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Pamulaparti Venkata Narasimha Rao

[edit] A profile

India Today, September 7, 2015

Kaveree Bamzai

Inside the complex mind of India's forgotten PM

Jairam Ramesh recounts the remarkable fashion in which P.V. Narasimha Rao ushered in far-reaching economic reforms despite a minority government and a lifetime of circumspection.

Jairam Ramesh was aide to P.V. Narasimha Rao as India confronted some ugly economic truths. In a new book, To The Brink and Back: India's 1991 Story, the sharp-witted, silver-maned, always controversial former minister recounts the 90 agonising days in which Rao engineered a two-step devaluation, changed export rules, accepted a conditional IMF loan, and liberalised India's industrial policy with a crack team comprising the man who was to become prime minister in 2004, then finance minister Manmohan Singh; principal secretary A.N. Verma; a hands-on commerce minister P. Chidambaram; and commerce secretary Montek Singh Ahluwalia.

Jairam recounts the remarkable fashion in which Rao ushered in far-reaching economic reforms despite a minority government and a lifetime of circumspection. As he puts it, "A man who famously remarked, 'Even not taking a decision is a decision', was remarkably decisive in the initial months. Jairam ascribes Rao's success to some "unique characteristics. Rao was crafty as well as bold; he did not have the image of being pro-business and pro-industry which meant if he was championing liberalisation, it implied it was of value to the nation; and because he had been in Parliament for over a decade, his voice commanded respect.

Jairam reminds us of what an extraordinarily accomplished man Rao was-a polyglot fluent in Telugu, Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit and Urdu; familiar with Arabic and Farsi; able to give interviews in Spanish; and capable of writing in French. He reminds us how Rao was computer-savvy (he was personally operating desktops in the late 1980s and was among the very first to start using laptops).

Equally, Rao was complicated, seemingly unable to break the spell of self-styled godman Chandraswami (Jairam suggests that Chandraswami was responsible for his sudden exit from the PMO because he was upset about the exclusion of his chosen aide, Pinaki Misra) and overcome a lifelong distrust of Rajiv Gandhi. Echoing the posthumous autobiography of former minister Arjun Singh, he also reminds us of Rao's complicity in the event that was to forever tear the communal fabric of the nation. But it is also true that when Rao and Manmohan Singh left office in May 1996, foreign exchange reserves were equal to five months of imports (against only three weeks when he assumed office) and there were three consecutive years of 7-plus per cent GDP growth.

As Jairam puts it, "What had started out as a matter of compulsion soon became a matter of conviction. Nothing, he says, reflects this transformation than the attitude of Rao himself who increasingly started taking credit for the emergence of a new India. But it was an India where ancient enmities were also raising their ugly heads. These excerpts provide a peep into a thoroughly complex mind in a thoroughly complicated time.

[edit] How he became PM on the verge of retirement

Alind Chauhan, Dec 27, 2023: The Indian Express

Just a year before he became the prime minister, Rao had thought his political career was almost over. He had packed his bags, books, and beloved computer and sent them to his second son’s home in Hyderabad. So how did he first become Congress chief and then the PM? We take a look.

Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge paid homage to former Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao on his 19th death anniversary on Saturday (December 23). In a post on X, Kharge said under Rao’s government, India embarked upon a transformative journey with a series of economic reforms.

Just a year before he became the PM, Rao had thought his political career was almost over. He packed his bags, books, and beloved computer and sent them to his second son’s home in Hyderabad. He wrote to a monastery in Tamil Nadu, saying he was considering becoming its head monk — the position was offered to him earlier, but he had put it off.

So what changed? How did PV Narasimha Rao first become Congress chief and then the prime minister? We take a look.

On the verge of exit

In 1990, Rao heard that then Congress chief Rajiv Gandhi was planning to transition to a younger Cabinet if the party won the next year’s Lok Sabha elections, according to ‘The Man Who Remade India: A Biography of PV Narasimha Rao’, by Vinay Sitapati.

“These whispers resonated with Rao’s own exhaustion with politics. He had won eight consecutive elections, and at sixty-nine, was getting old for the ingratiating namaste,” Sitapati wrote.

As a result, the Congress leader began to plan his post-retirement life. But on May 21, 1991, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated at a campaign stop in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu. The tragedy changed the course of Rao’s political journey.

The return

Rao arrived at 10 Janpath for the funeral a few hours after he got the news of Rajiv Gandhi’s demise. There, senior Congress leader Pranab Mukherjee took him aside and told him that there was a general agreement that Rao should be the next Congress President and “it would be good to clinch it today itself, so as to forestall rumours of internal struggle etc,” Rao noted in his diary.

Although he was glad to hear the news, Rao didn’t reveal his excitement and kept the information close to his chest.

Sitapati in his book wrote: “Rao was wise to be cautious. Seven years earlier, Pranab Mukherjee had broken the queue when prime minister Indira Gandhi was killed, setting himself up as successor. For the sin of a commoner claiming a dynastic right, Pranab was sent to the back of the line. He was only now being rehabilitated.”

Not only this, there were several other aspirants for the position of the party president besides Rao. These were Arjun Singh, ND Tiwari, Sharad Pawar, and Madhav Rao Scindia.

Sonia Gandhi, who was asked to pick the successor, knew each of the candidates well. According to Sitapati, Maharashtra’s chief minister Sharad Pawar was “young and pushy” but had betrayed the Congress party by splitting the state unit to become CM in 1978. Arjun Singh, former CM of Madhya Pradesh, and Madhav Rao Scindia were opposed by rival factions within the party. The most obvious choice was ND Tiwari, former CM of Uttar Pradesh. However, as Rao mentioned in his diary, Tiwari had earlier disobeyed Rajiv Gandhi’s instruction and contested the ongoing Lok Sabha elections (he went on to lose the election).

Therefore, Rao became the go-to option for the next Congress President. Writing for The Indian Express, Sanjay Baru noted: “Rao’s candidature also benefited from the firm support he secured from President R Venkataraman, who adopted a new principle of inviting the leader of the largest political formation to form a government without seeking a proof of numbers.

In ensuring this, Kerala’s K Karunakaran played a part. Moreover, a substantial number of Congress MPs had been elected from peninsular India and they rooted for India’s first south Indian PM.”

Baru added that at the time Rao was also among the most experienced Congress leaders — he had been CM of a state, general secretary of the party and Union minister for external affairs, defence, home and human resources development.

Rao’s name for Congress president was also suggested by PN Haksar, who used to be Indira Gandhi’s principal secretary. According to Sitapati’s book, Haksar argued that Rao was an “intellectual who didn’t have enemies and could keep the party united.” The other candidates might split the party, Haksar indicated.

On May 29, 1991, Rao was elected the Congress President. The next month, when the party made a comeback by winning 232 of 487 seats in national elections, Rao became the prime minister.

