Unsung economy gamechanger

India’s tipping point S. Narendra Bloomsbury India Rs.699 Pages 212 In this biography, the author details how prime minister Narasimha Rao unshackled the Indian economy by stealth During the past 76 years since India wrested freedom from almost 200 years of British rule, P.V. Narasimha Rao (PVNR, 1921-2004) was undoubtedly the greatest of India’s 14 prime ministers. Although he served only one term in office (1991-96), during those momentous years he substantially won the country’s economic freedom by pulling it out of the mire of neta-babu socialism which had sentenced it to a rock-bottom 3.5 percent GDP growth per year for four decades after independence, and wiped out the modest material aspirations of an entire generation of free India’s children. This informative biography written by S. Narendra, who as a senior aide of PVNR and principal information officer and adviser to the Union government (1992-98), had a ringside view of those tumultuous years during which the choke-hold of the neta-babu brotherhood on India’s economy was substantially broken, was overdue. It’s a measure of the extent to which the establishment is committed to the status quo ante, that this revealing biography which details the step-by-step dismantling of the licence-permit-quota regime, which had smothered the native spirit of private enterprise and perpetuated poverty and illiteracy in post-independence India, has been ignored by the media and media pundits. The plain truth is that India’s 400-million-strong middle class with deep connections — uncle, brother, nephew — prospering within the brotherhood, isn’t dissatisfied with licence raj. It provides hidden subsidies — inflation-proof salaries, subsidised electricity, water, higher education, pensions — and keeps private businessmen (baniyas) in check. Highly risk-averse, under the influence of Nehruvian socialism nothing gets the middle class goat more than businessmen prospering and flaunting their money. Which is why even three decades after liberalisation, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi of the Nehru dynasty continues to excoriate India’s most successful entrepreneurs — Ambani-Adani — who have risen from rags to riches for ‘corruption’, i.e, transgression of absurd economic laws enacted by negligent Parliaments down the ages. The author details how PVNR steered and unshackled the Indian economy by stealth for fear of the academy/establishment. Following Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991, Rao had been appointed PM with the tacit sanction of his widow Sonia Gandhi, whose expectation was that as a former minister in Rajiv’s cabinet he would be a pliable caretaker PM and toe the socialist line. But this calculation went awry because unlike all previous prime ministers, Rao was genuinely educated. Jawaharlal, the only Nehru to earn a university degree, scraped through with a third class degree in natural sciences at Cambridge and was totally economics illiterate. However that didn’t stop him from upturning the Indian economy which had a thousand year tradition of free enterprise, and converting it into a “socialist pattern of society”. Central planning meant strangling private enterprise and establishing vast public sector enterprises (PSEs) managed by business-illiterate, risk-averse bureaucrats who quickly ran them into the ground. This arid socialism…