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

  The ensuing struggle against the Nizam brought together the unlikeliest of allies. The Indian National Congress wanted to dethrone him and integrate Hyderabad state into secular, democratic India. The Hindu Mahasabha and Arya Samaj disliked the Islamic ruler. And in Telangana region, an armed insurrection against landlords had morphed into a communist rebellion. These three elements gave rise to an anti-Nizam movement that was secular, religious and radical. All at once.

  These features were embodied in the man who led the movement. Bald and clean-shaven, with penetrating eyes and saffron garb, Swami Ramananda Tirtha was a Hindu sadhu who was half-saint, half-politician—a persona which Mohandas Gandhi had perfected nationally. He spoke many languages, and was active in Telangana. He was president of the Hyderabad State Congress,38 and had attempted to convert it into a mass movement. Tirtha argued that land ownership should vest not just in the hands of the village agents (who were from the dominant castes)—land should pass on to the actual tiller (many of whom were low-caste Hindus). These radical views were resisted by party ‘moderates’ such as Mohandas Gandhi in Delhi and Burgula Ramakrishna Rao in Hyderabad. But Tirtha’s vision, infused with spirituality and socialism, proved irresistible to the twenty-six-year-old Narasimha Rao.

  Rao would later describe the left-wing Ramananda Tirtha as someone whose ‘saffron robes scared [some people] as Red rags’.39 Tirtha was to be the first of many religious figures with whom Rao would share a political relationship. But unlike the Chandraswamis and N.K. Sharmas who would come later, this power broker was guru first. Tirtha would mentor the future chief ministers of three states: Virendra Patil of Karnataka, S.B. Chavan of Maharashtra, and Narasimha Rao of Andhra Pradesh.40 No one would be more grateful than Rao. Before meeting him, Rao would wash his mouth carefully to make sure there was no trace of paan.41 In his later years, Rao would create a memorial for his dead guru, and when he himself died in 2004, Rao’s beloved books would live on there.

  Ramananda Tirtha’s influence over his young protégé is central to understanding chief minister Rao’s zeal for land reforms in the 1970s. It is also crucial to appreciating prime minister Rao’s attitude to the BJP and Hindu nationalists in the 1990s.

  That was to come later. In the struggle against the Nizam between August 1947 and September 1948, Narasimha Rao worked under Ramananda Tirtha, who was deploying the methods of both Gandhian resistance as well as violent struggle. Rao moved to a Congress camp in Chanda, Maharashtra, where he worked as a gunrunner, ferrying arms to groups plotting the Nizam’s downfall.

  These groups were opposed by the Nizam as well as a Muslim militia called the Razakars. Through this period, the Indian press reported atrocities by the Razakars against the state’s Hindu population, incidents which were used to make the case for military action.42 That came in September 1948, when India’s home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, sent in troops to annex Hyderabad into the Indian Union. This ‘police action’ ended the 224-year rule of the Nizams. It also brought retaliatory violence against the state’s Muslims. According to a government report commissioned by prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, between 27,000 and 40,000 Muslims were murdered after the liberation of Hyderabad.43 The Indian Army stood by and in some cases even participated in the killings.

  After September 1948, those who had fought the Nizam searched for a new career. Narasimha Rao, once again torn between his inner and outer ambitions, once again sided with the latter. His choice of a career in politics was not an affirmation, merely the preclusion of other alternatives. In his own words, he was a ‘hopeless misfit’; but a ‘mundane existence’ would have driven him mad.44 Politics was where Rao would finally belong.

  By 1948, the Indian National Congress had already transformed itself from a freedom movement to a political party. Since there was little opposition from other parties, political differences began to be reflected within the Congress. The contradictions of India—regions, castes, religions, personalities—were represented by groups arguing and manoeuvring inside the same party. As the political scientist Rajni Kothari first pointed out, this ‘Congress system’ made for energetic inner-party democracy.45 In Hyderabad state, for example, landed castes such as the Reddys and the Velamas began to compete with Brahmins for power within the party. There was also rivalry amongst the Brahmins. Rao’s former employer, the ‘moderate’ Burgula Ramakrishna Rao, was pitted against the ‘radical’ Ramananda Tirtha and his supporters.

