The ‘jugaad reformer’

It’s been famously said of former Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao that he could speak 10 languages – and remain silent in all of them. The man who presided over India’s political and economic destiny at a crisis-ridden moment in the early 1990s was arguably one of India’s most transformative leaders.

Yet, the most enduring image that history has sculpted of him is of a pouty-faced, ziplock-mouthed politician forever frozen in Rodin-esque Thinker mode. Assessments of his legacy have tended to be harsh, which even Narasimha Rao did little to remedy, partly because his personality was prone to self-effacement and partly because he was the nearest thing to a philosopher-Prime Minister, the archetypal sthithapragya , who could “meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.”

Political scientist and journalist Vinay Sitapati’s biography of Narasimha Rao fills the vacuum in this space, and ends up – with the power of hindsight and some sterling reportorial work — correcting some of the perceived wrongs that have tainted PV’s standing.

In this enterprise, the author has been helped by the exclusive access he gained to Narasimha Rao’s private collection of papers, which offer some revelatory insights into the workings of a keen mind that fused a rare erudition with underappreciated political sagacity.

The PM years The most impactful period of Narasimha Rao’s political career relates to the five years (1991-96) that he served as Prime Minister, during which he headed a minority Congress government (improbably for a full term) and, against tremendous odds, oversaw the most sweeping economic reforms since Independence. But Narasimha Rao was, in fact, an ‘accidental’ Prime Minister: in 1991, he had all but retired from politics after a 50-year career of at-best middling distinction, and was on the verge of taking up a position as the head of a spiritual order.

The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, however, reconfigured planetary positions and thrust Narasimha Rao in the saddle, largely on the strength of the fact that he was perceived by the Nehru-Gandhi durbar as a political lightweight who would keep the Prime Ministerial seat warm for the next member of the dynasty – and then fade away quietly into the night. How wrong they were, how wrong!

Narasimha Rao seized the day, turned the multi-pronged political-economic crisis into an opportunity, built an all-star economic reforms team, (partially) unshackled the economy and unleashed India’s entrepreneurial energy. Just as significantly, he sought to unhitch the Congress passenger coaches from the engine of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.

It was partly for that last act of ‘treachery’ that he was politically delegitimised by Sonia Gandhi and her loyalists: he finds no mention in the official narratives of Congress history; worse, he was churlishly denied a memorial in New Delhi — and, in a moment of sickeningly petty politics, even his body was refused admittance to the Congress party headquarters for party workers to pay their homage.

When Narasimha Rao took over as Prime Minister, India was being buffetted by several storms. Rajiv Gandhi had just been assassinated, and bloody separatist campaigns wracked Punjab, Kashmir and the North-East. The country was on the brink of a balance-of-payments crisis, which would have had devastating consequences.

The polity had been ripped apart by the politics of caste-based reservations, and the BJP-led campaign for a Ram temple at Ayodhya. And with the coming apart of the Soviet Union, India’s foreign policy orientation of nearly 50 years was in disarray. The country needed a steady hand at the wheel, and Sitapati argues that for all of Narasimha Rao’s failings, India would likely have fared a lot worse under any other leader.

Embracing the Big Bang There is a school of thought that holds that India’s economic troubles were so deep-rooted that anyone in Narasimha Rao’s place would have had to embrace ‘big bang’ reforms. But as Sitapati establishes, the economy had been in crisis mode for over a decade, and the template for reforms had been in place for that period. But even Rajiv Gandhi, with a 400-plus majority in the Lok Sabha and the political goodwill that the dynasty enjoyed, could not summon up the resolve to see any meaningful reforms through.

That Narasimha Rao undertook them without a parliamentary majority and with only the reluctant backing of his own party and of protectionist-minded domestic industrialists, makes it triply creditable. In any case, the fact that he did not abandon the reforms immediately after the balance-of-payment crisis was resolved, but persisted until 1995, is telling.

Of course, the methods that Narasimha Rao deployed in that enterprise were not always high-minded. In the same way that Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping ritually invoked Maoist thought while embracing the market, Narasimha Rao sought to portray the reforms as a continuation of the Nehru-Gandhi vision.

And, on occasion, in the quest for parliamentary survival, he often blurred ethical lines. All of which, in Sitapati’s reckoning, rendered him less than leonine: he was also part fox, part mouse, he argues.

Narasimha Rao was, of course, far from flawless. As Home Minister in 1984, his passivity during the Sikh pogrom following Indira Gandhi’s assassination is a bloody blot on his political record. And in December 1992, he was clearly outwitted by Hindutva forces that demolished the Babri Masjid — even if, as Sitapati points out, allegations of his tacit complicity in the demolition are agenda-driven.

Yet, Narasimha Rao deserves far greater credit for transforming India, even if only as a ‘jugaad reformer’, than historians have accorded him thus far. This breezy biography is part-remediation of that historical failing.

MEET THE AUTHOR

Vinay Sitapati is a political scientist, journalist and lawyer. He teaches at Ashoka University. He is finishing his PhD in politics from Princeton University, USA.

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