4

  As reward, Indira appointed him as one of four general secretaries of the All India Congress Committee.5 Rao claimed this elevation had caught him unawares. ‘I had resigned as Chief Minister and was slowly slipping into my favourite literary activity when the High Command perhaps decided that such drift was not on.’6

  This cosmetic surgery did not change Indira’s appearance from empress to democrat. Protests continued through the early months of 1975, and were rejuvenated on 12 June when the Allahabad high court found the prime minister guilty of a minor election offence. Her election was cancelled and she had twenty days to find a successor. When Indira appealed to the Supreme Court, the high court judgment was conditionally stayed on 24 June 1975. But she could not vote in Parliament until her appeal was fully heard. Some of her own partymen thought she should resign.

  The next day, 25 June, Jayaprakash Narayan addressed a considerable rally at Delhi’s Ram Lila grounds. He declared Indira’s prime ministership illegal. And then he crossed a line: he asked the police and army to disobey her ‘illegal orders’. That night, Indira Gandhi declared a national Emergency and suspended fundamental rights. The largest democracy in the world was now a constitutional dictatorship.

  As Rao noticed in the first days of
the Emergency, it was Indira’s second son, Sanjay Gandhi, who called the shots more than the prime minister. Meanwhile, Indira’s eldest son, Rajiv, was living in a cocoon insulated from politics. In 1968, he had married an Italian girl he had met in Cambridge. Her name was Sonia Maino. They lived together in Delhi, while Rajiv worked as a pilot for Indian Airlines, soaring above the tumult and casual violence that was the defining feature of the Emergency.

  In private, Narasimha Rao told his close friends such as the Karnataka politician Satchidananda Swamy that he was not happy with the imposition of Emergency.7 But the public man was mum.

  This duplicity served Rao well, and the Emergency improved his political fortunes. He was now celebrated as a martyr for land reforms. At a meeting prime minister Indira Gandhi called in late 1975 to discuss using her Emergency powers for further land reforms, the Andhra politician Narsa Reddy told her, ‘General secretary Rao was the architect of our Land Reforms Act. So there can be no fault in the law. The fact that big landlords put up such a fight means that it was well drafted.’8 There was even talk of Narasimha Rao replacing the Congress president—and high priest of Indira worship—D.K. Barooah.

  Rao’s ascension to the top party post would have marked a dramatic return from exile. But he was still a state politician schooled in the Nehruvian sixties. He was unused to the new rules of the Delhi durbar of the seventies, where flaunting ambition was the surest route to downfall. When Rao misjudged his context and deployed associates to lobby on his behalf, the backlash was swift.

  Barooah’s faction spread rumours about his competitor. Rao had earlier obliquely criticized the Emergency, noting that ‘only a dialogue would help but not detentions’.9 This was spun as treason. The prime minister was also told that Rao was spending time with Lakshmi Kantamma, by then Indira’s opponent.10 Rao had, in fact, seen little of Lakshmi in those years. But the gossip fell on paranoid ears. Instead of becoming party president in 1976, Rao was removed as general secretary.

  He spent the next few months lecturing abroad as well as working on his writing. Meanwhile, the Emergency was proving unpopular. Trains may have run on time and bureaucrats may have run to work, but that was only the shawl of terror. As the historian Ramachandra Guha chronicles, ‘Thousands were arrested under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), known by its victims as the Maintenance of Indira and Sanjay Act.’11 The absence of press freedoms as well as pressure on bureaucrats to meet impracticable targets led to awful abuses of human rights. This was captured in the public imagination by the forced sterilization of men in the name of ‘family planning’, the emasculation of India by a cruel dictator.

  And so when Indira Gandhi ended the Emergency by calling for national elections in March 1977, she was trounced by a united Janata Opposition. The Congress won only 34.5 per cent of the vote and just 154 of the 543 Lok Sabha constituencies.12 Indira Gandhi lost her own seat.

  While the Congress had been decimated in northern and central India, it had held its own in southern states such as Andhra Pradesh. This was probably because the effects of the Emergency in the south had been less brutal. Southerners were also worried that the predominantly north Indian Janata Party might impose Hindi as the sole national language.13

  Narasimha Rao had contested the Lok Sabha seat of Hanamkonda in the Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh, the first time he was fighting a parliamentary election after losing in 1952. Bucking his party’s national rout—but in line with the Congress’s performance in Andhra Pradesh—he won easily, polling 59.3 per cent of the votes cast.14 He had already won four straight state elections; this was to be the first of six consecutive national elections he would go on to win. Rao’s career in the Congress might have been wobbly, but he was always sure-footed when it came to winning elections.

  Rao entered the 1977 Lok Sabha as a member of the Opposition. He was soon made chairman of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), a parliamentary group meant to keep tabs on government accounting. In the 2000s, the PAC would gain prominence in the way it went after the Manmohan Singh government. Back in the late 1970s, it was a sleeping dog. And Rao let it lie. Instead, he spent his energies defending Indira in her time of need. The Janata government was unleashing commission after commission to investigate misdeeds during the Emergency, and within her party, devotees turned into apostates and left to form their own cults. Narasimha Rao, only half a lion, chose to remain loyal to Indira.

