So thoroughly had Rao gained Indira’s confidence, that in 1982, she considered him for the role of President of India. P.C. Alexander, then Indira Gandhi’s principal secretary, recalls that Zail Singh’s and Narasimha Rao’s names were both floated.26 But southern politicians, especially Tamil Nadu’s Dravidian parties, preferred a Sikh over a Brahmin, and Zail Singh was made President. Rao had seen so many U-turns in his career that he did not show his disappointment, remaining Indira’s trusted problem-solver.
The one problem that Rao’s diplomatic skills could not solve was Punjab. By 1984, the state was ungovernable. Sikh separatists, led by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, had taken over the Golden Temple in Amritsar, from where they directed attacks on Hindus in the rest of Punjab. Told that ending the violence meant taking control of Sikhism’s most revered site, Indira ordered the Indian Army to storm the Golden Temple on 3 June 1984. By the time the operation ended five days later, Bhindranwale, 700 soldiers and more than 2000 others had been killed.27 The shrine itself was bulleted and burnt.
Throughout the military operation, Narasimha Rao was in Jakarta on an official visit along with K. Natwar Singh, then a senior diplomat. When news of damage to the Golden Temple reached them, Rao was exasperated. He had presided over the largest number of meetings with Sikh leaders,28 and had invested much in a negotiated solution. He had always believed that faced with so emotional a regional and religious issue, the centre should play fox instead of lion. But he had by now learnt the first rule of the Delhi durbar: the monarch is never wrong. When an angry Natwar told Narasimha Rao, ‘This is a great tragedy. It could have been avoided. The Sikhs will neither forget nor forgive,’ he remembers how Rao said much while saying nothing. ‘Deep in thought, Narasimha Rao’s silence was eloquent enough.’29
Internal security was now prime minister Indira Gandhi’s priority. In July 1984, a month after the damage to the Golden Temple, she decided to move her trusted foreign minister to the critical ministry of home affairs. Narasimha Rao was now in charge of protecting the nation from enemies within.
On 31 October 1984, three months into his new job, Narasimha Rao was visiting the city of Warangal in Andhra Pradesh. Around 10.15 a.m., he received a message that Indira Gandhi had been shot.30 She had been walking to a television interview within her guarded house in New Delhi an hour earlier, when her two Sikh bodyguards sprayed her with bullets. Her daughter-in-law Sonia had rushed her to hospital, but to no avail. On hearing the news, Narasimha Rao recollected that he ‘left Warangal at about 1.00 pm by special plane of BSF, reached Delhi airport around 5.00 pm and state way [sic] went to AIIMS [hospital]’.31
Rajiv Gandhi was sworn in as prime minister that evening, despite the protestations of his wife. Rajiv had become the heir apparent of the party after the sudden death of his brother, Sanjay. As darkness fell, armed Congress thugs fanned out from AIIMS hospital, where Indira’s body was kept, to meet local supporters and arm them with kerosene, knives and voter lists that located where Sikhs lived. A pogrom was being planned.
Delhi was a union territory at the time, and the police chief reported directly to the Union home minister, Narasimha Rao. That evening, as police dispatches began to report attacks against Sikhs, Rao was in his office in the home ministry in North Block on Raisina Hill talking to a bureaucrat from the ministry. This bureaucrat recalls vividly what happened next, though he has never spoken about it publicly for fear of forfeiting his career. His evidence is crucial in assessing Rao’s complicity in the killings that followed.
According to this bureaucrat, the telephone rang at around 6 p.m. On the line was a young Congressman known for his proximity to Rajiv Gandhi. He told Narasimha Rao about the attacks against Sikhs living in Delhi, and spoke of the need to ‘coordinate a single response to the violence’. Henceforth, ‘all information [on the violence] should be sent to the PMO [prime minister’s office]’. The reason was one of efficiency, but the result was that home minister Rao was bypassed. Reports from local police stations were now sent directly to the prime minister’s office.