[edit] 1991: As the Prime Minister

Narasimha Rao was elected as the leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) on 20 June 1991. On the evening of 20 June, (then cabinet secretary) Naresh Chandra met Narasimha Rao and handed over a top-secret eight-page note highlighting the urgent tasks awaiting the new prime minister. While the note had been prepared by different ministries, especially the finance ministry, it was the cabinet secretary who finally put it all together. When he saw the note, Narasimha Rao's first response was: 'Is the economic situation that bad?' To this, Naresh Chandra's reply was, 'No, sir, it is actually much worse.' He quickly briefed the incoming prime minister about what needed to be done and added that a default had to be avoided at all costs. He also informed Narasimha Rao about the efforts of the Chandra Shekhar government in seeking assistance from the IMF, adding that it would be better to do whatever had to be done immediately-rather than wait for IMF assistance, then respond, and give the impression of acting under international pressure. On the evening of 21 June 1991, the new prime minister-before informing me that he would be getting Ramu Damodaran, who had worked with him earlier, as his private secretary-said that I should join his office soon and basically focus on what had to be done immediately. He asked me not to wait for formal orders and instead, start working closely with his newly appointed finance minister, Manmohan Singh-someone I knew well since he had recruited me into the Planning Commission in August 1986. Indeed, when Manmohan Singh saw me at the prime minister's residence on the evening of 21 June, where he had come to give a detailed briefing, he smiled at me and said, 'Jairam, now is the time to do all the things you wanted us to do while in the Planning Commission.' My appointment as officer-on-special-duty in the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) was notified a day or two after the prime minister had, at the suggestion of P.C. Alexander, appointed as his principal secretary, A.N.Verma-another man I knew and enjoyed a warm personal relationship with. I could even share a joke in his company-on one occasion, suggesting that with him, Naresh Chandra and Suresh Mathur (then industry secretary), the 'Kayasth mafia' would rule. Verma only laughed and said, 'Badmaash ho tum! (You are a troublemaker!)'. This, then, is how I came to be where I was in that momentous period. The years of revival lay ahead. But June-July-August 1991 were early days of survival. The later impressive growth record of the Indian economy lent a certain amount of retrospective coherence to what got done in the initial weeks.

[edit] Rao and Manmohan

[edit] Government's priorities in economic policy laid out

Manmohan Singh was officially given the finance portfolio on 22 June 1991. Three days later, he held his first formal press conference. It was a virtuoso performance where he laid out the government's priorities in economic policy in the clearest manner possible. On one issue though, what he said created a storm. The Congress' manifesto for the 1991 Lok Sabha elections had made a departure from the usual staid practice and ended up with a programme of action for the first hundred days (as also for the first 365, 730 and 1,000 days). P.V. Narasimha Rao was chairman of the manifesto drafting committee which included Pranab Mukherjee and Mani Shankar Aiyar. But it was P. Chidambaram who was the principal author of the idea.

In the 'First 100 Days' section of the 1991 manifesto, the Congress pledged to, among other things, arrest price rise in essential commodities. At the 25 June press conference, the finance minister was asked about inflation. What he said first was unexceptionable: 'It would be wrong to say that I have a magic wand to bring down prices. What I can promise is that in three years time prices could be made stable if a strategy of macroeconomic management is pursued now.' But he went on to say that he had no readymade mechanism by which he could fulfil the Congress (I) poll promise of rolling back prices of a select group of commodities to their July 1990 levels.

It appeared that the new government had started with a self-goal. The prime minister was perturbed and so was his political secretary, Jitendra Prasada. Prasada first sent for me. Next, the prime minister asked me to see him. I could sense that he was clearly irritated. He had received letters of protest from MPs like Rajni Ranjan Sahu and Gurudas Kamat. He expressed some frustration with economists not being sensitive to politics. He was worried that this could create a backlash against the government within the party.

He was right. At a meeting of the CWC on 1 July 1991, the finance minister's admission on prices came under sharp attack-mostly by a senior leader from Uttar Pradesh, Ram Chandra Vikal. On 7 July, at a press conference in Hyderabad, in a bid to douse the flames, the prime minister said that the finance minister's statement was not a reflection of the government's decisions and that the government was bound by the 1991 manifesto-earning for Manmohan Singh the only public rebuke of sorts from his boss in their five-year partnership.

A number of my friends in the Congress called me and asked me to tell the finance minister to issue a statement saying that 'he was misquoted'. Knowing Manmohan Singh, I did nothing of that sort, but for months had to bear the wrath of senior Congressmen for canvassing the idea of a hundred-day agenda. I took this in my stride knowing full well that I was not its real author. Pranab Mukherjee, too, told me that 'people should realise that we seek a mandate for five years and not for a hundred days'. Since both he and Singh were key figures in the drafting of all subsequent manifestos, this fracas over the roll-back ensured that the Congress never included a specific and separate hundred-day agenda as part of its election promises in 1996, 1999, 2004, 2009 and 2014.

[edit] Rao, Manmohan and liberalisation: Jairam Ramesh

liberalisation/articleshow/83864508.cms Jairam Ramesh, June 26, 2021: The Times of India

There is no doubt that PV Narasimha Rao was navigating India through a most troubled period, and that he had inherited a number of encumbrances. He was not in the best of health. He headed a minority government — a government that won a vote of confidence because many parties had walked out. Rao came to power against the backdrop of the brutal assassination of a young leader of immense charm and charisma, a man of great energy and exuberance [Rajiv Gandhi] — all qualities that he himself lacked in abundance. Even while the party he headed was in a state of shock, he had to stave off a leadership challenge from one of his colleagues, who he went on to accommodate in his cabinet as defence minister. (Sharad Pawar was the defence minister in Narasimha Rao’s cabinet.)

At the same time, Rao was buffeted by all sorts of problems. A senior oil industry executive had been abducted in the Kashmir Valley — which was in ferment — and was kept in captivity for 55 days. Punjab was in a state of tumult. The abrasive chief election commissioner was giving the government a hard time. Rao’s party’s government in Karnataka, a traditional bastion, was tottering. Another ally ruling in Tamil Nadu had started giving him huge headaches by her theatrical actions on the Cauvery river waters issue. The principal Opposition party had resumed its shrill campaign for building a Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.

To make matters worse, Rao was under immense pressure to implement the 100-day agenda mentioned in the party’s manifesto, even while the economy was in the doldrums — gold continued being hypothecated to the Bank of England; foreign exchange remained at dangerously low levels; and inflation was running at over 16 per cent. As though this weren’t bad enough, Rao had appointed somebody from outside the world of mainstream politics as his finance minister.

