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

by Vinay Sitapati

  Rao’s varied persona also gave him hobbies when exiled from politics—as he was in 1973 and ’76 by Indira, 1991 by Rajiv, and post-’98 by Sonia Gandhi. While the curse of politicians the world over is that they don’t know how to ‘exit’ with grace,31 Rao could distance himself from power. It contributed to his unique insight into it.

  Rao’s most adroit deployment of these skills is also perhaps the least acknowledged. Unlike in the case of economic reforms, welfare schemes, foreign policy or the nuclear programme—all dealt with in separate chapters in this book—Rao played only an indirect role in reducing separatist violence. But his interventions in Punjab, Kashmir and the North-east showcase perfectly, his ability to play lion, fox and mouse.

  When Narasimha Rao became prime minister, Kashmir and Punjab were under Central rule, while Assam was ruled by a chief minister being undermined by state Congressmen. Rao’s first act was to appoint his own team. When it came to Kashmir, he changed the governor. He would eventually give his home secretary, K. Padmanabhaiah, direct charge of Kashmir affairs. ‘That was a smart decision,’ the former RAW chief and Kashmir expert, A.S. Dulat, believes. ‘He was reporting straight to the PMO.’ Rao also enlisted the bureaucrat—and Sonia Gandhi favourite—Wajahat Habibullah to be his prime negotiator in Kashmir. When it came to Punjab, Rao appointed a new governor, and ensured that K.P.S. Gill was not moved out as police chief (despite constant complaints against him). He also gave the Assam chief minister, Hiteswar Saikia, his unconditional backing. Not only was Saikia under pressure from ULFA militants, he was facing dissent from within his own party. In November 1991, for example, Saikia sent Rao a secret letter—now archived amongst his papers—that state Congressmen were plotting to get him replaced.32 Rao chose to stand by Saikia through his years as prime minister.

  In addition to appointing his chosen men, Rao allowed some of the most ruthless assaults on militants during this period. Operations by the army and police wiped out the top militant leadership of ULFA in Assam and the Khalistanis in Punjab. ‘Rao knew exactly what was happening,’ an IB official coordinating the attacks remembers. ‘He even knew we were targeting [militants’] families.’

  Rao’s condonation of human rights abuses shows a pitiless politician, willing to do what it took to preserve the integrity of India. What made him such a bundle of contradictions, however, was his simultaneous belief in freedom and democracy.

  In the case of Punjab, Rao ordered elections to be held in 1992, despite every single official telling him not to.33 Though the elections were boycotted by the Akalis and the chief minister eventually killed in 1995, this judicious mix of carrot and stick had the desired effect. By the time Rao left in 1996, Punjab was on the way to normalcy.

  In the case of Kashmir, Rao was desperate to have elections in 1995. ‘Rao knew that the rigged elections [of 1987] was the catalyst for the insurgency,’ a police official from Kashmir says. ‘He wanted to undo that.’ His private papers are full of secret meetings he held with terrorists and freedom fighters of varying shades, imploring them to stand for elections instead.34

  Rao also ordered an unusually large development package for Kashmir. His most equipped socialist official, K.R. Venugopal, remembers: ‘The guiding and supervision of this effort was entrusted to me in the prime minister’s office.’35 Returning from one of his many visits to rural Kashmir, Venugopal told Rao, ‘The cultural alienation could be compared to the feelings in Telangana, excepting for there being no hostile power sitting on the borders.’

  Though Rao could not conduct elections during his tenure, they took place soon after, in 1996. And though Rao’s policies have not made the local population any less hostile towards India, they have created a semblance of normalcy and democracy in that troubled state.

