Hardly the outsider

Former prime minister P V Narasimha Rao, who passed away on December 23 at the age of 83, leaves behind a legacy that will go down in history as having changed India forever

Sanjay Kapoor Delhi

During his last days, P V Narasimha Rao sat in the musty drawingroom of his Motilal Nehru residence reflecting about the time he was prime minister and wondering what had gone wrong — or right, for that matter — when he ruled India. He had plenty to reflect on — essentially, why things spun out of control after he chose to go in for the 1996 elections. And why, under his leadership, the Congress party lost the elections.

In his last days, Rao was quite vocal about the reasons for his party's loss. He blamed Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) officers for giving him the wrong advice regarding the Jain hawala scandal, and about charges pertaining to payoffs to some of his party colleagues. The CBI, he felt, had misled him into believing that they had a watertight case against all those who figured in the infamous Jain diaries.

Rao — who had an inordinately tough time with the CBI after he left office — claimed that they took up cases without really doing their homework, or the requisite footwork to take the cases to their conclusion. He thought that the government should constitute a commission to inquire into the CBI's peculiarly chronic paucity of preparation. Rao, who had presided over the inquiry into one of the most significant corruption scandals in post-Independence India, thought that politicians spend time and effort building up their reputations, which are then demolished by frivolous corruption scandals.

While it was hardly pathbreaking for a career politician to think that way, Rao infused his beliefs with an academic cerebration. Behind the inscrutable veneer of a stoic Brahmin — and his trademark pout, which he wore like a mask — lurked a mind that has intrigued and fascinated many political observers. He defied the conventional understanding of politicians and showed his prowess as a leader with a Chanakyan bent and intent when he became prime minister.

Till his ascension, he had been a seemingly mild-mannered veteran with total fealty to the Nehru-Gandhi family, good at, of all things, drafting letters. He was also, by the way, well-read, and generally perceived as a harmless politician who had little ambition beyond the ordinary. Many of Rajiv Gandhi's young and impatient retainers made fun of him, not realising that in all the years of being a Congress minister, he had learnt to conceal his ambitions with his quiet intelligence.

When he was catapulted to the leadership of the Congress after Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, it was his sudden strength and authority that came as a surprise. Those who had lobbied to make him prime minister, considering him pliable and harmless, were proved wrong. He had clearly long-ruminated over a plan of action, gathering close to him his strategies if he ever became prime minister.

What Rao had was the rare ability to take a step back and look objectively at a situation. And he wasn't burdened by a conventional perception of morality, political or personal. This iconoclasm intruded into his politicking: one moment, he would be sitting comfortably with an uncouth and villainous "godman" like Chandraswami; the next, he would hold forth on the moral imperatives of a modern State. Someone once asked him about such prime ministerial amorality; his reply was typical: "Can you do all that Chandraswami can do? For running the State, you need all kinds of people."

It's no wonder, then, that Rao's tenure as prime minister was so tumultuous that it irreversibly changed the course of India's polity and economy. He dismantled the draconian and enchaining licence permit raj and ushered in economic liberalisation. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is, in many ways, the creation of those times.

But Rao did dither, and that, too, changed India's course — the Babri Masjid-Ramjanmabhoomi issue. He was sleeping when the mosque was razed on December 6, 1992. Many went on to accuse him of being a closet Hindu fundamentalist, not realising that he had his own ways of getting things done, or undone. Many say that he chose to look the other way because ignoring it was the only way to solve an age-old problem. His unpublished book — now posthumous — will probably provide insights into what transpired in the dimly-lit corridors of power that fateful day.

For this, at least, Rao deserves a comprehensive and authoritative exegesis on his contribution to a mercurially-changing India more than on what he has left behind.