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Saturday, Dec 25, 2004

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UNLIKELY HELMSMAN

"A SMALL INDIAN village, like a thousand others; an obscure child, like a million others; a non-descript childhood, like any other's; climbed ladders and more ladders, feeling all the while that he was on level ground ...from patwari to Prime Minister: a long journey with no celebration at any stage... ." Pamulaparti Venkata Narasimha Rao's disarmingly frank self-portrait in his 1998 novel The Insider captured the life and times of the man more succinctly than the many fulsome tributes paid to him after his death. Narasimha Rao — PV to his small circle of friends — was understated in life as he was in death. Yet his `ordinariness' lent extraordinary meaning to his diverse accomplishments, among them knowledge of as many as eight languages (including Spanish). Mr. Rao stood out equally for his scholarship, a qualification considered inessential, indeed a hindrance, for a career in Indian politics. His biggest achievement, then, was his slow but steady rise in a party where leadership was decided more by lineage than merit. If PV was an unlikely politician, Prime Minister Rao was an impossibility in any conventional reckoning. He was highly competent but not charismatic, that undefined magical something that is supposed to set the Leader apart from his or her cabinet colleagues. It speaks for Mr. Rao's intellectual capabilities and the esteem in which he was held that he was called upon to author the manifesto of the Congress even as he was preparing for a quiet life in retirement in the early 1990s.

Mr. Rao was pitchforked to centre stage thanks to the very qualities that stopped him from scaling the political heights earlier. If in the aftermath of Rajiv Gandhi's assassination, he was recalled from semi-retirement or rather semi-exile, it was because his sobriety and perceived lack of high ambition were widely felt to be the need of the crisis hour. Mr. Rao, rather than one among the galaxy of go-getting Congressmen, was Sonia Gandhi's choice — for party president as well as Prime Minister (although later the coterie was to undermine him). Prime Minister Rao showed surprising command over his job, more so given the challenges he faced — the absence of a majority for the Congress in Parliament, insurgency in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir, an economy on the verge of bankruptcy, and, finally, a polity left sharply divided by the politics of Mandal and Mandir. He was on overdrive for the first year and half. In partnership with Dr. Manmohan Singh, he initiated a strategic change in the direction and content of India's economic policy that seemed akin (at least in the eyes of proponents) to what Deng Xiaoping put in place in China a decade earlier. Mr. Rao also ensured that Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir were pulled back from the brink.

But Prime Minister Rao remained tragically and inexcusably indifferent to the problem of communalism. It was evident that tension was building up in Ayodhya; that hordes of Sangh Parivar-affiliated fanatics had descended on the temple town with the intention of creating mischief. But Prime Minister Rao in his wisdom chose not to act, leading to one of the darkest chapters in modern Indian history. He was never to live down the shame of December 6, 1992. Indeed historians will remember it as that defining moment when his sharp downward journey began. In due course, the man himself metamorphosed — gone was the avuncular elder statesman who had earned admiration for the excellences of the mind, the consensual style, and a seeming detachment from manipulative garden-variety politics. The Machiavellian tactician who emerged would keep his seat at any cost, even if that meant bribing Members of Parliament to vote for his Government. Other scandals followed. Thus it was that the unlikely helmsman became the first ex-Prime Minister to be convicted for corruption. Although the courts subsequently cleared him in the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha bribery case and also in the St. Kitts affair, the damage was done. Mr. Rao's final years were overshadowed by tragedy and neglect by a party that devalued and came close to denying his contributions. However, for all his flaws history will judge him as one of India's most accomplished and important Prime Ministers.

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