Without doubt, Narasimha Rao confronted huge challenges. Yet, in the very brief period I saw him at the closest of quarters, I have to say that he was simply magnificent. A lifetime of circumspection gave way to courage. From the outset, Rao proved everybody wrong. A man who famously remarked, “Even not taking a decision is a decision,” was remarkably decisive in the initial months. Indeed, one of Narasimha Rao’s closest aides, who worked with him when he was Union minister and prime minister, but who prefers to be anonymous, says: "I don’t believe he [Rao] was indecisive; he was deferential to authority or to positions where the ultimate responsibility for decisions lay, but where he was assured that the position was his to hold, he was quick to decide. He crafted the National Policy on Education in May 1986 within eight months of taking charge of that [human resource development] ministry, and directed its modification, as prime minister, six years later.”

Would anybody else in his place have done differently in the initial months? It’s hard to tell, but undoubtedly, Rao brought some unique characteristics. For one, by surprising everyone and ensuring that quick decisions were taken, by being exceedingly crafty as well as bold, he propelled change; critics could carp about the state of things, but they, too, knew in their heart of hearts that what he was doing was inevitable.

Rao did not have the image of being pro-business and pro-industry, but to be fair, that could be because he had never served in an economic ministry earlier. This further meant that if he was championing liberalisation, there may well have been something of value in it for the nation. Moreover, Rao had been around in Parliament for over a decade and hence, his voice did command respect. His reputation was that of a scholar who had been given a lot of importance by Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi and hence, when he spoke, he was heard intently, even if, more often than not, what he said appeared metaphysical and complicated.

Narasimha Rao was indisputably a loner, a man who didn’t do much to cultivate and build relationships. To borrow a phrase from Michael White’s biography of Isaac Newton, Narasimha Rao was above all “a secretive man, a man coiled in upon himself”. Moreover, his relationships with the sleaziest of characters — Chandraswami being the most notable of them — which I saw at close quarters, were inexplicable and did no justice to a man of such erudition and learning.

At one stage in the early days of his prime ministership, Chandraswami had convinced Narasimha Rao that India could easily tide over its immediate financial crisis because the godman’s buddy, the Sultan of Brunei, had agreed to extend a line of credit to India at the most concessional terms without any questions asked. That the prime minister took this suggestion seriously is borne out by the fact that a plane was ready to fly the finance minister to meet the Sultan! Thankfully, Manmohan Singh managed to convince his boss at the last minute that this would be a foolhardy adventure.

If Rao still remains compelling of our attention, even commendation, it is for the truly transformational leadership he demonstrated at a most precarious time in India’s economic history. Of course, it could be argued that he had no choice and the alternative would have been to go down in history as the prime minister who presided over a default — but that would be tantamount to cavilling. Rao did not put a foot wrong forward in the initial months, and displayed both political manoeuvring and statesmanship of the highest order. Moments sometimes produce men (and women). Narasimha Rao is an outstanding example of this.

Rao’s masterstroke was the appointment of Manmohan Singh. One of his closest aides later recalled to me that even as a cabinet minister, Rao always felt that a prime minister should always have one source of senior, substantive and non-political advice, especially in those areas where the prime minister is weak. The aide also recalled Rao citing the precedent of Dr [Vitthalrao] Gadgil, who was deputy chairman of the Planning Commission between 1967 and 1971. In Manmohan Singh, Narasimha Rao found a tailor-made bulwark. It is true that Rao had told his finance minister right at the very beginning, “Manmohan, if things go wrong, your head is on the chopping block; if we succeed, the credit will be ours.” Notwithstanding this warning, and despite the enormous pressure and criticism he faced, Rao backed his finance minister to the hilt, allowing him full freedom, even when his instincts told him not to.

I have always believed that the personality of the finance minister has much to do with the degree to which economic reforms seem palatable in the initial months and years. Manmohan Singh made the years of liberalisation appear acceptable, largely because he defied ideological labels, and could, if anything, only be called moderately left-of-centre. He was personally very close to politicians and economists of the Left; Jyoti Basu treated him with enormous respect and, as I was to discover many years later, so did Harkishan Singh Surjeet. While the archpriest of the Left establishment during Indira Gandhi’s era, PN Haksar was one of his staunchest allies, Haksar’s colleague, PN Dhar, who was generally considered right-of-centre, was also his trusted friend.

Besides, the credibility Manmohan Singh had across the political spectrum was obvious. While SK Goyal from the Chandra Shekhar era was his intimate associate, the debates in Parliament of those times reveal that Atal Bihari Vajpayee, LK Advani and Jaswant Singh, too, held him in the highest professional and personal esteem. At critical moments, what is said and done might matter; but what truly counts is the person who is talking and how he presents his case. The finance minister may have lacked political standing, but he had unparalleled moral authority, apart from unsurpassed intellectual gravitas. His phenomenal personal reputation for simplicity and his non-threatening style helped sell the bitter pills of devaluation, gold sales, subsidy cuts and whole-scale industrial deregulation.

Manmohan Singh’s integrity has always been unimpeachable and what better example than what he did after he and Rao had taken a decision to devalue the Indian rupee? Manmohan Singh was worried that his personal rupee balance, born out of modest dollar savings from his South Commission stint in Geneva during 1987-90, would swell with the proposed changes in the rupee-dollar exchange rate. Therefore, he informed the prime minister that the ‘windfall’ gains would be deposited in the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund.

Excerpted with permission from To the Brink and Back – India’s 1991 Story (Rupa Books)

[edit] A time for reforms

Swaminathans Anklesaria Aiyer

The Times of India, June 26, 2011

Unsung hero of the India story

Twenty years ago, Narasimha Rao became Prime Minister and initiated economic reforms that transformed India. The Congress party doesn’t want to remember him: it is based entirely on loyalty to the Gandhi family, and Rao was not a family member. But the nation should remember Rao as the man who changed India, and the world too.

In June 1991, India was seen globally as a bottomless pit for foreign aid. It had exhausted an IMF loan taken six months earlier and so was desperate. Nobody imagined that, 20 years later, India would be called an emerging superpower, backed by the US to join the UN Security Council, and poised to overtake China as the world’s fastest growing economy. For three decades after Independence, India followed inward looking socialist policies aiming at public sector dominance. The licence-permit raj mandated government clearance to produce, import or innovate. If you were productive enough to create something new or produce more from existing machinery, you faced imprisonment for the dreadful crime of exceeding licensed capacity.

Socialism reached its zenith in the garibi hatao phase of Indira Gandhi (1969-77), when several industries were nationalized and income tax went up to 97.75%. This produced neither fast growth nor social justice. GDP growth remained stuck at 3.5% per year, half the rate in Japan and the Asian tigers. India’s social indicators were dismal, often worse than in Africa. Poverty did not fall at all despite three decades of independence.

In the 1980s, creeping economic liberalization plus a governmentspending spree saw GDP growth rise to 5.5%. But the spending spree was based on unsustainable foreign borrowing, and ended in tears in 1991.

