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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Sanjaya Baru
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March 29 - September 21, 2018
September 1971, PV was named chief minister of Andhra Pradesh as part of a deal to end an agitation for the bifurcation of the state and the creation of Telangana.
Kasu Brahmananda Reddy from coastal Andhra, a Congress Party supremo in the state, had to step down as chief minister. While the agitation for a separate Telangana state was led by Chenna Reddy,
PV had been elected to the Lok Sabha in 1984 and 1989 from Ramtek in Maharashtra. But he was denied a ticket in the 1991 elections. Realizing that Rajiv had intended to sideline him as he had Pranab Mukherjee, PV planned to go into political retirement. However, while Mukherjee had to quit the Congress Party (and was later rehabilitated), PV was merely denied an election ticket. Ironically, when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, PV chaired the CWC meeting that condoled his death. If Rajiv and PV lived in different worlds, Sonia and PV came from different planets.
They assumed India’s prime ministership was there for Rajiv’s taking; that, upon his death, it was for the heirs of Rajiv to decide who would be India’s next prime minister. Perhaps they assumed PV would be more biddable than any of the others. That he would be a loyal yes man, a mere rubber stamp, who would do as he was told because he was very old and a political non-entity. However, this remains a simplistic explanation.
The Indira Congress’s vote share had gone down to 39.5 per cent from 49.1 per cent in 1984.
Congress candidates elected to the Lok Sabha went down even more precipitously from 404 in 1984 to 197 in 1989.
As for those who chose to stay within, loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi family became the cheapest ticket to political relevance.
Circumstantial evidence suggests that Rajiv had intended to bring the government down at a time suitable to him so that he could return to the voters and seek another mandate to rule.
psephologists
was only natural that senior Congress leaders like Venkataraman, Mukherjee and PV were thinking about their party’s future beyond the Nehru-Gandhis.
He was not a Brahmin from UP and so wouldn’t undermine the political base of the Nehru-Gandhis.
PV had the support of all the 89 MPs from the south. He would, after all, be the first south Indian to head a government in Delhi.
southern states remained loyal to Indira Gandhi even after the Emergency. In recognition of this fact, Indira contested from Karnataka in 1978 and Andhra Pradesh in 1980.
They did not join the Congress because they liked any one individual—Gandhi or Nehru or Bose or Patel. The Congress was a movement, and became a political party. In their twilight years, however, that generation saw the Congress turn into a family enterprise.
took PV a full two years to secure a majority in Parliament. In July 1993 his government won a vote of confidence in Parliament and further consolidated its position. This enabled him to complete his full term in office. No other prime minister from outside the Nehru-Gandhi family had done so until then. Not Morarji Desai from Gujarat, not Charan Singh or V. P. Singh from UP, not Chandra Shekhar from Bihar. As
I have mentioned earlier, P. V. Narasimha Rao also became the first south Indian in history to govern India from Delhi.
The Mughals ruled India with the help of Kayasthas in their courts and administration.
Even the Nizams of Hyderabad invited Kayasthas all the way from UP
Chandra was India’s ambassador to the United States during the Pokhran-II nuclear tests conducted by the Vajpayee government, and played a stellar role in defending and safeguarding Indian interests.
P. C. Alexander, Indira Gandhi’s principal secretary in the early 1980s. PV relied greatly on Alexander’s advice in the first few days of his prime ministership, and it was at his suggestion that PV finally appointed Manmohan Singh as finance minister.
reckoner
I don’t know if PV was aware that IG was also Chandra Shekhar’s first choice, but what may have gone in IG’s favour as far as PV was concerned was the fact that among the available ‘professional economists in government with an international reputation’, as PV defined his potential finance minister, IG was the one person he knew who had handled the most recent loan negotiations with the IMF.
P. C. Alexander to suggest an alternative—he mentioned the name of Dr Manmohan Singh. PV approved the name and Alexander was asked to call Dr Singh.
IG and Singh had led parallel lives. Both studied in Cambridge, England, both returned home to work in government, both were highly nationalistic in their orientation. While IG was known as ‘Morarji’s man’, Singh was essentially ‘Indira’s man’, having come into prominence in the early 1970s for his role in tackling high rates of inflation.
canny
Dr Singh had offered to quit on at least three occasions in the face of intra-party criticism and each time PV had to get him to withdraw the resignation offer,
attacks, mainly from Arjun Singh, A. K. Antony and the Congress left, were in fact aimed at the prime minister.
