To the Brink and Back: India’s 1991 Story (22 page)

It is the sagacious leadership of Shri Narasimha Rao which has enabled the [Congress] party to survive all threats to the government at the centre in and outside Parliament. At times, inner-party developments have created doubts about the survivability of the government. But by combining inner-party democracy with discipline,
Narasimha Raoji has belied such doubts whenever they have arisen.

Narasimha Rao’s own description of himself and how he came to be where he was in June 1991 cannot be bettered. It reveals much of the man and how he thought of himself.

Indeed, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Narasimha Rao actually was a man of many parts. Unfortunately, many of his personal accomplishments have remained hidden. That he was a polyglot was quite well known—fluent in Telugu, Marathi, Hindi, Sanskrit and Urdu; familiar with Arabic and Farsi; able to give interviews in Spanish; and capable of writing in French. What is less well known is his computer-savviness, which was next only to Rajiv Gandhi amongst politicians then. He was personally operating desktops in the late-1980s and was amongst the very first to start using laptops. I recall, he once saw a Taiwanese laptop with me, assembled in India by Zenith, and asked me to get two sets for him—he kept one and gave the other to
Jitendra Prasada. What also isn’t well known is that he was a tennis buff, with the Spaniard great, Manuel Santana, apparently being one of his favourites!

My abrupt exit from the PMO was not pleasant—at least not from my point of view. For quite some time I seethed in rage, even while keenly aware of the helplessness of my position. Yet, I could not but admire the man who was responsible for my expulsion, and who, in some ways, was the Chinese revolutionary
Deng Xiaoping’s counterpart in India. Both were old men. Both had their ups and downs (more downs than ups). But when the moment came, they seized the opportunity to leave their imprint—Rao did it in June 1991, and Deng did it first in 1978 and then, more famously, in 1992. In the case of Deng, it was a complete U-turn—moving away from Mao’s hard-line policies, and combining the Communist Party’s socialist ideology with a practical adoption of economic reform. In Rao’s case, although he changed the paradigm of economic policy, the paradigm itself had been chopped away bit by bit for well over a decade, with the blueprint for change having been debated and discussed for a number of years.

Notwithstanding his many talents, it must be admitted that Narasimha Rao was a most puzzling man. Winston Churchill, the British premier, said of Clement Attlee, his successor, that he was ‘a modest man, who has much to be modest about’. Similarly, it could well be said of Rao: he was a much misunderstood man and he may well have done much to be so misunderstood—especially by his own colleagues.

Rao was a complex personality, not at all easy to comprehend, and he made no effort whatsoever to make people want to understand him—except when he was on the back-foot. I was simply in no position to know what went wrong between him and his own party—a party he had served with distinction for almost half a century. I was an anguished witness to a most painful event on 24 January 1998 which showed how remarkably friendless Narasimha Rao had become within the Congress. The occasion was the release of the
Congress’ manifesto for the 1998 Lok Sabha elections. I was seated on the dias when, in response to a question, the Congress president,
Sitaram Kesri, emphatically declared that his predecessor would not be put up as a candidate in the upcoming polls. It was a most jarring moment, and coming from someone who had been personally selected by Rao as a successor made it even more unpleasant. The manifesto sank without a trace as the only news to hit the headlines was the former prime minister’s humiliation.

Narasimha Rao was indisputably a loner, a man who didn’t do much to cultivate and build relationships. To borrow a phrase from Michael White’s biography of Isaac Newton, Narasimha Rao was above all ‘a secretive man, a man coiled in upon himself’.
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Moreover, his relationships with the sleaziest of characters—
Chandraswami being the most notable of them—which I saw at close quarters, were inexplicable and did no justice to a man of such erudition and learning. At one stage in the early days of his prime ministership, Chandraswami had convinced Narasimha Rao that India could easily tide over its immediate financial crisis because the godman’s buddy, the Sultan of Brunei, had agreed to extend a line of credit to India at the most concessional terms without any questions asked. That the prime minister took this suggestion seriously is borne out by the fact that a plane was ready to fly the
finance minister to meet the Sultan! Thankfully, Manmohan Singh managed to convince his boss at the last minute that this would be a foolhardy adventure.
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Some months after I had left the PMO,
Madhavan Kutty, the veteran Malayali journalist drew my attention to a devastating article titled ‘The Great Suicide’ which had appeared in
Mainstream Weekly
in January 1990. The author was identified as a
‘Congressman’ and was described as a senior leader of the Congress (I). Madhavan Kutty was convinced—and told me it was everybody’s view—that the real author was none other than Narasimha Rao himself. That
Nikhil Chakravartty was the prime minister’s close friend made me believe what I was being told. I have checked with a few others, and everyone, after reading the article, has ascribed its authorship to Narasimha Rao, although
Mani Shankar Aiyar says that the possibility of the author being
Siddhartha Shankar Ray, the erstwhile chief minister of West Bengal, had also been suggested when the article had first appeared. As far as the article itself was concerned, the very title said it all. It was a highly critical analysis of the Rajiv Gandhi era and Rajiv Gandhi himself—whose style of functioning was panned as brash, self-destructive and immature—and examined the reasons for the severe drubbing the Congress received in the 1989 Lok Sabha elections. The article amazed me no end because it highlighted Narasimha Rao’s frustration with his late leader, a kind of exasperation that did not quite fit the image I had (or for that matter, anyone else had) of their relationship. I had heard nothing but encomiums from Narasimha Rao for Rajiv Gandhi in June, July and August 1991 when I had been at his side. But evidently, the very same man in 1990 deemed it fit to write bitingly about the then Congress president. Maybe it was a knee-jerk reaction to an ignominious defeat. Maybe, as
Mani Shankar Aiyar has pointed out, it was the result of being sidelined. There is no clinching or conclusive evidence that Narasimha Rao was indeed a ‘Congressman’, but if he was, as he is widely suspected to be, there is reason to reassess the man and his relationship with his mentors.