An hour or two after Rao had been sidelined, the lawyer Ram Jethmalani met him and urged that the army be called in to protect the city’s Sikh population. Jethmalani was struck by the fact that Rao appeared unconcerned. He also noticed that throughout the thirty-minute meeting, Rao was not in contact with police officers, by phone or in person.32 With the prime minister’s office in direct control of the police, the home minister knew he had been made redundant.
The next morning, the first Sikh was reported killed. He was to be one of an official total of 2733 knifed, burnt, shot or beaten to death in four days of mob fury. Later that day, the former law minister Shanti Bhushan met Narasimha Rao in his house to ask him to stop the violence. He remembers the home minister picking up the phone and talking to someone to convince them to take action.33 Bhushan infers from this that there was a higher-up who had given instructions to the police to stand by.
Rao spent that first day, 1 November, as well as the next, evaluating the change of guard within the party, as well as preparing to receive foreign leaders arriving for the funeral. Rao’s behaviour on these crucial days recalls the lines of Tacitus, the first-century CE Roman historian: ‘The higher a man’s rank, the more eager his hypocrisy, and his looks the more carefully studied, so as neither to betray joy at the decease of one emperor nor sorrow at the rise of another, while he mingled delight and lamentations with his flattery.’34
Meanwhile, policemen did little while Congress mobs roamed the streets of Delhi, killing turbaned Sikhs, setting fire to their houses, and looting their shops. At Indira’s funeral on 3 November, Narasimha Rao, eager to display devotion, headed the procession.35 The violence eventually subsided. For the Congress party, the taint had just begun.
Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister on the evening of 31 October, before the slaughter had commenced. One public word from Rajiv would have ended the violence. There is no evidence that he directly ordered the killings; rather, his silence allowed party thugs to loot and murder in his name. The investigation into the murder of Sikhs, by successive Congress governments, would be abysmal. Convictions were few, and the implicated leaders continued in the party.36 A fortnight after the killings, Rajiv would dismiss the violence with ‘whenever a mighty tree falls, it is only natural that the earth around it does shake a little’.37
It is true that commission after commission investigating the massacre have cleared Narasimha Rao of any role in the violence and, as the evidence suggests, he was under a direct order from the prime minister’s office to stand down. But he was home minister of the nation, formally in control of the Delhi Police. He could have defied his prime minister’s henchmen, ordered the police to act, and called in the army on 31 October itself, before the killings began. A public statement by him may have shamed Rajiv into acting sooner. Such an open revolt against his party would have meant political oblivion for Narasimha Rao, who had by now perfected the art of being a loyal number two.
Rao’s career in the Congress would have surely ended had he ignored instructions—both categorical and couched—from his party. But it would have set him apart from the others who allowed evil to take place in those four days of 1984. It was his vilest hour.
A month after the murder of 2733 Sikhs, a pesticide plant in Bhopal, operated by the multinational Union Carbide, negligently released 30 tonnes of methyl isocyanate. At least 5000 people were killed, and 6,00,000 thousand more affected.38 It was the world’s largest industrial disaster,39 and was to spark a global movement against western MNCs exploiting the Third World.
Four days after the catastrophe, when prime minister Rajiv Gandhi visited Bhopal, he spoke with the chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, Arjun Singh. In his autobiography, Arjun Singh says, ‘Even today I cannot reveal what he told me. It’s a state secret that I shall carry to my grave.’40 When the chairman and CEO of Union Carbide, Warren Anderson, landed in Bhopal the next day, he was arrested. What remain controversial
to this day are the circumstances under which Anderson was then allowed to leave for the United States, never to return. Arjun Singh claims that the orders for Anderson’s release came from the home minister.41 Even if Singh is to be believed—and given his later attack on prime minister Rao, this is a big if—the cautious Rao would have only acted on the orders of his boss, the then prime minister of India.