Gandhi made Nehru. PV made Manmohan.
When PV died, in 2004, Manmohan Singh attended every memorial meeting in New Delhi—the only member of the CWC to do so.
coterie
July 1992, Commerce Minister Chidambaram, one of the ministers Rajiv first drafted into government, offered to quit following allegations of financial impropriety on his part in a matter pertaining to the ownership of shares in Fairgrowth Financial Services, a Bangalore-based company charged with involvement in a stock market scam.
Most Congress MPs regarded Chidambaram as uppity and arrogant.
In early January 1993, an Uzbekistan Airways plane had crash-landed in Delhi airport.
Civil Aviation Minister Madhavrao Scindia, another close friend of Rajiv Gandhi’s and a maharaja to boot, resigned his post, owning moral responsibility for the mishap and the mess-up. The prime minister promptly accepted his resignation. Scindia was flummoxed! PV was not inclined to accept the resignation but was irritated by the minister’s bravado. He had sent word to Scindia asking him to withdraw his resignation. Scindia wanted the prime minister to reject it. That way he could occupy the high moral ground of having offered to quit and yet retain his job as an expression of respect for the
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Herculean task.
Himalayan achievement.
The government is committed to removing the cobwebs that come in the way of rapid industrialization.
The US believed GATT had served its purpose, helping Germany, Japan and many ‘East Asian Tigers’ emerge as globally competitive economies. Their exports were now threatening the US and the sole superpower wanted a restructuring of the global trading system, replacing GATT with a new world trade organization.
‘the sympathy of the common man is always with the debtor.
Not many are aware that when Indira devalued the rupee in 1966,
1991 was not just another year for the economy. It was a manifestation of all the mistakes India’s political leaders and policymakers had made in the preceding decades and it was the year in which expectations about India changed dramatically.
Between the United Front governments of 1996-98, the BJP-led coalition of 1998-2004 and the Congress-led coalition of 2004-14, every single major national party has either been in government or lent its support from outside to the parties in government. None of them, not one, ever sought to reverse any of PV’s policies.
PV made history when his election saw the highest ever voter turnout in any democracy till that date. PV was elected with 89.5 per cent of Nandyal’s voters turning up and voting for him. This was the highest voter turnout in Indian elections and earned him a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.
has been noted, in the May 1991 elections, Rajiv Gandhi had declined to give PV a party ticket, forcing him to go into political retirement.
While PV’s impressive victory in the November election helped stabilize the minority government, it appeared as if the BJP, the main opposition party, chose to support PV through his first year in office when the focus was on getting to grips with the economic situation. PV had advised his finance minister to keep opposition leaders, especially BJP leaders, informed about their policy moves.
The Tirupati session was historic because it was the first such session after 1966 when neither the prime minister nor the party president belonged to the Nehru-Gandhi family. In 1966, the prime minister was Lal Bahadur Shastri and the party president was K. Kamaraj. PV wanted the Congress to return to a pre-1966 trajectory, seeking a future independent of any one family. Why should the Congress remain only the ‘Indira Congress’? It ought to return to its roots as the Indian National Congress, a normal political party where any member could aspire to rise to the top.
With Rajiv’s death and PV’s election, the Congress became implicitly divided into four camps: First, the Nehru-Gandhi family loyalists whose power and privilege derived from their service to Rajiv and Sonia. They were the ones who had earlier made sure that Rajiv became prime minister after Indira’s death and they were the most insistent on making Sonia party president after Rajiv’s death. While the formal resolution inviting Sonia to lead the party was moved by PV, among others, the move was pushed by members of the coterie, including Fotedar, Dhawan and the like; second, a north Indian group
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PV’s election as party president at the Tirupati AICC diluted the enthusiasm of those who sought to bring Sonia into politics.
1951, the INC was given the election symbol of two bullocks carrying a yoke.
It is possible to suggest that the first step towards inherited political power came when Motilal Nehru urged Mahatma Gandhi to name his son Jawaharlal as Congress president.