When Rao assumed office, the once-admired Soviet model was collapsing. Meanwhile, Deng had transformed China through market-oriented reforms. Rao opted for market reforms too. He was no free market ideologue like Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher: he talked of the middle path. His model was Willy Brandt of Germany.

[edit] Rao and the Babri demolition

[edit] A

Rao's problems truly started with the Harshad Mehta scam that first came to light in April 1992, and thereafter, with the demolition of the Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992, an event that many of his own party colleagues believe-and, perhaps, rightly so-he helped orchestrate, or allowed to happen, or at the very least knew of as it unfolded, without intervening decisively. Almost the entire Congress believes that he wanted the masjid out of the way so that a permanent solution to the imbroglio at Ayodhya could be found.

I had called him around 4 p.m. that fateful Sunday before leaving for Mumbai with Pranab Mukherjee, only to be told that prime minister 'andar hain' (is inside). Rao has offered an elaborate defence of himself in his book that came out two years after his death. That defence cannot be ignored. There were many circumstances that did preclude him from imposing President's Rule in Uttar Pradesh in October or November 1992. But there is no doubt that the responsibility for ensuring that 6 December 1992 never happened was his and his alone, even if there may be different views on his culpability with regard to what transpired that day.

If Rao still remains compelling of our attention, even commendation, it is for the truly transformational leadership he demonstrated at a most precarious time in India's economic history. Of course, it could be argued that he had no choice and the alternative would have been to go down in history as the prime minister who presided over a default-but that would be tantamount to caviling.

Moments sometimes produce men (and women). Narasimha Rao is an outstanding example of this.

[edit] After Babri demolition, Rao’s Ayodhya temple wish

S S-talks-sonias-shah-bano-red-flag-raos-temple-wis-8867038 An extract from Neerja Chowdhury’s book How Prime Ministers Decide , Aleph, 2023

The book captures, in vivid detail, the sequence of events that led to demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992.

The book mentions a meeting journalist Nikhil Chakravartty had with Rao days after the demolition. The two had been friends.

“‘I heard you were doing puja after twelve o’clock on 6 December,’” Chakravartty teased Rao. “A stung Rao shot back at Chakravartty, ‘Dada, you think I don’t know politics. I was born in rajniti (politics) and I have only been doing politics till today. Jo hua voh theek hua…. (What happened, happened for good.) Maine is liye hone diya...ki Bharatiya Janata Party ki mandir ki rajniti hamesha ke liye khatam ho jaaye (I allowed it to happen because I wanted the BJP’s temple politics to finish forever).’”

The book quotes former CISF DIG and IPS officer Kishore Kunal, who worked with Naresh Chandra who was heading the Ayodhya cell, as having said that Rao wanted to build a temple where the idols of Ram Lalla were kept.

“‘Aisi baat hai,’ police officer Kishore Kunal told me, ‘Narasimha Raoji jahaan Ram Lallaji virajman hai, wahin mandir banaana chahte the (The fact is that Narasimha Rao himself wanted to build the temple where the idols were kept).’ Rao instructed his media advisor, P. V. R. K. Prasad, to create a trust which could build a temple where the mosque had once stood.”

“On the Sunday after the demolition (13 December 1992), Prasad had gone to see Rao. He had found the PM alone and in a reflective mood. ‘We can fight the BJP, but how can we fight Lord Ram?’ he asked Prasad pensively. ‘When we say that the Congress is a secular party, it does not mean we are atheists,’ he went on. ‘How far are they (BJP) justified in hoodwinking people by monopolizing Lord Ram under the pretext of constructing a temple in Ayodhya?’

The book captures, in vivid detail, the sequence of events that led to demolition of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992.

[edit] Chandraswami's influence

Notwithstanding his many talents, it must be admitted that Narasimha Rao was a most puzzling man. He was a much-misunderstood man and he may well have done much to be so misunderstood. Rao was a complex personality, not at all easy to comprehend, and he made no effort whatsoever to make people want to understand him-except when he was on the backfoot. I was simply in no position to know what went wrong between him and his own party-a party he had served with distinction for almost half a century. I was an anguished witness to a most painful event on 24 January 1998, which showed how remarkably friendless Narasimha Rao had become within the Congress. The occasion was the release of the Congress' manifesto for the 1998 Lok Sabha elections. I was seated on the dais when, in response to a question, the Congress president, Sitaram Kesri, emphatically declared that his predecessor would not be put up as a candidate in the upcoming polls. It was a most jarring moment, and coming from someone who had been personally selected by Rao as a successor made it even more unpleasant. He was indisputably a loner, a man who didn't do much to cultivate and build relationships. To borrow a phrase from Michael White's biography of Isaac Newton, Narasimha Rao was above all 'a secretive man, a man coiled in upon himself'. Moreover, his relationships with the sleaziest of characters-Chandraswami being the most notable of them-which I saw at close quarters, were inexplicable and did no justice to a man of such erudition and learning. At one stage in the early days of his prime ministership, Chandraswami had convinced Narasimha Rao that India could easily tide over its immediate financial crisis because the godman's buddy, the Sultan of Brunei, had agreed to extend a line of credit to India at the most concessional terms. That the prime minister took this suggestion seriously is borne out by the fact that a plane was ready to fly the finance minister to meet the sultan. Thankfully, Manmohan Singh managed to convince his boss that this would be a foolhardy adventure.

[edit] Contributions in Indian political system

His master stroke was to appoint Manmohan Singh as finance minister. Rao wanted a nonpolitical reformer at the centre of decision-making, who could be backed or dumped as required. He presented Singh as the spearhead of reform while he himself advocated a middle path. Yet, ultimately, it was his vision that Singh executed. In his first month in office, the rupee was devalued. There followed the virtual abolition of industrial licensing and MRTP clearance. At one stroke, the biggest hurdles to industrial expansion disappeared. Who was the industry minister who initiated these revolutionary reforms? Narasimha Rao himself! He held the industry portfolio too. Yet he did not want draw attention to himself. So he ingeniously made the delicensing announcement on the morning of the day Manmohan Singh was presenting his first Budget. The media clubbed the Budget and delicensing stories together as one composite reform story. In the public mind, Manmohan Singh was seen as the liberalizer, while Rao stayed in the background. Singh initiated the gradual reduction of import duties, income tax and corporate tax. Foreign investment was gradually liberalized. Imports of technology were freed. Yet the overall government approach was anything but radically reformist. When bank staff threatened to go on strike, Rao assured them that there would be no bank privatization or staff reforms. When farmers threatened to take to the streets, Rao assured them there would be no opening up of Indian agriculture.

The IMF and World Bank believed that when a country went bust, that was the best time for painful reforms like labour reforms. However, Rao took the very opposite line. He focused on reforms that would produce the least mass losers (such as industrial delicensing) and yet produced 7.5% growth in the mid-1990s. These gave reforms a good name, and ensured their continuance even when Opposition parties later came to power.

