1991 Quotes

“reject nothing useful for its plainness, we take nothing irrelevant for its dazzle.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“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.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“Expectations shape outcomes in a world of uncertainty. Expectations about the economy end up being self-fulfilling prophecies. If you expect tomorrow to be better than today, you take economic decisions that ensure that tomorrow is indeed better. If, on the other hand, one believes the future to be bleaker than the present, one ends up taking decisions and making choices that contribute to a less than satisfactory outcome.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“Twenty metric tonnes of confiscated gold, worth US$200 million, held in its vaults was made available by the RBI to the State Bank of India for sale, with a repurchase option, to the Union Bank of Switzerland.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“Expectations shape outcomes in a world of uncertainty. Expectations about the economy end up being self-fulfilling prophecies. If you expect tomorrow to be better than today, you take economic decisions that ensure that tomorrow is indeed better. If, on the other hand, one believes the future to be bleaker than the present, one ends up taking decisions and making choices that contribute to a less than satisfactory outcome. The”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“That is, the responsibility for the events that combined to push India to the brink of default must lie with Rajiv Gandhi and V. P. Singh. It was then left to Chandra Shekhar and Narasimha Rao to arrest the slide and clean up the mess. And the credit for understanding the seriousness of the situation and acting in time must go to the two of them.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“the responsibility for the events that combined to push India to the brink of default must lie with Rajiv Gandhi and V. P. Singh.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“In his tribute to Jawaharlal Nehru, a few months after Nehru passed away, political scientist Rajni Kothari argued that Nehru’s greatest contribution to nation-building was ‘not to have started a revolution but to have given rise to a consensus’. He called it ‘the Congress system’. The Congress, he said, was a ‘party of consensus’—an umbrella party containing within itself a wide range of interests and opinions from across the Indian subcontinent.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“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’?”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“Most Congress MPs regarded Chidambaram as uppity and arrogant.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“Self-reliance in 1991, PV believed, could be defined as being ‘indebted only to the extent we have the capacity to pay’.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“Sir, I do not minimise the difficulties that lie ahead on the long and arduous journey on which we have embarked. But as Victor Hugo once said, ‘no power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come.’ I suggest to this august House that the emergence of India as a major economic power in the world happens to be one such idea. Let the whole world hear it loud and clear. India is now wide awake. We shall prevail. We shall overcome.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“If he had succeeded in conducting nuclear weapon tests in the winter of 1995, as he had planned to, his tenure would not only have begun with a bang but also ended with one, so to speak. In the event, he left the opportunity to test and declare India a nuclear weapons state to his friend and successor, Atal Bihari Vajpayee.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“For the leadership he provided in that fateful year PV deserved the Bharat Ratna. It is a sad commentary on this nation of ours that we do not know who our real heroes are and do not know how to honour them. The year 1991”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“PV’s ‘middle way’ sought to ‘strike a balance between the individual and the common good’, as PV put it.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“It meant that we looked for Truth in the interstices of dogmas. It means today that we will accept no dogma even if it happens to be the only dogma remaining in the field at a given moment. Our quest for truth will still continue.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“foreign policy is the outcome of economic policy.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“PV became the first Indian prime minister to travel to the Republic of Korea. In Seoul, he urged Korean chaebol to invest in India in a big way. In 1991, there was no major Korean brand available in the Indian market. A decade later, Samsung and Hyundai had become household names across”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“Manmohan Singh put it pithily in his budget speech of July 1991 when he spoke of ‘the emergence of India as a major economic power in the world’. This, he believed, was an idea whose time had come. Power no longer lay in the barrel of the gun, but in a nation’s economic capability.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“Finance Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, the man who had no time for Yashwant Sinha in early 1991 did visit India in late 1991 but no investment was forthcoming.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“the IMF, World Bank and donor governments was implemented. PV picked and chose what he felt he could reasonably defend within his own party and Parliament. It was his ‘middle way’. It is useful to”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“PV did nothing in 1991 that had not already been suggested by someone or the other at home. To that extent they were home-grown. But it is also true that the implementation of many of these reforms was a policy conditionality imposed by the IMF as a quid pro quo for the balance of payments support India sought from it.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“We reject nothing useful for its plainness, we take nothing irrelevant for its dazzle.”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History

“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 head the government. Thus, Manmohan Singh became the first nominated, rather than elected, prime minister. It”
― Sanjaya Baru, 1991: How P. V. Narasimha Rao Made History