  Narasimha Rao had to choose between master and mentor. He selected neither, cleverly cultivating a relationship with each bloc without alienating the other. As his career advanced, Rao was to perfect this quality, one that his daughter, S. Vani Devi, described as that of ‘ajathashatru’—someone whose enemies are yet to be born.46

  As a reward, Rao was made president of the Karimnagar district Congress, and given a ticket to contest in the first elections of free India.

  The elections were scheduled between the final months of 1951 and early 1952. They were, in historian Ramachandra Guha’s words, ‘an act of faith’.47 Of the 176 million Indians of voting age, about 85 per cent could not read or write. These voters cast their preferences in 2,24,000 polling booths to choose representatives for 500 Parliament seats and 4000 seats in provincial legislatures. To supervise the process, there were 56,000 officers, 2,80,000 helpers and 2,24,000 policemen.48 History provided no parallel.

  P.V. Narasimha Rao contested the first Lok Sabha election as the Congress candidate from Huzurabad constituency in Hyderabad state. His party prevailed nationwide, winning 364—74 per cent—out of the 489 seats. But the party did below average in Hyderabad state, only winning 56 per cent of the seats.49 Rao lost his election to a communist party candidate. The thirty-year-old could not fathom the results. His family was ‘sullen and disapproving’; his party demoted him.

  Rao also lost his guide within the party. Ramananda Tirtha had attempted to become the first chief minister of Hyderabad state in 1952. He was defeated by Burgula Ramakrishna Rao. A full lion, if ever there was one, Tirtha had been able to scare away the wolves, but was not fox enough to avoid traps. He chose to retire from active politics in 1953.50

  In the elections of 1957, Rao was given a state legislature ticket, not a national one, from Manthani, a constituency far away from his village. It was a ticket to oblivion.

  To avoid that fate, Rao campaigned hard. He would drive from village to village in an olive-green military jeep, humming Hindustani raga tunes from film songs.51 This time he won easily, and never lost Manthani for the next twenty years. His eldest son-in-law, Venkat Kishen Rao, who managed the campaign, remembers Rao’s appeal: ‘He used to speak in a colloquial language. He would always give one or two simple solutions to some of the people’s problems. If they took long to travel, he would talk about building a bridge. And after [the] elections, the bridge was built.52

  Compared to the suitcases of money that would tarnish Narasimha Rao in later life, the early Rao was a stickler for rules. Those days, candidates would commandeer Mahindra jeeps from Madras. But few would be returned, and the company dared not ask. Before one of his election campaigns, Rao took 200 jeeps from Madras for the entire state. He returned them after the election. ‘The owner was shocked,’ Rao’s son-in-law remembers. ‘No politician ever did that.’53

  Ever since Rao moved to Hyderabad to pursue politics, he would see his family infrequently. As he grew successful, he saw even less of them, not more than once in six months.54 It was almost as if a busy public persona was meant to compensate for a lonesome personal life.

  Soon after he won his first election, Rao returned home to Vangara village for a rare meeting with his family. While walking in his mango orchards one evening, Rao was shown a new Kirloskar motor, bought to pump water from the well. The expensive motor was refusing to start. The next morning, Rao dismantled it. Examining the inner parts in the glint of the sun, he noticed that the steel was too dry to rotate. He bathed that part in kerosene, lubricated it, then put the motor bac
k. It worked. Rao composed a technical letter to the company, asking them to make changes in their pump motor in ‘public interest’.55 It was duly acknowledged.

  In 1956, after a fierce agitation, Hyderabad state was cut on the lines of language. The Marathi- and Kannada-speaking regions were included in the newly formed linguistic states of Maharashtra and Karnataka respectively. The remaining part—Telangana, where Rao was from—became part of Telugu-speaking Andhra Pradesh, along with the coastal Andhra and Rayalseema regions of the erstwhile Madras state.56 The belief was that a shared language would bind these diverse regions together. But those in hinterland Telangana suspected landlords from the coast of dominating their region, and demanded a state of their own. The grievances of the Telangana region against Andhra Pradesh would never go away, and would reshape the political career of Narasimha Rao within his new state. To his many political identities—being a Brahmin, a landlord, a socialist, a scholar—another one was added in 1956. He was now from the poor, disgruntled region of Telangana.

