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

  VINAY SITAPATI

  HALF LION

  How P.V. Narasimha Rao transformed India

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  1. Half-burnt Body

  2. Andhra Socialist, 1921–71

  3. Puppet Chief Minister, 1971–73

  4. Exile, 1973–74

  5. Delhi Durbar, 1975–91

  6. Monk to Monarch

  7. Rescuing the Economy, 1991–92

  8. Growing the Economy, 1992–96

  9. A Welfare State?

  10. Surviving Party and Parliament

  11. Managing Sonia

  12. The Fall of Babri Masjid

  13. Look East, Look West

  14. Going Nuclear

  15. Lion, Fox, Mouse

  Illustrations

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  A prince . . . must imitate the fox and the lion. For the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognise traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.

  Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, circa 1513 AD

  The demon king Hiranyakashipu performs penance to achieve immortality. He is granted a boon that he will die neither on earth nor in space, neither in the day nor night, neither at home nor outside—neither by a human nor animal. Confident of cheating death by this clever device, the demon starts believing he is God and unleashes terror. His devout son Prahlada continues to worship Lord Vishnu as all-pervasive. Enraged, Hiranyakashipu points to a pillar and mockingly asks if Vishnu is present within. He shatters the pillar with his mace. Out of the shards emerges Narasimha, an incarnation of Vishnu. Narasimha—half-man, half-lion—kills Hiranyakashipu. The time is twilight, the place is the courtyard, and Hiranyakashipu is killed on Narasimha’s lap, neither earth nor space. The ambiguities and contradictions of Narasimha, half-lion, are precisely why he is able to slay the demon.

  Story from Narasimha Avatar, Bhagvata Purana, 900 AD1

  1

  Half-Burnt Body

  The corpse was clad in white dhoti and golden silk kurta.1 At 2.30 p.m., it was brought from Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences to 9 Motilal Nehru Marg. P.V. Narasimha Rao, prime minister of India from 1991 to 1996, had died at around 11 a.m., 23 December 2004. The doctors had needed a couple of hours to dress the body before sending it back home.

  One of the first people to arrive at Rao’s house was Chandraswami, the bearded guru who had known him since 1971.2 Also present were his eight sons and daughters—whom he had kept at a distance—as well as the nephews and grandchildren he had been closer to. Eldest son, Ranga Rao—who had fought bitterly with his father—was inconsolable.

  Then began the politics.

  The home minister, Shivraj Patil, suggested to Rao’s youngest son, Prabhakara, that ‘the body should be cremated in Hyderabad’. But the family preferred Delhi. After all, Rao had last been chief minister of Andhra Pradesh more than thirty years ago, and had since worked as Congress general secretary, Union minister, and finally prime minister—all in Delhi. On hearing this, the usually decorous Shivraj Patil snapped, ‘No one will come.’3

  Kashmiri Congressman Ghulam Nabi Azad, another aide of party president Sonia Gandhi, arrived. He too requested the family to move the body to Hyderabad. An hour later, Prabhakara received a call on his mobile phone. It was Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy, the Congress chief minister of Andhra Pradesh and no friend of Narasimha Rao’s. ‘I just heard about it,’ Reddy said, ‘I am near Anantapur, and I’ll be in Delhi by this evening. Take it from me. We will give him a grand funeral [in Hyderabad].’

  At 6.30 p.m., Sonia Gandhi entered the house in Motilal Nehru Marg, named after her great-grandfather-in-law. Prime minister Manmohan Singh followed, along with Pranab Mukherjee. They walked through the long corridor to the room at the end where Rao’s body, now decked in flowers, was displayed. ‘What do you want to do with the body?’ the prime minister asked Prabhakara. ‘These people say it should be in Hyderabad.’ ‘This [Delhi] is his karmabhoomi,’ Prabhakara replied, ‘you should convince your Cabinet colleagues.’ Manmohan nodded. Sonia Gandhi was standing nearby. She said little.

  The journalist Sanjaya Baru arrived. His bureaucrat father knew Rao from the 1960s. As Baru entered the corridor, Sonia’s political secretary tapped him on the shoulder. ‘You know the family,’ Ahmed Patel said. ‘The body should be taken to Hyderabad. Can you convince them?’ Baru continued walking towards the end of the corridor, when he heard someone cry. He turned left to see Kalyani Shankar sobbing in a side room.4 Kalyani had been Rao’s most trusted friend for the last two decades.

  Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy had by now reached Delhi. ‘It is our government, trust me,’ he told Rao’s family. ‘Let him be moved to Hyderabad. We will build a grand memorial for him there.’ Rao’s daughter S. Vani Devi says, ‘YSR was playing a major role in convincing [the] family to get the dead body to Hyderabad.’5

  The family wanted a commitment that a memorial would be built for Rao in Delhi. The Congress leaders present said yes. But considering how the party had treated Rao in his retirement, the family wanted to make doubly sure. At 9.30 p.m., they paid a visit to the one man who had stood by Narasimha Rao in the last years of his life. Manmohan Singh was wearing his nightdress, a white kurta-pyjama, when Rao’s family met him at his official residence on Race Course Road. When Shivraj Patil explained the demand for a memorial in Delhi, Manmohan replied, ‘No problem, we will do it.’6

  Prabhakara recalls, ‘We sensed even then that Sonia-ji did not want Father’s funeral in Delhi. She did not want a memorial [in Delhi] . . . She did not want him [to be seen] as an all-India leader . . . [But] there was pressure.’

  ‘We agreed.’

  The next day, 24 December 2004, leaders from across the political spectrum—from communists to BJP leaders—all came to pay their respects.7 At 10 a.m., the body was draped in the national flag, put on a flower-decked carriage pulled by an army vehicle, and escorted by military personnel8 in a slow procession towards the airport. Along the way, they planned to stop at 24 Akbar Road, the Congress party headquarters. Ever since Narasimha Rao had first moved into 9, Motilal Nehru Marg in 1980, he had made this journey countless times.

  As the body approached 24 Akbar Road, located adjacent to Sonia Gandhi’s residence, the funeral procession slowed. The entrance gate to the compound looked firmly shut. There were several senior Congressmen present, but hardly any cadres had been rustled up.9 No slogans filled the air, just deathly silence. The carriage stopped on the pavement outside, as Sonia Gandhi and others came out to pay their respects.

  It was customary for the bodies of past Congress presidents to be taken inside the party headquarters so that ordinary workers could pay their respects. The family was somewhat dazed when this did not happen. A friend of Rao’s asked a senior Congresswoman to let the body in. ‘The gate does not open,’ she replied. ‘This was untrue,’ the friend remembers. ‘When Madhavrao Scindia died [some years earlier] the gate was opened for him.’ Manmohan Singh now lives in a guarded bungalow a few minutes from Akbar Road. When asked why Rao’s body wasn’t allowed into the Congress headquarters, he replies that he was present, but has no knowledge of this.10 Another Congressman is more forthcoming. ‘We were expecting the gate to be opened . . . but no order came. Only one person could give that order.’

  He adds, ‘She did not give it.’

  After thirty awkward minutes,11 the cortège moved on to the airport, where the body was placed on an AN-32 plane of the Indian
Air Force. The plane reached Hyderabad airport at 4.55 p.m.12 The entire state Cabinet and bureaucracy, led by the chief minister and the governor, was present to receive the body. The coffin, draped in the national colours of orange, white and green was carefully lowered from the plane, with a guard of honour provided by soldiers of the Gorkha regiment of the Indian Army. The soldiers wanted to place the coffin on a gun carriage, but it would not fit. They improvised, placing rubber sheets under the coffin, and using a nylon rope the soldiers fastened it to the gun carriage.13 Narasimha Rao, experimenter of objects and ideas, would have approved.

  Body secured, the carriage made its way through the streets of Hyderabad, mourners on either side, till it reached Jubilee Hall in the centre of the city. Here the body lay in state for an entire day, as thousands streamed past to pay their respects.14

  Meanwhile, the Andhra chief minister stuck to his word, and oversaw preparations for the funeral on a four-acre site by the banks of Hussain Sagar lake.15 The funeral took place at 1 p.m. the next day. Prime minister Manmohan Singh made it a point to attend. K. Natwar Singh, then a senior Congressman, remembers, ‘Manmohan was not happy with the treatment of the body [in Delhi].’16

  Apart from the prime minister, most of his Cabinet as well as former prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda were present. As was the BJP’s L.K. Advani—the man who chose not to become prime minister in 1996, in part after Rao had ordered hawala corruption charges filed against him.17 Also paying their respects were 12,000 ordinary citizens of India, many of whom had come all the way from Rao’s ancestral village of Vangara.

