Overdue Revisionism

When he died in New Delhi on a winter’s day on December 23, 2004, there were very few mourners for Pamulaparti Venkata Narasimha Rao, former prime minister (1991-96) of India and president of the Congress party which has ruled the world’s most populous democracy for almost half a century since this huge subcontinent of 525 princely states transformed into an independent nation in 1947. According to the official history of the Congress party in which the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, founded by free India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and perpetuated by his daughter Indira Gandhi and her heirs looms large, PVNR was just another accidental one-term prime minister, undeserving of a place of honour in the history of the Congress and nation.  The critical role Rao had played in the historic liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy in 1991, when his minority government took the revolutionary initiative of abolishing industrial licensing and opened up the economy to international trade and investment, was deliberately minimised by the Sonia Gandhi-led Congress party. In this history-cum-biography of PVNR, journalist Sanjaya Baru, former media advisor (2004-08) of prime minister Manmohan Singh and author (Accidental Prime Minister: the Making and Unmaking of Manmohan Singh (2014)), sets the record straight and accords Narasimha Rao his rightful place in Indian history. In particular, he makes it clear that the real architect of the transformational liberalisation of the red-taped and chronically malfunctioning Indian economy wasn’t Manmohan Singh, as Sonia Gandhi and her coterie within the Congress wanted the country to believe. It was PVNR.  Public memory is short, and in retrospect it’s hard to recall what an annus horribilis 1991 was for India. In 1990, Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein had invaded and annexed the oil-rich tiny kingdom of Kuwait, sending global crude oil prices spiralling and prompting Standard & Poor to classify India which had run up huge budget deficits of over 8 percent in the 1980s, as a ‘political risk’. Within a few months, a minority coalition government led by former Congressman Chandrashekhar was voted out of power and a general election was called in June 1991. But on May 21, Rajiv Gandhi, leader of the Congress party which was on the comeback trail following the Bofors scandal, was assassinated in Tamil Nadu by LTTE militants fighting for an independent state within Sri Lanka, which the Congress had opposed. The party’s first reaction was to invite the foreign-born Sonia to lead it into the general election. When the grief-stricken widow declined, the party elected Narasimha Rao who was all set to retire from politics, as its new leader. According to Baru, under Rao’s leadership the Congress party won more seats in the Lok Sabha (244) — though not a clear majority — than it would have won had Rajiv been alive and leader of the party.  Ardent admirers of Narasimha Rao remember him for initiating the economic reforms of 1991 which launched the Indian economy into a higher growth orbit, doubling the annual rate of GDP growth…