National elections were held later that month. The Congress party campaign resorted to innuendos against the entire Sikh community. One political advertisement warned, ‘India could be your vote away from unity or separation’.42 Narasimha Rao contested from both his old seat of Hanamkonda, as well as the constituency of Ramtek in eastern Maharashtra. This was done on the advice of Indira Gandhi, who had told Rao before her death: ‘I am getting indications that you will not win in Hanamkonda. I would like you to contest from Ramtek also.’43 Narasimha Rao convinced crowds in both Telugu and Marathi, and photos from the campaign show an energetic Rao speaking in front of a garlanded photograph of Indira Gandhi.44
The results stunned even the Congress. It had gained 49 per cent of the electorate and 404 of the 543 seats. Rajiv had won more seats, and won over more Indians, than his mother or grandfather ever had. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), established in 1980, was reduced to just two seats. There was a surge of affection for the young prime minister. Many Indians felt that an honest man with a modern outlook had received the mandate necessary to transform their country. Narasimha Rao’s own election results were mixed. He had won from Ramtek, but lost from Hanamkonda. Death approaching, had Indira Gandhi turned prescient?
In prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s new Cabinet, Rao was shifted from the home ministry to defence. It was an ever so subtle demotion, and Lutyens insiders noticed. There were rumours that Rajiv was planning to move away from the ageing coterie which had advised his mother and cultivate a younger generation of advisors. Rajiv surrounded himself with anglicized friends like Arun Singh and Mani Shankar Aiyar, who like him, had studied at the Doon School and Oxbridge. Satish Sharma, Rajiv’s pilot friend from Indian Airlines, was the other entrant into his inner circle. Sharma too had a European wife, and they would all socialize in the rarefied drawing rooms of Delhi. This world was aeons away from that of the more vernacular Narasimha Rao. At sixty-three, he was also twenty-three years older than his prime minister. He had mastered Indira’s mind, but was yet to fathom his new master.
Some months after the elections, Narasimha Rao was present in the room when Rajiv Gandhi told a friend that he intended to open up electronic and computer imports to India. ‘But the old guard in my party will not understand,’ Rajiv complained within earshot of his defence minister. Narasimha Rao said little.
That evening, he called up his son, the engineer Prabhakara. The home computer revolution had only begun in the late 1970s, and computers were a novelty even in the United States. ‘You keep talking about this computer thing. What is it? Send me one,’ Rao said.45 The next day, Prabhakara sent a prototype to Delhi. Prabhakara also hired a computer specialist to teach his father. Ever the technophile, Rao bought manuals to read on his own, and within fifteen days, told the specialist he was redundant. Over the years, Rao would master two computer languages, COBOL and BASIC, and would also go on to write code in the mainframe operating system UNIX. Narasimha Rao’s love for learning had merged with his instinct for political survival.
And survive he did. Indira’s handyman rebooted himself to be in sync with Rajiv’s programme of technology and modernization. In the words of Pranab Mukherjee, ‘[Rao’s indispensability] was clearly demonstrated when Mr Rajiv Gandhi formed his government and he wanted to have a new team. But it was recognized that without P.V. Narasimha Rao there cannot be a team. Therefore, he not only continued as minister in various ministries with which he dealt, but also he proved to be indispensable in the Congress ministry.’46 During Cabinet meetings, Rao would be seated to the left of Rajiv.47 Other Indira loyalists such as P.C. Alexander were soon eased out. Pranab left to form his own party. But Rao remained, as prominent in the new republic as he had been in the ancien régime.
Dr V.S. Arunachalam was then leading a number of India’s nuclear and covert technological programmes. He remembers telling Rajiv Gandhi about the need to talk to the Israelis to exchange information on the F-16 planes and other US technologies that were being sold to Pakistan. India did not then have full diplomatic relations with Israel. ‘Have you told the defence minister [Rao]?’ Rajiv asked. When Arunachalam said that he had, Rajiv was reassured.48 When Rajiv gave Arunachalam and Naresh Chandra the secret approval for nuclear weaponization in 1988-89, Narasimha Rao was the only other politician (apart from President R. Venkataraman) Rajiv thought fit to inform.
