Remembering Narasimha Rao - the man who liberated the Indian economy

It is interesting that the 25th anniversary of economic reforms — one of the nice myths created by the middle class for middle-aged India — is being used to drive home the point that the man who did it, PV Narasimha Rao, has been given short shrift by the Congress party, and that it is the duty of the historian, intellectual and pro-reforms priests to argue and fight for the recognition that is due to the man. It is good that the fight is taking place in the public arena, and there is a ripple in the waters as it were. There are many silent admirers of Rao, the reformer, but only two people have dared to stick their neck out — Vinay Sitapati, a young researcher from Princeton University, the author of Half-Lion, and Sanjaya Baru, who has served as the media advisor to Manmohan Singh in his first term as prime minister and who has written 1991: How PV Narasimha Rao Made History. 

Sitapati’s biography, claiming to be objective and sympathetic, fails to get the measure of Rao. The young author is not to be blamed because Rao was indeed an elusive politician in more senses than one. Baru’s is a frontal offensive, where he roundly criticises the Congress party and the Nehru-Gandhi family for its refusal to recognise the achievements and genius of Rao. Baru’s polemic is a necessary one to enliven the supine intellectual atmosphere in the country. But Sitapati and Baru seem to fail to stir the hornet’s nest and unleash a mini-storm. For some reason, the intelligentsia in the country just refuses to show any interest in Rao. The question to be asked is: Is it the fault of Rao that he does not evoke any interest in the intelligentsia about himself, or is it the fault of the intelligentsia that it just refuses to engage in a serious debate about Rao?

It looks like that even among politicians Rao does not seem to command much respect or interest. There were three people who spoke at the book launch of Baru in the India International Centre in New Delhi. There were the former finance ministers, Yashwant Sinha and P Chidambaram, and there was the cabinet secretary, Naresh Chandra. Sinha spoke about Chandra Shekhar who was prime minister for four months, and Sinha was the finance minister then. Chidambaram talked about the Machiavellian manoeuvres of Rao with barely a nod to Rao’s success in ushering in reforms. Naresh Chandra, too, spent time talking about the issues during Chandra Shekhar’s short term as prime minister, and all that he would say about Rao was that he knew many things and he liked learned divagations with his top bureaucrat , and files which could be disposed of in a few minutes took a few hours. So, Baru was left holding on to Rao’s achievements like a lone, brave soldier standing guard.

Baru’s pitch is quite interesting. He says that Rao had forged a new foreign policy for the country in a post-Cold War situation. It is a fair enough argument, but there is not much to show what Rao’s thinking on the issue was. Rao was much too taciturn for a politician. He rarely thought aloud, and the few times he did, he revealed the mind of a man who enjoyed the complexity of an issue and who was willing to dwell on it at length. A fine example is the Samuel L and Elizabeth Jodidi Memorial Lecture he delivered at Harvard University on May 17, 1994. It is terse and dense and a sort of black hole of Rao’s point of view where too much information is compressed. It is indeed a challenge to tease something out of Rao from his pronouncements. There is intellectual Machiavellianism at work here. Here is a man willing to argue all sides of an argument, without letting anyone know where he himself stands.

But the real question is why is it that no one is willing to pay attention to Rao’s role, and why is there this reluctance to acknowledge his contribution. It seems that the pro-reforms congregation as well as the anti-reforms band do not take Rao seriously. For the pro-reforms lobby, he was not much of a pro-reforms politician. For the anti-reformswallas he was plain anathema. It is indeed a daunting task for anyone to stand up for Rao and make an argument on his behalf. And Rao himself makes the task more difficult because of his refusal to take credit for the economic reforms. It is his refusal to bask in the glory of the successful reforms that makes it so difficult for his defenders to push his case.

Sitapati and Baru, and Baru much more than the other, have found in Rao a good stick to beat the Congress with. Baru argues with enough belligerence that it is the Congress, dominated by the Nehru-Gandhis, which has given Rao’s achievements an indecent funeral. Of course, Baru means it in a metaphorical sense rather than the literal, though it would make sense in the literal way as well. This is an argument that can stick, and it could possibly embarrass the Congress. But the party is quite unabashed about its scornful treatment of Rao. It is of the view that Rao had betrayed the secular identity-marker of the Congress. But Rao felt that he was nothing but a Congress secularist, and he was right too. The glitch in the case of Rao was that he was caught out in his Congress brand of secularism, whereas the party plays the self-consciously cynical game of catch-me-if-you-can. Rao is the classical fall guy for the party, and it cannot but elide him from the records. 

It would seem that Rao’s bid to rid the party of the stranglehold of the Nehru-Gandhis did not succeed. The question to be probed is why he failed in freeing the party from the family’s domination. Chidambaram gave a hint about the many things that he did not do to reform the party. There is room for a book on Rao’s contentious relationship with the Congress. Baru has given a hint that there was a north-south divide in the party, and Rao prevailed in 1991 because of the support from the Congress members of Parliament from the south. It is a clue about the inner dynamics of the Congress.

The author is consulting editor, dna