In the 2000s, the cumulative effect of gradual reform finally made India an 8.5% miracle growth economy. Rao got no glory for this. He had lost the 1996 election amidst charges of buying the support of JMM legislators. This led to his exit as Congress chief. Although he was eventually exonerated by the courts, he died a political nobody.

He deserves a high place in economic history for challenging the Bank-IMF approach on painful austerity, and focusing instead on a few key changes that produced fast growth with minimum pain. The World Bank itself later changed its policy and started targeting “binding constraints” (like industrial licensing)

Manmohan Singh said repeatedly that he could have achieved nothing without Rao’s backing. Today, 20 years after the start of India’s economic miracle, let us toast India’s most underrated Prime Minister —Narasimha Rao. The Swaminomics column of June 5 said incorrectly that Premier Auto had gone bust. In fact the company survived the collapse and shutdown of its auto production. It now has a modest presence in engineering, and is trying to reestablish auto production.

[edit] The JMM Bribery Case, July 1993

India Today, December 29, 2008

Gunjeet K. Sra

The democratic values of the country were put to shame when the then PM P.V. Narasimha Rao was accused of bribing members of Jharkhand Mukti Morcha to vote in his favour in the confidence motion.

[edit] Legacy

[edit] Reforms

July 5, 2021: The Times of India

The ailing, exhausted Rao who had been denied a Lok Sabha ticket, had already packed off his precious books and computer to Hyderabad and accepted the monkship at the Mouna Swami mutt in Tamil Nadu. But the next morning, Rao was summoned by his party to Delhi. Exactly a month after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination, Rao was sworn in as India’s ninth Prime minister. As Rao’s friend Gopal Gandhi was to say to him: “ Itihaas nein karwat badli hai.” History had taken a turn.

Fluent in nine languages, and still mysteriously uncommunicative, Rao got his new job precisely because he was seen as low-key and unthreatening to the powerful regional satraps in the Congress party. Over the next few months, Rao along with his finance minister Dr Manmohan Singh wrested India back from financial ruin. This June marks 30 years of liberalisation and Rao’s 100th birth anniversary.

In this episode of The Times of India podcast, Meenal Baghel spoke with political scholar and professor at Ashoka University, Vinay Sitapati, who wrote a biography on Rao titled ‘Half Lion’. She also spoke with Jairam Ramesh who, as Rao’s assistant, played a sherpa’s role in designing some of these changes and wrote about those heady days in his book titled ‘To the Brink and Back: India’s 1991 story’.

Meenal Baghel: You had a ringside view of the events of 1991, described as the most consequential year after 1947. What was it like to be in the Prime Minister's office in June 1991?

Jairam Ramesh: The full dimensions of the crisis became apparent to Rao when Manmohan Singh briefed him on the evening of June 21. I think the immediate decision that got taken was related to devaluation. That was the first and most immediate step that had to be taken, because it was clear that we were going to go to the International Monetary Fund and World Bank for assistance. It was better to go to them after devaluation, rather than devaluing after you approach them. Rao was very, very reluctant to devalue the rupee because he was a prisoner of the past. We had devalued the rupee in June 1966 and that had a disastrous political consequence for the Congress party in the 1967 elections. It was a bold and courageous decision on the part of Indira Gandhi to have devalued since she was devaluing against the advice of people around her, very few of whom actually supported the devaluation.

Rao was aware of this, and in my conversations with him, he expressed his extreme reluctance to agree with Singh's recommendation. In fact his exact words to me were ‘Why is Manmohan insisting on a two-step devaluation?’

I explained to him that Singh's reasoning was that we test the market with a moderate dose of devaluation. And if the markets don't react in a malignant manner we will go for a second step of devaluation. That’s what actually happened. But Rao actually tried to stop the second devaluation. After the first devaluation was done, he called Singh and said, ‘Can't you stop it?’ And Singh said, ‘No, but I've already communicated our decision to Dr Rangarajan’. C Rangarajan was the deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India at the time.

The phone call was made at about 10 o'clock or thereabouts, and Singh explained that it was too late and that he had already told the RBI. But he said he’d ask the RBI to hold on if they could. So, this drama was enacted. Singh called up C Rangarajan, and said the Prime Minister has asked me to speak to you about the second step. But Rangarajan said, ‘Oh, the markets have already opened.’ So, this whole thing was a nice jugalbandi between Rangarajan and Singh.

The second big step that got taken after devaluation was the trade policy. The rationalisation of the export incentive structure, the removal of the cash compensatory support and the announcement of a new trade policy. These were done in the first week of July when P Chidambaram was commerce minister, and Montek Singh Ahluwalia was the commerce secretary.

And the third big step was the formulation of the new industrial policy, which included delicensing, abolition of industrial licensing, foreign investment and other things. And that became part of Manmohan Singh's budget, which was presented on the 24th of July. So, these were the three sort of mega blockbuster events that took place in the first 30 days. The political management, the political messaging, the political outreach was that of Rao. On the devaluation, he came under attack from the Left, on the trade policy, by and large, there were not many criticisms. But on the budget, he came under severe attack from within the Congress party.

The first time the industrial policy went to the cabinet it got rejected on the grounds that it had made too many departures from the past. And that's when he called me and asked me ‘What do we do now’? And then I sort of repackaged the whole policy, and wrote a preamble, which is there in my book. I ended the preamble by saying, our policies always change with continuity, and then it went back to the cabinet and the same cabinet people, the same people who had opposed the policy said, ‘ Yeh toh bahut accha hai. Yeh humhare siddhanton ke aadhar par hi hai.’And they approve the policy.

Meenal Baghel: You have in the book compared Rao and Singh to Richard Nixon's embrace of China in 72.

Jairam Ramesh: Remember, Rao was a nondescript union minister. He had the anti-Midas touch. He was defence minister, external affairs minister, health minister and HRD minister. He was a very ordinary minister and as chief minister also he didn't have a great record. But he was seen to be left of centre.

Singh, on the other hand, was seen as pragmatic, non-ideological, and a very competent man with great integrity and honesty. But again was seen as being left of centre, he was not seen as a market walla. There were two choices for finance minister. The first choice was Dr I G Patel who was seen as being pro-market. Singh was the second choice and was seen as being pro-planning. He was a planning man, deputy chairman of the Planning Commission.

That’s why I used the Nixon analogy. Only Nixon could have opened up America to the Communists because he had opposed them all his life. Similarly, Rao and Singh had mainly been lukewarm about markets, private investment and about globalisation. But they saw the crisis, and saw an opportunity of writing their names in the history books. I think they grasped the opportunity.

But the fact that there were gung-ho market fundamentalists, liberalisers or privatisers, gave the reforms respectability. Very often, it's not what you do that counts, it's when you do it and who is doing it.