The new prime minister was passionate about raising the education level among Indians. In September 1985, Narasimha Rao was told that Rajiv Gandhi wanted him to take charge of the education ministry, which would be renamed the ‘Human Resource Development Ministry’. His secretary, Ramu Damodaran, remembers Rao asking for a list of all ministries and any pending files at the defence ministry. When the files returned the next morning in a steel box, Ramu noticed a handwritten note that Rao must have inadvertently placed among them.49
With ‘Human Resource Development’ as the heading, it contained an excerpt from an author Rao enjoyed, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: ‘A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.’ Below this, Rao had written: ‘Women and Child Development. Health. Youth Affairs/Sports. Culture. Labour?’
The note was returned to Rao and he slipped it into the pocket of his kurta. Later that morning, he went to see the prime minister. He told Rajiv, ‘We see a rock pile of disorganized, underutilized human resources. You see a cathedral. We can fashion it, but we need to go beyond just the Ministry of Education.’
Rao persuaded Rajiv to integrate the departments of culture, youth affairs, sports, women and child development (and later, health) with education into the new ‘HRD’ ministry.50 Critically, Rao did not insist on adding ‘labour’ to the mix. An aide says, ‘[This was because] the focus of that ministry [was] on protecting the interests of existing workers rather than creating opportunities for new ones.’
After the razzmatazz of defence, home and foreign affairs, the new portfolios would have traditionally been considered punishment postings. But Narasimha Rao was not a traditional man. The former health and education minister of Andhra Pradesh took to his new roles with old relish. They were to provide him the training needed to expand India’s welfare state as prime minister in the 1990s.
In May 1986, he drafted the national education policy.51 What was remarkable about the policy was that it took implementation seriously.52 Education researcher Akshay Mangla lists the problems in primary education at the time. ‘National surveys on education revealed that 40 per cent of primary schools had no blackboards, two-thirds of all classes (grades 1–5) were taking place in one or two classrooms and almost one-third of primary schools had only one teacher.’53 Rao’s policy response ensured that every school would have at least two classrooms, two teachers and instructional materials. Narasimha Rao’s time as education minister also saw the creation of the Navodaya school system. A brainchild of Rajiv Gandhi, the aim was to provide centrally run residential schools in every district so that rural children could access quality education.54 It was not just these ideas that were a departure from the past, it was their implementation. As Rao would demonstrate once again as prime minister, he cared less about lofty words in a policy document, and more about the actual impact on the lives of poor children.
For much of this period, Rao was also in charge of the culture ministry. Like education, it was considered a lightweight. Like with education, Rao’s interests made him suited to the task. The minister’s expertise, however, did not always make up for bureaucratic clumsiness, as this story reveals.
In preparation for the Festival of India
in Moscow in 1987, a film on Ardhanareeshwara, the androgynous depiction of a composite of Lord Shiva and his wife Parvati, was conceived by the dancer Chandralekha and shot by the Kerala film-maker G. Aravindan. The film was to be shown in the ‘Stree: Women in India’ exhibition at the festival. The staid bureaucrats in the ministry were hesitant to accept the film, worried that themes of sexuality would show India in a prurient light. The cultural critic Sadanand Menon, who assisted in the making of the film, remembers the culture minister being requested to see the documentary.55
Narasimha Rao loved it. One of his favourite Telugu books Veyi Padagalu—which Rao had translated into Hindi in 1968—describes a scene in which a village artiste dresses up as both Parvati and Lord Shiva, one half of his face portraying the sensitivity of Parvati while the other half depicted a serious Shiva. Similar to his fascination for words with multiple meanings, Rao identified with the ambiguities of Ardhanareeshwara. His own dual personality as well as political experience had taught him that success in life required one to play contradictory roles. Sadanand Menon remembers Rao overruling his bureaucrats, saying, ‘Such a film should be screened in schools to educate children.’56
Half - Lion: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India Page 7