  The other politician associated with Telangana was Lakshmi Kantamma. Kantamma would be the first of many women to provide political acumen as well as companionship to the professionally and personally lonesome Rao.

  The wife of a forest officer, she was a Kamma, a landed and entrepreneurial caste that had only just begun to organize politically. By 1957, she was working the Congress machine, lobbying to become a member of the legislative assembly. Years later, in his fictionalized memoir, Rao would remember the first time he saw her: ‘Although she was plain and rather dark, she had a captivating presence.’57 As he came to know her, he saw reflections of his own loneliness. In his words, ‘she was a typical example of many people who had access to university level education for the first time in the history of their families, with no specific idea of what to do with it . . . And having achieved academic success, they felt an acute sense of alienation from the feudal, semi-literate, traditional environment they were trapped in.’58 He might as well have been describing himself.

  Like Rao, Lakshmi was attracted to socialism; like Rao, she was a writer and Sanskrit scholar. While Rao would almost become a Hindu monk in his later years, Lakshmi would make the complete transition from politician to sadhvi, a female renunciate in the Hindu tradition. Though they shared many interests, their personalities could not have been more different. While he was cautious, she was voluble, warm and full-blooded. She needed the approval of others; he looked inward for happiness.

  In 1962, Lakshmi Kantamma became a member of Parliament. In that same year, the forty-one-year-old Rao became a minister in the state Cabinet. His name was not on the original list, but was pencilled in to accommodate someone from the backward region of Telangana.59 All eight children and Satyamma moved to Hyderabad to live with him in his spacious government bungalow.60

  Narasimha Rao’s nine years as state minister would be marked by an impulse to fix and ‘modernise’ the rusting mechanisms of Indian society. But it was a socialist version of modernization that Rao adopted, the version that his idols Ramananda Tirtha and Jawaharlal Nehru espoused. To be a ‘moderniser’ in this idiom meant suspicion of private enterprise and belief in the modern state as the sole instrument for social change.

  Rao began as state minister by holding dual portfolios of law and information. In 1964, he was made minister in charge of Hindu endowments and temples. A colleague of his remembers: ‘Temples were not managed well . . . they were encroached, and tenants never gave rent. Even pujaris were not behaving. He regulated them, put them in their place.’61 Three years later, in 1967, Rao moved to the ministry of health. Here, he monitored government doctors by paying unannounced visits to hospitals, and forbade them from private practice.62 In 1968, when he was made education minister of Andhra Pradesh, Rao banned private colleges. He also thrust Telugu as the medium of instruction on all government schools,63 a populist decision that placed poor children at a disadvantage compared to their English-speaking counterparts in wealthy private schools.

  Narasimha Rao’s time as Andhra minister taught him how government worked at the state level, a skill he would take with him to Delhi as Union minister and prime minister. Where the Andhra Rao was markedly different from the later Rao was in his impeccable socialism. The Nehruvian in him believed that only the visible hand of the state could pull India into the twentieth century.

  During these years, Rao took care to keep his wife and children away from politics. This was especially hurtful to Rao’s eldest son. Ranga wanted a political career of his own and could not understand why his father would not promote him. He was even angrier that Lakshmi Kantamma, not family, seemed to be benefitting from minister Narasimha Rao’s career.64

  The state Congress was then led by the Reddys, and the Kammas wanted a toehold in the party. Lakshmi became their self-appointed spokesperson. When a minister sacked an irrigation engineer for corruption, Lakshmi stalled the dismissal because ‘under this administration, all Kamma issues go through me’.65 A rare woman of the time trying to make it in a man’s world, Lakshmi was the target of sexist jokes and innuendos. While she did not care, the gossip upset Narasimha Rao. By 1968, he was in need of a break.

