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

by Vinay Sitapati

In 1990, when in the Opposition, Rao would write to the commerce minister, Subramanian Swamy, complaining that the electrolytic manganese metal from abroad was being allowed easy import into India under the ‘open general license’.75 Rao grumbled that this was hurting domestic producers. His complaint reflected economic protectionism at its worst. On foreign policy, ‘he had realized that the old shibboleths, that book, had become obsolete. He needed a new approach and vocabulary.’76 But on the economy, Rao would come to this realization only in the debt-ridden days of June 1991. By 1987, just as Rajiv’s star was on the wane, Narasimha Rao believed his was on the