The timing was right. We were in a crisis, and it was a situation of kuch bhi karna hai. In Parliament, Rao was criticised and a no-confidence motion was moved. Rao listened to all the criticisms, all the parties criticised. Then he looked at the BJP and said ‘I've been criticised, but what have I done? What have I done?’

And suddenly he threw a Sanskrit googly, in the middle of his speech. It translated to when troubled times arise, the wise man gives up half so that he can retain half and build on it. I remember everybody just simply got floored, he never used the word liberalisation, globalisation, privatisation or even reforms. I remember Manmohan Singh had spoken. He had spoken about reforms, transformation, the need to grasp private initiative and all that. You know, the usual thing that economists talk about.

Suddenly, Rao said what we have embarked upon, and what we are embarking upon, is a ‘mahaprasthanam’. This is the journey of Yudhishthira, the Pandavas and the dog, where they go on a great journey to heaven at the end of the Mahabharata. The point I'm making is that while Singh had the idiom of the technocrat, Rao had the idiom of the politician.

Vinay Sitapati: Around 2014-15, I read a book called ‘Deng Xiaoping and the transformation of China’ by Ezra Vogel. It was a double biography. It was a biography of China changing in the 80s and of Deng. I said there's a book waiting to be written about India in the 90s, and the Deng Xiaoping figure was Narasimha Rao. I feel that with the Sikh violence, Rao was criminally inactive, I say it. But I also say that he was the greatest Prime Minister of India since Jawaharlal Nehru Meenal Baghel: Narasimha Rao’s biographer Vinay Sitapati now explains why he rates him so highly and whether there was anything about Rao that surprised him.

Vinay Sitapati: The main thing that surprised me was, how could somebody so weak bring about so much change? So that was a lesson in leadership for me, because whenever we think about leadership, we say that the leader has a mandate, and then she or he has to make the right policies. But often a leader needs to just remain in her or his seat for enough time to be able to bring about change.

Let me give you an example of how weak Rao was. He ran a minority government. The two governments before him were both minority governments and had collapsed within a year. The four governments after him all collapsed within barely a year. This was a man who was able to make a minority government last for five years.

Second, he was hated within his own party. He was seen as a placeholder for Sonia Gandhi. Almost every month some Congress leader would publicly rebel against him.

Third, and most importantly, he didn't have personal charisma. Unlike Nehru, Indra Gandhi, and unlike Narendra Modi, when Rao used to go to give speeches, you had to pay people to show up. But a man this weak was able to bring about enormous transformation in India’s foreign policy and economics.

Four prime ministers before Narsimha Rao had access to the same blueprints on the economy that Rao implemented. What changed was there was a prime minister who was willing to stick his neck out and take a risk, not just on the economy, but even foreign policy. I think today's generation can scarcely grasp how big a calamity it was for Indian foreign policy when the Soviet Union collapsed. It was an immediate defence problem, since most of our defence supplies came from the Soviet Union.

When the Soviet Union collapsed, most of our MiG fighters couldn’t take off because they didn't have spare parts. To navigate India from a multipolar world where India was with the Soviet Union, to a unipolar world with America as the hegemon, while not abandoning your old allies, took a lot of skill.

While we focus so much on Rao and the economy, we forget that during his period as chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, he was actually a scholar and a policy thinker when it came to welfare issues like health, education and nutrition. India's first national employment guarantee scheme was during Rao’s time, the nationalisation of the midday meal scheme and the national rural health mission. Some of the schemes were not very successful.

For example, today's NREGA is much better designed than what Rao had. But this idea that with India's economy booming, with Indian state coffers increasing, the new social compact was using that money for welfare schemes for India's poorest. Rao created it. He wasn't a right wing economist. He was a social democrat in the German tradition.

Meenal Baghel: Why was he so disliked and how did he manage to win when there were so many contenders for the post of Prime Minister?

Vinay Sitapati: He became Prime Minister because he was the weakest option. If you look at the top three contenders for Prime Minister, after Rajiv Gandhi was murdered, it was in this order: Sharad Pawar, Arjun Singh and Narasimha Rao.

I would say Pawar and Singh were unacceptable – both to other party leaders as well as to 10 Janpath – because they were too ambitious. However, Rao was seen as a weak, non-charismatic consensus figure. It’s very similar to why Manmohan Singh was selected by Sonia Gandhi as Prime Minister: he is effective, but he is politically weak. So he will not mount a challenge to 10 Janpath or threaten the various regional satraps in the Congress. Ironically, Rao was selected because he was weak.

You know, I’ve mentioned that Rao had the Intelligence Bureau keeping tabs on Sonia Gandhi's life. I also mentioned, of course, that Sonia Gandhi was relying on Rao’s own cabinet ministers to keep a tab on him. So it was spy versus spy.

To give you just one example of how he countered Pawar. It was soon after the Bombay blasts in 1993. Pawar was the defence minister and Rao wanted to get him out of Delhi. Right. And if Pawar is moved to Bombay as chief minister of Maharashtra, he's less of an immediate threat to Rao.

So what does Rao do? He makes it known that he's considering appointing SB Chavan – the Maratha rival of Pawar – as chief minister of Maharashtra. Immediately Pawar said he’d be chief minister. So Pawar was sent back and Rao glorified it saying you're rescuing a state after the riots and the bomb blasts. But actually, he was trying to get rid of a rival.

Here’s another example. I found in Rao’s archives, a letter that was given to him saying that on a certain date Arjun Singh had bought a property near Bhopal. I don't know whether Rao acted on it. But think about it, the Prime Minister of India is keeping an eye on the land transactions of a rival. That was how Narsimha Rao was able to manage the Congress Party.

Meenal Baghel: For somebody who was so erudite and deeply intellectual, even rational to a great extent, his reliance on Chandraswami seems to be very baffling and a contradiction...

Vinay Sitapati: Rao was the epitome of a rational human being. He placed a lot of emphasis on astronomy, but you know, I found in his private archives, a lot of astrological charts. And as I mentioned in the book, what's amazing about Rao is that when Rajiv Gandhi denied him a Lok Sabha ticket in 1991, he accepted the position of a head monk of Hindu monastery in South India. How do you square that with his belief in science?

He always had a religious side, a spiritual and mystical side to him. Chandraswami was somebody who had devotees across the political aisle, he had international followers. He was very useful to a man like Rao and I mention in the book that both their careers sort of take off around the same time. So Chandraswami, whose name is Nemichand Jain was from Hyderabad, and first made his name in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Around that time, Rao was chief minister of Andhra Pradesh. When Rao moves to Delhi, Chandraswami also moves to Delhi. Just like understanding Rao’s welfare schemes is central to understanding one aspect of the man, understanding his relationship with Chandraswami is genuinely to understand another deeply held aspect of Rao.