  A.S. Dulat says, ‘His role in Kashmir followed the pattern of his economic reforms. He wanted to look ahead. When he became PM, it was the worst time in Kashmir. So obviously the old man believed this danda rule and military rule is OK up to a point. But he also believed: “We have to deal with the people, and we have to move on.”’36

  As prime minister, Rao also encouraged peace talks in the North-east. The Bodoland Autonomous Council was set up during his time. Rao proved willing to talk to every dissident, though he had no illusions about his powers to persuade. He once called Bodo separatists for a secret meeting in his house on Race Course Road. They seemed amenable, but Rao later told an aide: ‘Things always go well in the PM’s office. The question is what happens when they go back.’ Narasimha Rao also met—in secret—Naga separatist leaders in 1995 in Paris. Officials say that it helped lay the groundwork for peace talks undertaken by prime minister Narendra Modi twenty years later.37

  In every one of these manoeuvres, the former chief minister of Andhra Pradesh revealed a skill in dealing with state politicians that Indira Gandhi and Rajiv lacked. He knew the details and the players intimately. His dual personality was also comfortable with deploying a range of options—from brute force, to monetary allurements, to electoral enticements—and manage these mutinies.

  It is too much to credit one clever prime minister with reducing violence in Kashmir, Punjab and the North-east. Changes in external conditions, the exhaustion of locals with violence, effective counter-insurgency, and improved state governance mattered as much, if not more. But it remains to Rao’s credit that his calibrated responses aided the process rather than setting it back. ‘Rao was prepared to use sama, dana, bheda, danda . . . every technique,’ the journalist Shekhar Gupta says.38 It was a messy story, but it enabled perhaps Rao’s most underrated achievement: preserving the territorial integrity of his country.

  Rao’s transformation of India was assisted by his ability to select the right team. For Punjab, Kashmir and Assam, he had his favoured governors, negotiators and chief ministers. On foreign policy, he selected pragmatists who delivered. He retained the old team when it came to the nuclear programme. He chose pro-market reformers for the economy, while staffing his welfare schemes with socialists. Many of his team members did not see eye to eye, but Rao tolerated, perhaps even encouraged, a team of rivals. This was in contrast to Indira Gandhi, who liked sycophants, and Rajiv, who appointed childhood chums. Flattery or conviviality, Rao believed, was not the same as effectiveness.

  One of the reasons why Rao patronized talented people was that he was secure in his own abilities. He told an intelligence bureau man whom he turned to for advice, ‘I don’t like you. But you have insights I need.’ A proactive manager, Rao’s knowledge of files and rules was as good as his best bureaucrats. As Kalyani Shankar—his closest confidante—says, ‘He would listen to everybody, take everyone’s inputs. But he would always make up his own mind.’39

  Of all his team members, historically the most important was Manmohan Singh, who would later go on to become prime minister. Manmohan was not the only pro-market reformer Rao selected; his principal secretary, Amar Nath Varma, was arguably as important to the liberalization process. Neither was Manmohan Singh the first choice for finance minister; that was the pro-market economist I.G. Patel. But Manmohan played the role Rao had anticipated for him: he was a scrupulously honest technocrat who could both deflect blame from Rao as well as prod the prime minister when Rao’s instincts faltered. Unlike almost every other Congressman, Manmohan Singh never disowned his former boss, respecting him in retirement, attending his funeral, and gracing birthday celebrations held since. Manmohan also never belittled Rao’s role in liberalization.

  That was done by other members of the Congress, and by Narasimha Rao himself. Since economic reforms were politically dangerous in the 1990s, Rao found it convenient to ‘blame’ Rajiv Gandhi and Manmohan Singh for them. Rao’s success in obscuring his own role has worked against him. Few credit him, as this book does, with being the principal architect of India’s economic reforms.

  This cannot be emphasized enough. For, though Manmohan was critical to Rao’s team, he was not indispensable. Had I.G. Patel become finance
minister in 1991, liberalization would have likely persisted. But had Narasimha Rao not become prime minister, India would have been a different country.

  When the ex-chief minister Narasimha Rao returned to his village house in Vangara in 1974, he realized that the mud building was unsuited to the times. He decided to demolish it and build a brick and mortar structure in its place. Tellingly, and as we saw in an early chapter, Rao kept the original measurements—calculated according to vaastu architectural rules. Even while modernizing, Rao paid his respects to tradition.