  In his spare time, he turned inwards, taking courses in Spanish at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. A visitor to the university library recalls Rao parking his own car, and walking, unescorted, to the languages department.15 Most politicians do not know how to take a break from politics. They hanker after influence long after they have lost it. Rao’s exception to this rule gave him his exceptionally detached view of how power worked. Distance allowed him to see the trees as well as the forest.

  A few years later, in 1980, the Janata government collapsed. Its internal splits could not be stitched together by a shared loathing of Indira Gandhi. Elections were called and Rao once again won from Hanamkonda. This time, his party shared his success, winning 362 of 520 seats—a gain of 208 from the 1977 elections.16 Indira was back as prime minister, and the man who had stood with her in the wilderness was about to be rewarded.

  Indira Gandhi offered Narasimha Rao the position of foreign minister of India. The ministry is one of four that sit on Raisina Hill, right beside the prime minister’s office. It was a signal to Rao, an outcaste just seven years ago, that he was now part of Indira Gandhi’s inner circle. Rao was nonetheless dissatisfied. He was an expert in education and health, ministries he had held in Andhra Pradesh in the 1960s. But he had little experience in world diplomacy.17

  Rao’s youngest son, Prabhakara, was with him at the time. He remembers his father asking Indira Gandhi’s personal secretary and man Friday, R.K. Dhawan, to fix a meeting with the prime minister. Dhawan briefed Indira, and when Rao was brought into the prime minister’s office, Indira asked him bluntly, ‘Are you not happy with Foreign Affairs?’ ‘Yes,’ replied Rao, ‘I would prefer some other portfolio.’ ‘In that case,’ Indira said, ‘you have the job of finding your own replacement. You have two days to think about it.’18 Rao mulled over it that night, telling Prabhakara, ‘The leadership has given me so much confidence, I do not want to disappoint them.’ The next morning, he accepted the offer.19

  This early foray into foreign policy would serve Narasimha Rao well as prime minister a decade later. For, Rao had become foreign minister at a time when India was recomputing its Cold War calculus. The Indira Gandhi of 1980 was different from the Indira of 1969. During her years in the Opposition, from 1977 to 1980, the Soviets had cosied up to the Janata government and ignored her completely. The diplomat Ronen Sen (later ambassador to Russia) remembers, ‘[The Soviets] even erased Indira Gandhi from their history books.’20 Upon her return to power, a peeved Indira first visited the United States before travelling to Moscow.

  As foreign minister, Rao was also witnessing a revolution in China, with whom India shared a 3500-km-long border.21 After Mao’s death in 1976, Deng had emerged victorious in the succession struggle. Deng opened the economy to domestic and foreign enterprise in late 1978, and Rao was primed to watch China abandon Maoism for the Market, all the while paying lip service to the glories of the first chairman of the Communist Party of China. Rao’s admiration for Deng’s ability to wrap change in the garb of continuity was evident in a later interview: ‘[Deng’s] thinking was the single largest factor in giving a new orientation to the Chinese political philosophy, still not doing away with prevailing beliefs in their external manifestations. I am reminded of the genius of the Hindu Law, which brought out different practical results from a particular Sutra to suit different areas and customs prevalent in them—by the method of multiple interpretation of the same Sutra by different commentators. Deng’s miracle is an object lesson to those wedded to different interpretations.’22

  Years
later, in 1991, prime minister Narasimha Rao would prove an apt pupil of Deng, praising the socialism of the Nehru-Gandhis, all the while adroitly abandoning their policies.

  Despite Rao’s initial hesitation on foreign affairs, he proved an able apprentice. Having learnt from his debacle as chief minister, he was now calibrated rather than impulsive. This Narasimha Rao was a natural diplomat. He was also, by 1982, one of Indira’s most trusted advisors, along with Pranab Mukherjee and R. Venkataraman. Party papers and government files from other ministries would be redrafted by him.23 Rao’s emollient style also made him Indira’s point man with secessionist groups, many of whom prime minister Rao would outwit in the 1990s. When Rao was prime minister and Pranab Mukherjee was making a meandering return from his own exile, Pranab would gushingly remember Rao’s relationship with Indira Gandhi during the early 1980s. ‘Mrs Gandhi depended on him so deeply that [on] any major issue . . . be it the problem of Punjab or that of Assam or that of Sri Lanka, P.V. Narasimha Rao was the first person to be consulted . . . and to be entrusted with the job.’24

  Rao selected a young diplomat to assist him. The unassuming Ramu Damodaran, son of a freedom fighter and storied diplomat, later worked for the United Nations in New York. In 1983, he helped Rao navigate the twin roles of foreign minister and domestic troubleshooter. Damodaran recalls that this dual responsibility once had unintended consequences.25 ‘I suggested that Rao as foreign minister meet new Indian Foreign Service [IFS] officers one-on-one for fifteen minutes each. Rao agreed, and it was pencilled into his diary. Meanwhile, a minor flunky working in the prime minister’s office called up Rao and told him that he had to meet with leaders from Punjab, a state where separatism was a growing concern. This assistant scheduled these meetings at the same time that Rao was supposed to meet with the IFS probationers. The probationers were not told of this, and at the appointed time, went to meet with Rao. The first ranking man walked into the foreign minister’s office, and Rao spoke for fifteen uninterrupted minutes about the importance of staying within the Indian Union. When the perplexed diplomat left, the next one walked in to be lectured about the importance of non-violence. It was only when the third one came in that Rao realized something was amiss.’