Meenal Baghel: Jairam Ramesh too writes in his book about Rao’s complexity, saying there was about him, an unknowable quality, which eventually led to his isolation within the Congress party.

Jairam Ramesh: Rao was a fox, he knew many tricks. Manmohan Singh was the hedgehog. He knew one thing, which was economic reforms. So Rao was extraordinarily well read, indecisive in over 10 languages and a great communicator. He could communicate in simple language, spoke fluent Urdu, Marathi, Telugu, Hindi, English, Spanish and a bit of Persian as well.

He played chess with himself all the time. He’d think if I move now, what is not only my opponent's move, but what will be my move to my opponent's move? Very, very complex, but very erudite. And I must say, a man who was a nondescript union minister, and not a great chief minister, turned out to be a successful Prime Minister in terms of economic policy and foreign policy. So he rose to the moment. He grasped the moment. He saw the opportunities.

Meenal Baghel: He was also, recalls Jairam Ramesh, one of the best draftsmen in the Congress party.

Jairam Ramesh: I know for a fact about a speech that Rajiv Gandhi had to give for the 1991 Lok Sabha election, that Doordarshan would broadcast. And he (Rajiv) was going to speak on behalf of the Indian National Congress. Mani Shankar Aiyar had produced a draft, and I had given some points. And I remember Rajiv Gandhi asking me ‘Have you shown it to PV?’ and negotiating with Rao was the most painful experience.

He’d change every line with a red Pilot pen. Rao would change the meaning. People like me believe that we craft sentences in order to convey a meaning, but for Rao, the true test of a sentence is how much it can obfuscate meaning. The less you say, the better off you are. Rao was a better draftsman than Pranab Mukherjee. Pranab Mukherjee got a grossly exaggerated and inflated reputation as a draftsman. Rao was infinitely superior in terms of ideas, language and in terms of coherence.

He was a very difficult man to understand, a man who had no friends, a man whose relationship with his party completely broke down after the sixth of December 1992.

Meenal Baghel: On December 6, 1992, a mob tore down the Babri Masjid altering India’s political reality forever. Narsimha Rao as Prime Minister was conspicuous in his silence and his inaction. Why do you think he chose not to act in the days leading to the sixth of December?

Jairam Ramesh: I spoke to him on December 6, 1992. But I spoke to him only at about 5 pm, after everything was over, so I scrupulously refrained from writing or even speaking about this. Madhav Godbole, who was home secretary at that time, has written a whole book on this. Rao himself has written his book on December 6 called ‘Ayodhya’, which is contradictory to the book written by his own information advisor PVRK Prasad, who was his interlocutor with some of the Hindu and R S S outfits.

I think Rao has been less than honest in the book. I spent long hours with Naresh Chandra, the former cabinet secretary, who later became his advisor on Ayodhya. And he basically pointed out that Rao’s hands were tied. He believed in the R S S. He believed in the elected UP government of Kalyan Singh. He believed in the promises that were made in the Supreme Court. And frankly, the only line I have said in the book is that he overestimated his own capacity. So I think he overstretched, but the net result of that was his relationship with his party snapped. He was a misunderstood man, no doubt. But he worked hard to make himself misunderstood as well. He was not a gregarious man. He was not given to reaching out, unless there was a crisis that he faced.

Meenal Baghel: Vinay Sitapati has a different, and a slightly more astringent, view of the Congress party, of Narasimha Rao’s actions and how it decisively changed his relationship with the party he had served for almost five decades.

Vinay Sitapati: He tried his best to save the mosque. Did he try enough? Should he have done more? Yes, in hindsight that was an error. But there's a difference between saying something is an error and something is malafide or deliberate. I think there's no evidence that it was deliberate and plenty of evidence that it was the opposite. Let me give you just one example. I think Rao realised that if the mosque fell his government would be in trouble. But if he, in order to protect the mosque, around October and November of 1992 declared President’s rule in UP then the BJP would have moved a no-confidence motion against him in Parliament, saying that this is yet another example of the Congress squishing federal rights. And he was not convinced that his own party would stand up for him.

The third option, which was to have the CRPF or CISF actually fire at the kar sevaks, he thought he would lose the Hindu vote. So I think it's fair to say that Rao approached it through a political lens, rather than a secular lens. He wanted to make sure that the Hindu vote stayed with him, as well as the Muslim. And as it turned out, he ended up with neither.

The single biggest piece in that puzzle is to ask before December 6, which politicians were standing up and saying that they wanted Kalyan Singh dismissed? If Kalyan Singh is dismissed, we will pay the price. VP Singh didn't say that. Sonia Gandhi didn't say that. Sonia Gandhi only gave a statement after December 6. Sharad Pawar didn’t say that, Arjun Singh was trying to play both sides. He was going and meeting Kalyan Singh and coming back. The double game there was whether the mosque falls or not, the Narasimha Rao government should fall. In his archives, Rao kept copious volumes on Babri Masjid because it ate at him. He knew his legacy would be defined by that. He understood that the Congress, when they wanted to bury him, would bring up the Babri Masjid. By the way, in the year after the Babri Masjid demolition, there were some in the Congress like ML Fotedar who opposed Rao, but the rest of them supported him.

It's not that Sonia Gandhi asked for his resignation immediately after that. Only in 1998, after she came to the Congress did this message go out that we won't forgive Rao for the Babri Masjid demolition. So in that sense, it is a political allegation, but that doesn't mean it's untrue. We need to look at it with an open mind. But essentially it was an own goal. The Congress party in order to bury the legacy of Rao became silent about his role in economic policy, and has emphasised his role in the Babri Masjid demolition.

Meenal Baghel: Can you briefly talk about the two key relationships – with Manmohan Singh, and also with Sonia Gandhi?

Vinay Sitapati: I think that Sonia Gandhi acquiesced to the selection of Narsimha Rao as Prime Minister. She's the one who vetoed Arjun Singh and certainly Sharad Pawar. So in that sense, he was initially somebody she was comfortable with. I would say between 1991 and 1993, Sonia Gandhi was genuinely apolitical, she was a grieving widow. She held politics responsible for the murder of her mother-in-law and her husband, so she wanted nothing to do with it.

But after 1993 she was coming more into politics, having a view, meeting other politicians. I think Rao began to resent that and so after 1993 their relationship began to nosedive. It reached a nadir around 1995. That was when Sonia Gandhi publicly accused the national government of going slow in the investigation into her husband's assassination. After 1998, it turned into a very bad relationship because I think Sonia Gandhi correctly felt that Rao was trying to displace the Nehru Gandhis from the Congress. They didn't like each other and made no bones about it.

