Half Lion: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India

by Vinay Sitapati

Indira began to look for a ‘nominated’ chief minister. It was a concept that Narasimha Rao would explain some years later in a speech at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.7 A ‘nominated’ chief minister would have no local power base, thus ensuring loyalty to New Delhi and its socialism. Indira was looking for a powerless devotee. One who would sing only her hymns.

MMS was similarly created by Sonia Gandhi

Over the years, Rao would master two computer languages, COBOL and BASIC, and would also go on to write code in the mainframe operating system UNIX.

He refused to present his own industrial policy, and throughout Manmohan’s budget speech, pouted next to him without speaking at all.

That P.V. Narasimha Rao was still able to cause (there is no other word for it) the most sweeping economic advance in Indian history is proof of his political genius, of course. It is also a testament to his idealism.

The final, endemic drawback of Indian-style socialism was a bumpy ‘last mile’, populated by grasping middlemen and venal

Most of these (for example, cheap fertilizers) went to politically connected groups.

PDS money was being siphoned off by corrupt middlemen and bureaucrats. Also benefitting were the rich farmers from whom the government procured rice, wheat and other grain.

‘You want the prime minister to take a file and go to the Congress president. Are you serious?’

Manmohan confessed to him: ‘There cannot be two centres of power . . . I have to accept that the party president [Sonia Gandhi] is the centre of power.’4

No national leader who achieved his scale of transformation worked under such constraints. It makes Narasimha Rao the most skilled Indian prime minister since Jawaharlal Nehru, a twentieth-century reformer as consequential as Deng Xiaoping.