  Congress President Sonia Gandhi chose not to be present.

  As Ranga Rao lit the pyre, he broke down and was comforted by his younger brothers.18 When the dignitaries left a couple of hours later, the body was still burning. That night, television channels showed visuals of the half-burnt body, skull still visible, lying abandoned.19 Stray dogs were pulling at the funeral pyre.

  Rao’s long-time aide, P.V.R.K. Prasad, was covering the funeral for a local television channel. He rubbishes the claim that Rao’s body was only half-burnt.20 ‘The body had been burnt, but the ashes continued to give [an] outline to where the body was.’ Prasad adds, ‘This was more in [the] minds of the people. They knew he had been forced to come to Hyderabad . . . the body had not been allowed into the Congress office.’

  Prasad then slows his speech to emphasize each word.

  ‘The story [of the half-burnt body] was an expression of public anger at Rao’s humiliation.’

  In the twelve years since his death, P.V. Narasimha Rao continues to be ignored by his party. The Congress was in power in both the Centre and in the state of Andhra Pradesh from 2004 to 2014. No memorial was built for him during this period. The government did not officially celebrate his birthday every year.21 This was instead done privately by Rao’s family in Delhi. They were helped by Rao’s personal staff, friends and M.S. Bitta, the Punjab Congressman sidelined for his proximity to Rao. Since filling up a hall for Narasimha Rao in Delhi was not easy, Bitta used to bus peasants from Punjab. ‘They were there for free food and drinks,’22 Sanjaya Baru, who would attend the event, remembers. ‘They didn’t know anything about Rao.’

  The one Congressman who would punctually attend these birthday celebrations was prime minister Manmohan Singh. When asked why he chose to defy an unwritten code of his party, Manmohan replies that Rao gave him full freedom on economic reform. Going for a memorial service one day in a year was a small price to pay. ‘I wanted to respect his memory.’23

  Captain Lakshmikantha, a relative of Rao, is a politician from the regional party Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS). When his party was in a coalition with the Congress in Andhra Pradesh in 2012, he remembers petitioning for a statute of Rao to be erected in Warangal. ‘The local Congress people blocked the plan,’ Lakshmikantha says. ‘If the statue is built, then they have to go garland [it]. If someone takes a photo and Sonia madam sees it . . . they did not want that.’24

  There was one basic reason for Sonia Gandhi’s dislike of Narasimha Rao. As K. Natwar Singh puts it, ‘Rao realized that he didn’t have to report to Sonia as prime minister. He didn’t. She resented that.’25 An aristocrat from the princely state of Bharatpur, Natwar was married to the daughter of the maharaja of Patiala. He had spent much of his life as a diplomat, before joining the Congress party, rebelling against prime minister Narasimha Rao, and then becoming Sonia Gandhi’s closest aide. Natwar would end his career like Rao, abandoned by Sonia, cast out by his own party.

  The subtle sidelining of Rao has been accompanied by more blatant attempts to tar his legacy. On economic liberalization, the Congress narrative seeks to credit Rajiv Gandhi for the ideas, and Manmohan Singh for the execution. As Sonia Gandhi said during the 125th anniversary celebrations of the Congress party, ‘Rajiv-ji did not stay with us to see his dreams being realized, but we can see reflections of his thoughts in the party manifesto for the 1991 elections. That became the basis for economic policies for the next five years.’26

  The other criticism of Rao has been on his role in the fall of Babri Masjid in December 1992. Congress leader Jairam Ramesh—otherwise an admirer of Narasimha Rao—says that ‘99.99 per cent of the Congress party believes that Rao connived in the destruction of the Babri Masjid. And that clouds the judgment of every Congressman.’27 Rahul Gandhi publicly claimed that had his family been in power in 1992, the Babri Masjid would not have fallen.28 Since the Congress was anxious to denounce its own for the demolition, other parties felt no need to contest the claim.

