1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

by Sanjaya Baru

including Akbar Ahmed, Gundu Rao, Rukhsana Sultana, Jagdish

We now know that those in the Indira Congress who were even suspected of questioning this principle (like Pranab Mukherjee), had to pay a political price. Long before Indira’s assassination Mukherjee did come to see himself as the second-in-command in her government.

Gulzarilal Nanda, who was sworn in as prime minister when Nehru and Lal Bahadur Shastri died.

when Rajiv Gandhi did finally become prime minister, he chose not to include Mukherjee in his council of ministers,

The fact that Rao had informally accepted monkhood just two months before becoming PM shows the mental distance from power he had developed.

His style of slow decision-making and not revealing his mind often frustrated people.

In 1998, when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was unseated by a vote of no-confidence, Sonia made an abortive bid to become prime minister. She was thwarted by Mulayam Singh Yadav who withdrew support to the Congress-led government after indicating an initial willingness to offer it.

In May 2004, when the Congress was once again in a position to form a minority government leading a coalition, the family coterie pushed for Sonia to become prime minister. This time she wisely chose not to. However, the party adopted a new methodology to select its prime minister. It elected Sonia as the chairperson of the CPP. Sonia

The practice till then, and in all parliamentary democracies, was that the leader of the party’s parliamentary party became the head of government. In May 2004, the Congress had Sonia as chairperson of the parliamentary party, Pranab Mukherjee as leader of the party in the Lok Sabha, and Manmohan Singh as the leader in the Rajya Sabha. Sonia then nominated Singh as the party’s choice to hea...

The Congress, led by Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul, experienced its worst ever rout in history, securing 44

seats in the 543-member Lok Sabha.

During the intervening years the Congress Party disowned PV. His name was virtually erased from the party’s public memory. When he died, the party shut the gates of its headquarters and refused to bid official farewell to a former president. His crime: seeking to end the proprietary control of the INC by the Nehru-Gandhi family. PV died on 23 December 2004. In the decade since then the only Congress leader who has regularly and religiously paid tribute and honoured PV’s memory on the occasion of his birth anniversary has been Manmohan Singh—the man whose political career was made by PV. But even Manmohan Singh was unable to honour PV with a Bharat Ratna during his decade-long tenure as prime minister. The party had again become a proprietorship.

What congress did to PV N Rao

On 26 December 1991 the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), popularly referred to as the Soviet Union, formally dissolved itself.

Soviat union dissolved

historic era that began on 7 November 1917, when communist partisans, the Bolsheviks, grabbed power in Russia and ended the reign of the Tsars.

The great battles of the first half of the twentieth century were between colonialism and national liberation movements; and, between socialism and democracy, on the one side, and fascism on the other. Colonialism and fascism were defeated. In the second half of the twentieth century the battle of ideas was between bourgeois democracy and state socialism under communist party rule.

the end of the twentieth century, old style communist parties were losing to the appeal of Western style democracy.

Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979,

muddle way!’

J. N. Dixit soon became his key diplomatic adviser.

Together, PV and Dixit altered the course of foreign policy, helping India adjust to the consequences of the end of the Cold War, and construct a post-Nehruvian narrative.

While the Charan Singh government conveyed India’s disapproval of the Soviet action in Afghanistan, Indira Gandhi initially toned down the criticism on her return to power in 1980. However, by 1981 Indira Gandhi decided to send a different message out. The botched Soviet invasion of Afghanistan forced India to rethink its strategic relationship with the big powers.

Turning to the West, PV entered 1992 elevating the India-Israel relationship to the diplomatic level.

1990, the Soviets supplied as much as 90 per cent of India’s defence equipment.

Even as he improved relations with ASEAN, PV became the first Indian prime minister to travel to the Republic of Korea.

chaebol

Rajiv Gandhi too played an important role. He made an incipient crisis worse by withdrawing support to the Chandra Shekhar government, and not allowing it to present a reformist budget in time to secure a lifeline from the IMF. Of course, his government and others in the 1980s contributed to the crisis with their irresponsible fiscal policies.

On the positive side, Rajiv helped manage the crisis even in his death by giving his imprimatur to the policies that PV eventually implemented. Rajiv did not have the political courage to do so. PV did.

Economists think of themselves as modern day prophets and saviours.

John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century,

intelligentsia,

Being a Cambridge student and an admirer of the Soviet Union, Jawaharlal Nehru was drawn to economic planning and to economists.

hired many and named himself chairman of a Planning Commission—an institution populated by economists.

contemporaries

PV praised Singh and acknowledged his loyalty and his contribution to reforms. Then, in his characteristic deadpan manner, he said to his interlocutor, ‘A finance minister is like the numeral zero. Its power depends on the number you place in front of it. The success of a finance minister depends on the support of the prime minister.’

PV made history. But, as I have noted, he made sure he took no individual credit for it,

Next, PV went on to redefine the role of the public sector, reminding his party that both the profits and the losses of public enterprises were in fact the profits and losses of the people of India. Making the public sector more efficient, so that it would cease to be loss-making, was in the interest of the people.

shibboleth

After all, in 1962, Nehru was willing to seek US military help to deal with China and in 1971 Indira sought Soviet help to deal with the ganging-up of the US and China on the issue of the future of East Pakistan.

The Polish economist Michał Kalecki described non-alignment as ‘a clever calf sucking two cows’,

Writing a few years later, in 1998, British sociologist Anthony Giddens called it the ‘third way’ in his politically influential book, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy.

It is a tragedy of Indian politics that PV’s leadership on the economic, foreign policy and domestic political fronts has not received the recognition it deserves.

His own party let him down, on the specious plea that his inaction during the destruction of the Babri Masjid in Uttar Pradesh in December 1992 had alienated the Muslim community.

1985 with Rajiv Gandhi and his advisers opening the doors of the Babri Masjid to Hindus...

In PV’s view, as he sums up in the book, Ayodhya: 6 December 1992, published

posthumously,

unnerved

by multiple crises and unforeseen changes and challenges.

For the leadership he provided in that fateful year PV deserved the Bharat Ratna.

Indians believed they had won their economic independence in 1991.

anew