  This small incident captures Rao’s larger philosophy. As foreign minister in the 1980s, he had noticed how Deng was able to reorient China towards the market by claiming he was only carrying out Mao’s wishes. For a system as complex as China’s, a sharp break from the past would have led to disarray. When Rao became prime minister, he too claimed that his economic and foreign policies were mere extensions of the past. And even as he moved towards the United States, Israel and East Asia, he balanced this with reassurances to old allies such as Russia.

  When faced with the advent of new technology—like computers, satellite television or mobile phones—Rao’s was not a Luddite’s instinct to regulate; he, instead, sought to adapt and adopt. The prime minister’s New Year greeting card for the year 1992 had a sketch of a spinning wheel smoothly turning into a mechanical gear. Typed below was the slogan ‘Change is the only constant’.40

  ‘How do you make a U-turn without making a U-turn? That’s a special Narasimha Rao art,’ Shekhar Gupta asked him in retirement. ‘It’s not like that,’ Rao replied. ‘If you understand that where you were standing is itself in motion, the turning becomes easier.’41

  Such a philosophy was both strategic as well as ingrained. The psychologist Ashis Nandy argues that ‘the tradition of India is to alter the dominant culture from within by showing dissent to be part of orthodoxy . . .”42

  Rao spoke ten languages (seven of which were Indic) and was a skilled translator. It was a skill that reflected his world view. As he put it, ‘We have this great tradition of interpretation, the Bhashyakara . . . [Nehru] took the text from Gandhiji. He moulded it, he interpreted it so as to be in continuity with Gandhiji and still different from what he started with. What we need today is persons who can imbibe Nehru not just as spongers.”43

  This mix of tradition and modernity, continuity and change, places Rao in the mould of the eighteenth-century Irish liberal Edmund Burke. Burke was a political reformer: he had fought to limit the powers of the British monarch, supported the American revolution, and opposed the British mistreatment of colonial India. Where Burke was not a progressive liberal was in his respect for local customs and a hurtling suspicion of radical change. For Burke, modern enlightenment was a product of traditions evolving over time, not their abandonment. Reform had to be gradual, taking the best of the past while improving upon it.44 If Chanakya, the fourth-century BCE Indian Machiavelli, best captures Rao’s skill in politics, the eighteenth-century Burke captures his vision.

  This political vision and skill enabled Narasimha Rao to reorient India’s economic, foreign, welfare, nuclear and federal policies. Rao’s idea of India was one that was open for business, sought to pragmatically shape the world order, pursued soft as well as hard power, stayed centralized while being sensitive to federal concerns, and used large social schemes to improve the lives of its marginalized. Later governments—inhabiting the entire range of ideological persuasions—have broadly followed his direction. But while they have built on, even improved, these ideas, it is Narasimha Rao who deserves credit for setting India off on a new direction.

  Narasimha Rao’s legacy also manifests in the everyday lives of most Indians. Real incomes of Indians across percentiles have increased. Most families—no matter how poor, how marginalized—are better off than they were before Narasimha Rao. Every time an Indian gives a missed call using her mobile phone, she has Rao to thank. The boom in private India—from corporate jobs to private airlines and toll roads—was possible largely because of Rao. The increase in social-sector schemes—from employment guarantee to better-targeted food subsidies—exemplifies Rao’s vision (and warts), while incorporating the new technology developed since then. Even the way Indians think of politics has changed, with voters now demanding service and performance rather than just being content with patronage.45

  Narasimha Rao lives on not just in this newer idea of India and the transformation of a billion lives, he persists in strategies that future prime ministers must use if they wish to succeed. This is because the contradictions that constrained Narasimha Rao continue to bind later Indian leaders. For, they are the paradoxes of Indians themselves.

  It is the Indian voter who is half a lion.

  We expect leaders who are all-powerful, without providing them a clear mandate. Five prime ministers since Rao were denied majority control of Parliament. It was only in 2014—almost twenty years after Rao’s time in office—that a prime minister actually commanded a full majority, and he too only got one-third of the popular vote. The Indian voter is unsure whether to centralize power or devolve it. When states misbehave, the expectation is that the Centre will intervene. When they do, it is portrayed as a threat to federalism.

  Indians have grown to expect the benefits of liberalisation—the large government schemes, the consumer options, the improvements in income. But voters are unwilling to reward political parties for espousing economic growth.