  He visited Madras, south India’s only metropolis at the time, for a writing holiday. Since Rao was by then a senior politician and head of the Telugu Academy, the local Telugu association decided to honour him at Mahabalipuram, a beach town on the outskirts of Madras. The programme began in Telugu, but then shifted to the local language. Rao, who did not know Tamil, felt excluded from his own felicitation. He went back to his temporary home in Madras, pored over Tamil grammar books, and improved his reading by walking around the city, translating street signs. By the time he returned to Hyderabad, he was fluent in the language.66

  Rao returned home to the changing colours of politics. It was 1969, the world was turning red. In the US, students had already occupied colleges protesting the Vietnam War. Activists in Paris had shut France down. In India, prime minister Indira Gandhi was pulling down the shutters in her own way.

  She had come to power in 1966 after the sudden death of prime minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. The regional heavyweights—the ‘Syndicate’—who ran the party wanted a surname that brought in national votes, and a novice who did their bidding. Indira Nehru Gandhi, at the time quiet and introverted, seemed just that person. But in the national elections held a year later, her middle name did not bring in the votes. Backward castes and other marginalized groups were unwilling to mechanically back the Congress any more.

  Indira Gandhi’s remedy was socialism. The hesitant prime minister, termed a ‘dumb doll’67 by a political opponent, transformed into a convincing protector of the poor. Painting her rivals in the Congress as right wing, she presented herself as a messiah of the marginalized, and split the party in 1969. In response to Opposition slogans calling for ‘Indira hatao’ (remove Indira), she coined the unopposable slogan, ‘garibi hatao’ (remove poverty), and potent symbols—bank nationalization, and the abolition of privy purses. Indira Gandhi was in full control.

  She began to use her power to promote economic socialism. In the Indian context, this meant strengthening state control over the economy, cutting businessmen to size and isolating India from the world market. It is vital to understand the origins of this licence raj, since these were the very controls that prime minister Narasimha Rao would abolish in 1991.

  Contrary to perception, it was Indira Gandhi and not her father who was responsible for many of the most stringent economic controls.68 Nehru’s preoccupation was rapid industrialization of his poor country, and when he looked around in the 1950s, the obvious inspiration was the planned economy of the Soviet Union. Western economists broadly agreed with his ‘soft-left’ vision in the late 1940s and ’50s.69 By 1965, however, many parts of the world were searching for new models of growth. Nowhere was this more evident than in East Asia where authoritarian governments in Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea began working with bu
siness houses to increase exports and achieve rapid growth.70 It was at this very moment when India should have opened up to domestic entrepreneurs as well as encouraged exports, that Indira Gandhi’s political compulsions closed the economy off.

  This closure was achieved in three ways. First, large parts of the economy were reserved for public sector enterprises, thereby limiting the industries where private entrepreneurs could operate to a few ‘open areas’. The wristwatch industry was one example of this. The government had placed restrictions on local manufacturers and banned imported Swiss watches. To meet domestic demand, therefore, the government tasked the state-owned Hindustan Machine Tools, or HMT—established to build heavy machinery—with making precision wristwatches. The results were ungainly and unsightly, like many Indian industrial products of the time. But a near-monopoly ensured that through the 1960s and ’70s, HMT made eight out of every ten watches sold in India.71 Some of these state monopolies were an extension of the logic of Nehru’s 1956 Industrial Policy Resolution. But it was Indira who converted the mild suspicion of the private sector into active animosity.

  The second set of changes was designed to limit the size of business houses so that they did not threaten the hegemonic power of the Congress party. This was done through licences, anti-monopoly laws, labour laws and nationalization of banks. Mandatory licences ensured that, in the few areas where the private sector was permitted, allocation decisions on what a businessman could make—how much, where, and at what price—was done by a bureaucrat sitting in Delhi. Licences, in particular, reduced entrepreneurs to a hobble. In the years 1966–68 alone, the Birla group of companies had to apply for 325 different licences.72 Indira Gandhi also passed anti-monopoly laws that curtailed the growth of companies. In addition, she nationalized private banks. The aim was to improve rural credit, but the move starved industrial houses of capital. Laws meant to protect labour also ended up having the opposite consequence: companies hired fewer workers.