Rao’s problems truly started with the
Harshad Mehta securities scam that first came to light in April 1992, and thereafter, with the demolition of the
Babri Masjid on 6 December 1992, an event that many of his own party colleagues believe he helped orchestrate, or allowed to happen or, at the very least, knew of as it unfolded, without intervening decisively. Almost the entire Congress believes that he wanted the masjid out of the way so that a permanent solution to the imbroglio at Ayodhya could be found. I had called Rao around 4 p.m. that fateful Sunday before leaving for Mumbai with Pranab Mukherjee, only to be told that the prime minister ‘
andar hain
(is inside)’. Rao has offered an elaborate defence of himself in his book
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that came out two years after his death. That defence cannot be ignored. There were many circumstances that did preclude him from imposing President’s Rule in Uttar Pradesh in October or November 1992. But there is no doubt that the responsibility for ensuring that 6 December 1992 never happened was his and his alone, even if there may be different views on his culpability with regard to what transpired that day.

If Rao still remains compelling of our attention, even commendation, it is for the truly transformational leadership he demonstrated at a most precarious time in India’s economic history. Of course, it could be argued that he had no choice and the alternative would have been to go down in history as the prime minister who presided over a default—but that would be tantamount to cavilling. Rao did not put a foot wrong forward in the initial months, and displayed both political maneuvering and statesmanship of the highest order.

Moments sometimes produce men (and women). Narasimha Rao is an outstanding example of this.

Narasimha Rao’s masterstroke was the appointment of
Manmohan Singh. One of his closest aides later recalled to me that even as a cabinet minister, Rao always felt that a prime minister should always have one source of senior, substantive and non-political advice, especially in those areas where the prime minister is weak.
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The aide also recalled Rao citing the precedent of D.R. Gadgil, who was deputy chairman of the Planning Commission between 1967 and 1971.

In Manmohan Singh, Narasimha Rao found a tailor-made bulwark. It is true that Rao had told his finance minister right at the very beginning, ‘Manmohan, if things go wrong, your head is on the chopping block; if we succeed, the credit will be ours.’ Notwithstanding this warning, and despite the enormous pressure and criticism he faced, Rao backed his finance minister to the hilt, allowing him full freedom, even when his instincts told him not to.

I have always believed that the personality of the finance minister has much to do with the degree to which economic reforms seem palatable in the initial months and years. Manmohan Singh made the years of liberalization appear acceptable, largely because he defied ideological labels, and could, if anything, only be called moderately left-of-centre. He was personally very close to politicians and economists of the left;
Jyoti Basu treated him with enormous respect and, as I was to discover many years later, so did
Harkishan Singh Surjeet. While the archpriest of the Left establishment during
Indira Gandhi’s era,
P.N. Haksar
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was one of his staunchest allies, Haksar’s colleague, P.N. Dhar, who was generally considered right-of-centre, was also his trusted friend.

Besides, the credibility
Manmohan Singh had across the political spectrum was obvious. While
S.K. Goyal from the
Chandra Shekhar era was his intimate associate, the debates in Parliament of those times reveal that
Atal Bihari Vajpayee,
L.K. Advani and
Jaswant Singh, too, held him in the highest professional and personal esteem.

At critical moments, what is said and done might matter; but what truly counts is the person who is talking and how he presents his case. The finance minister may have lacked political standing, but he had unparalleled moral authority, apart from unsurpassed intellectual gravitas. His phenomenal personal reputation for simplicity and his non-threatening style helped sell the bitter pills of devaluation, gold sales, subsidy cuts and whole-scale industrial deregulation.

Manmohan Singh’s
integrity has always been unimpeachable and what better example than what he did after he and Rao had taken a decision to devalue the Indian rupee?
Manmohan Singh was worried that his personal rupee balance, born out of modest dollar savings from his South Commission stint in Geneva during 1987-90, would swell with the proposed changes in the rupee-dollar exchange rate. Therefore, he informed the prime minister that the ‘windfall’ gains would be deposited in the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund.

Would
I.G. Patel have been unlike Manmohan Singh had he been finance minister? Substance-wise, decidedly not; but perhaps in style, here and there. Both I.G. Patel and Manmohan Singh had studied with distinction at Cambridge University. Both had doctorates in economics. Both had served in international institutions—IG at the
IMF and the
UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), and Manmohan Singh at UNCTAD (
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development). Both had held key positions in the finance ministry; had been governors of the RBI;
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and had served as part of academic institutions—IG at the London School of Economics and Singh at the Delhi School of Economics. Moreover, both were sensitive to political realities—with IG being a product of the Nehruvian 1950s and very early 1960s, and Singh being a product of the 1970s when he first came into contact with Indira Gandhi. The only difference between the two was that IG was considered to be more market-friendly and Manmohan Singh a little more state-friendly. It was only a nuance and nothing fundamental separated the two.

Two other appointments Narasimha Rao made proved to be very shrewd. Unfortunately, the same could not be said of his other appointments, especially in key infrastructure ministries. His choice of
P. Chidambaram as commerce minister—although not at the full cabinet level but one notch lower—ensured that far-reaching trade policy reforms got executed very quickly. Although Chidambaram had not served in a mainstream economic ministry earlier, he took to the Commerce Ministry instantly and provided a bold thrust. More importantly, the finance minister found in him a very articulate ally to champion the cause of economic reform both at home and abroad.