  Indians complain that the bureaucracy is unresponsive. Their private mobile phone provider responds quicker than the police. Yet few Indians would support the radical restructuring of the state, the firing of administrators who don’t perform. Most Indians know—and say so—that government schemes meant for them are siphoned off. But few are willing to agree that the pipeline needs refitting.

  We expect the highest moral standards of politicians, yet make it impossible for them to win without spending black money. Every time a scandal erupts, we take to the streets. But we are unwilling to turn those blips into sustained activism.

  Narasimha Rao’s genius was that his own ambiguities matched those of his countrymen. ‘India is destined to walk on [a] razor’s edge,’ he used to say. That India, that voter, has not changed, and the job of leading the world’s largest democracy remains mired in contradiction. Every prime minister—no matter what his disposition—will have to learn from P.V. Narasimha Rao. For, as long as Indians remain half-lions, so must their representatives. Rao may have been denied a Delhi funeral, refused entry into his party headquarters, and abandoned at his own cremation. But his legacy lives on.

  His half-burnt body continues to glow.

  Urdu Scholar: The fourteen-year-old Narasimha Rao (standing third from left) in an Urdu-medium school in 1936. He was one of Hyderabad state’s finest Urdu and Persian students.

  With family in 1944: Rao is holding his eldest son, Ranga, while wife Satyamma stands by his side. Rao’s parents are to his left, along with his two younger brothers.

  Mentor: Newly appointed Andhra Pradesh state minister Narasimha Rao along with his guru Ramananda Tirtha (centre) in 1962. On the right is Maharashtra Chief Minister Y.B. Chavan.

  Companion: Rao’s relationship with Lakshmi Kantamma would define his personal and political life.

  With Family as CM: Rao, along with his mother (seated), children and grandchildren. He has just become chief minister.

  Raging Bull: Chief Minister Narasimha Rao announcing his radical land reform plan on radio, 1972.

  Exile: Rao visits New York in 1974, his first time abroad. The trip was to impact the staunch socialist’s view of the West.

  The Emergency Crew: Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975 with senior Congressmen. General Secretary Rao is sitting at the centre.

  Marathi Campaigner: Rao canvassing from Ramtek in 1984. The garlanded photo of the recently killed Indira Gandhi is in the background.

  Still Number Two: Narasimha Rao with Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1987. />
  Best Friend: Rao first used a computer in 1986, and swiftly learnt three computer languages. As he contemplated retirement in 1990, he turned once again to his most trusted ally—his personal computer.

  The Fox: The PM welcomes PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat in January 1992. Rao orders this photo to be publicized. Soon after, he opens up full diplomatic relations with Israel.

  The Mouse: Rao with Sonia and Rahul mourning Rajiv Gandhi.

  With Confidantes: The prime minister on Air India One, returning from a visit abroad. His trusted principal secretary, Amar Nath Varma, is standing (in white shirt) on the left. To Varma’s right is Foreign Secretary J.N. Dixit. Rao’s close confidante, Kalyani Shankar, is first from right.

  Team PMO: Rao with Naresh Chandra (second from left), R.K. Khandekar (third from left), Bhuvanesh Chaturvedi (fourth from left), Manmohan Singh, Amar Nath Varma (to Manmohan Singh’s left) and P.V.R.K. Prasad (second from right).

  Philosopher King: Rao’s personal notes on the article ‘Clash of Civilizations’ by Samuel Huntington in 1993. Rao was a constant consumer of academic articles on foreign policy.

  Across Party Lines: Narasimha Rao hugging his close friend Atal Bihari Vajpayee soon after Vajpayee battled Pakistan in Geneva, 1994.

  Going Nuclear: The chairman of the top-secret nuclear weapons committee, Naresh Chandra, with Member Secretary APJ Abdul Kalam and Prime Minister Narasimha Rao. They are at the DRDO lab in Hyderabad.

  Managing Sonia: Sonia Gandhi sends Rao a polite letter of refusal in February 1995. A few months later, she would publicly accuse him of going slow on the investigation into her husband’s assassination.