When it comes to Rao and Singh, it was a good relationship. It was a completely political relationship. I interviewed Singh for the book. He said that Rao was his political guru. He learned about how to deal with politics from Rao after his disgrace and resignation from the Congress, from the Congress leadership, and all the cases he had to deal with. Singh never abandoned him. He continued to be a Rao loyalist and I have to give him credit for this. And I think in Singh's ability to be true to the memory of Rao, without irritating Sonia Gandhi, he's learned something from Rao

Meenal Baghel: But the falling out with those in his party marked the fading out of Narasimha Rao and also a diminishment of his legacy, says Vinay Sitapati.

Vinay Sitapati: But now that a new state has been created, the TRS government in Telangana wants to play up regional icons. And so Rao has been made into a Telugu beta. The local Congress unit of Telangana also wants to celebrate him, because they are afraid they will lose votes. Unfortunately, in India, someone like Rao, who was fundamentally a national icon, has now found a constituency solely as a regional leader. And that's not who he was.

It clearly struck out that Rao was a lonely man. You know, here was a man without friends, somebody who was an introvert, who was so lonely most of his life. But when he became Prime Minister, where everybody is lonely, he had perfect training in how to deal with it.

[edit] A homecoming in Telangana

Sugata Srinivasaraju, July 7, 2021: The Times of India

On June 28, at a function to mark the end of the year-long birth centenary celebrations of PV Narasimha Rao (PVN) in Hyderabad, Telangana Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao (KCR) presented him as a ‘son of the soil’. He listed all that his government had done in the past year to commemorate the memory of the state’s singular pride: There was the 16-feet bronze statue of PVN that had just then been unveiled (care had been taken to ensure close resemblance to PVN’s physical contours using imported laser technology); the Necklace Road in the heart of Hyderabad city was being renamed after the former prime minister; a chair was being set up at the Kakatiya University in Warangal, closer to PVN’s birthplace, and PVN’s daughter, Vani Devi, had been made an MLC from the graduate’s constituency on a Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) ticket.

On the same occasion, KCR repeated his demand that the Bharat Ratna should be conferred posthumously on PVN, and the Hyderabad Central University should be renamed after him. The message was that the homestate was celebrating him, and the Union government should demonstrate similar gratitude to a man who had contributed enormously to the nation’s wealth after growing up in a corner of Telangana – Vangara and Lakinepally villages. KCR also recalled how PVN had sacrificed over 800 acres of his family land after introducing land reforms as a chief minister in the 1970s.

KCR’s unstated emphasis was that the values and culture of the state had helped PVN serve India with distinction, and that he quintessentially remained a Telangana man. The chiselling of his image and the preservation of his legacy had an altogether different idiom from what was familiar about PVN in faraway Delhi. All those who spoke about him in English, on his birth centenary, spoke mostly about his economic reforms; but all references to him in Telugu were about his sacrifice, scholarship, vision, resilience, humiliations and hurt.

It is a twist of fate that a man who had been refused a cremation in the national capital (in fact Vinay Sitapati’s biography of PVN begins with the Congress top brass’ conspiracy to pack his body off from Delhi to Hyderabad in December 2004) had been resurrected as a regional hero 17 years later. The formation of the Telangana state in 2014, ten years after PVN’s death, had created this possibility. The state needed a contemporary local icon with a national and international presence, and they could not have found a bigger name than PVN.

Just as PVN did not plan to be Prime Minister, he had never imagined himself as a local star because his eclectic and esoteric personality had ensured that the roots do not strike deep but were instead spread out. In the pan-Indian space he was never seen as an exclusive Telugu person. He was always referred to as a multilingual scholar, polyglot, economic reformer, a sly challenger to the Nehru-Gandhi throne, a closet majoritarian who presided over the destruction of the Babri Masjid etc. His cultural identity was never rigidly defined.

In fact his spirit, right from his younger days, was itinerant, spiritual, scattered, and cosmopolitan in an unformed way. He was never a mass leader who mingled with his people and drew inspiration from them in his moments of defeat and loneliness. He was distant from his own family. As a nominated chief minister, he had quietly walked away into exile in 1973 when he could not manage the game of caste dominance and intra-regional complexities in the undivided state of Andhra Pradesh. Later, he went to the Lok Sabha from Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Odisha.

One wonders if an undivided state of Andhra Pradesh would have been so generous with the memory of PVN. The cultural fissures between Telangana and the rest of the regions were so deep that for over a decade after his death, there were no whispers of his resurrection. The story goes that the Congress did not want him to share the glory of memorials in Delhi with the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. But even in undivided Andhra Pradesh, the local Congress government was accused of abandoning his corpse. He was an accidental prime minister but ever since he stepped down as head of government - and in September 1996 as Congress president - he had appeared more an abandoned prime minster. Until now, when Telangana has adopted him like he was adopted as a three-year-old by a richer landlord’s family in his village.

In a metaphorical sense, PVN was uprooted very early in life, and he has been replanted in popular imagination only accidentally. It is significant that Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Jagan Mohan Reddy, who is also in need of a local icon for his new state, has not made counter claims about PVN. After all, his father, YS Rajashekar Reddy, as chief minister of an undivided Telugu state had presided over the cremation of PVN in Hyderabad. Interestingly, back in 2004, when PVN died, KCR himself was in the Congress and was part of Manmohan Singh’s Cabinet as labour minister. He would not have imagined then, that he would be the man in the future creating a definite political and cultural context, as well as a home, to PVN’s orphaned memory.

There is always a home and there is the world. Life in-between negotiates the relationship between the two (Amartya Sen’s forthcoming memoirs is titled Home in the World). Home is determined by the place of one’s accidental birth, but home is also determined by where you finally decide to rest. Often, where you are cremated determines how you will be remembered. Home is where the preservation, pardon and the celebration always happens. The return to home is always the grandest of journeys. Sometimes, decades after they are dead, the graves of people are shifted back home. If PVN had got a Delhi cremation (and Delhi is nobody’s home), he would have been so distant to the idea of Telangana in 2021. An embattled PVN did not make a choice of where he wanted to finally rest; he was appropriated back. That is what a home does when the world abandons you. According to PVN’s biographer, his last words were: “Where am I?” and he answered it himself: “I am in Vangara. In mother’s room.”

If Chief Minister KCR had not worked towards the resurrection and preservation of PVN’s memory in his home, to the rest of the world he would have looked like a deeply-conflicted person. The fact that he presided over economic reforms would be said loudly, but there would also be the bogies of Babri Masjid, the 1984 Sikh riots when he was home minister, the corruption charges etc. The reforms credit has also been cleverly contested and made competitive by playing up the role of Manmohan Singh, although Singh has accepted Rao as his ‘guru’ and has remained faithful to his memory. Now, all that does not matter because he is a Telangana star, and that is a different galaxy. Ironically, Sonia Gandhi and Singh played a huge role in the creation of Telangana in 2014, but it is the ‘son of the soil’ who is, and will always be, preferred.