  This absence of a political constituency meant that Rao was also blamed for other sins—from letting Union Carbide chairman Warren Anderson go free after the Bhopal gas leak,29 to allowing Sikhs to be killed in Delhi in 1984.30 As Congress leader Salman Khurshid says, ‘[Rao] is a tragic figure, remembered for so much that went wrong, but not for so much that went right.’31

  The Congress assault on Rao’s record has been supplemented by left-wing parties and intellectuals. They blame Rao for ‘pro-rich policies’, which, in the words of veteran communist Somnath Chatterjee, ‘had brought untold miseries to the people’.32 It is essential to this intellectual project that Rao also be blamed for Babri Masjid. For, communalism and capitalism, Marxists believe, are two sides of the same coin.

  With no group willing to stand up for him, these criticisms have contributed to Rao’s public disgrace.

  That has been changing in the past few years, with newly converted devotees—as hagiographic as his detractors are blistering—attempting to resurrect his legacy.

  In Telangana, the TRS has adopted Rao as a local icon in a newly formed state looking for regional heroes. Starting in 2014, the Telangana state government has chosen to officially celebrate his birth anniversary in Hyderabad every year. It has announced that Rao’s life will be taught to schoolchildren,33 and a district and university renamed after him.34 In 2015, the new BJP Central government built a memorial ghat for Rao in Delhi. The BJP’s finance minister, Arun Jaitley, calls Rao ‘India’s best Congress prime minister’.

  ‘He showed it is possible to be a Congressman without being from the Family,’ he says.35

  This nascent political revival is anchored in ideological waters. As a ‘right-wing’ intellectual discourse takes shape in India—loudly on Twitter and television, more subtly in think tanks and some universities—Rao is being sculpted as the hero who freed India’s economy and ended Nehruvian socialism. Subramanian Swamy, a poster boy for this emerging discourse, has demanded a Bharat Ratna for Narasimha Rao.36

  These disagreements over Rao’s legacy—between left and right, the Congress and its opponents—are really contestations over competing ideas of India. They revolve around a few key questions that deserve well-researched answers. What was Rao’s role in the liberalization reforms? Have they transformed India for the better, or have they made the poor worse off? Why was he selected prime minister? Did he secretly want the Babri mosque demolished? Why
did Sonia Gandhi and Narasimha Rao fall out? How did he survive a hostile Parliament and party to last a full term in office? Did he set India off on a new foreign policy path, or was the shift inevitable? Are the corruption charges against him true? And is Narasimha Rao India’s most transformational leader since Jawaharlal Nehru?

  That Rao’s five years in office transformed India is hard to dispute. When Rao became prime minister in 1991, the economy was folding up. By 1996, India was growing at 7.5 per cent. Narasimha Rao inherited a ‘welfare state’ that was inefficient and underfunded. Many of the large social schemes that India has now undertaken—from employment guarantees to food security—were first initiated during his reign. Rao came to power when India’s main global partner, the Soviet Union, was in slow collapse. By the time he left, India had improved relations with the US, Israel, China as well as East Asia.

  The India of 1991 was fraying at the edges. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) had just killed Rao’s Congress predecessor. Elections had to be postponed in Kashmir and Punjab, because the Indian government could not guarantee peace in either state. And insurrection in the North-east showed no signs of easing. By the time Rao left office, Punjab and Assam had been pacified, and the worst of the violence in Kashmir was over. Narasimha Rao also transformed the very idea of the Congress. A party that had grown used to anchoring itself around a single family was—even if briefly—prospering without them.

  The reforms Narasimha Rao unleashed have also transformed India in the everyday. In 1991, the middle-class numbered no more than 30 million,37 compared to 300 million in 2013.38 There were only 2.3 million kilometres of roads in 1991, compared to double that in 2012.39 Flying was expensive, with only one option, the state-owned Indian Airlines. A mere ten million passengers travelled by air in 199140—compared to 82 million in 2014.41 Train travel was cheaper but meant waiting in queue for months, with no certainty of a confirmed berth. The one accomplishment was telephone connectivity, a result of prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s target of a telephone booth in every village. But so low was the bar for ‘accomplishment’ in the India of 1991 that the number of subscribers was only five million.42 Compare that to 2015, where India has nearly a billion phone subscriptions.43