"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... ."
Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao, the ninth Prime Minister of India, was one of modern Indian politics' most enigmatic leaders. Born on June 28, 1921, in a feudal family of Andhra Pradesh, Mr. Rao grew up in the lush south of India. He was a freedom fighter whose first notable contribution to independence was in the movement that ousted the absolutist rule of the Nizam of Hyderabad, and ensured the incorporation of his sprawling kingdom into the new India. In the new state of Andhra Pradesh, Mr. Rao became a hard-working member of the All-India Congress Party, an affiliation from which he never wavered.
A devoted follower of the first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mr. Rao transferred his loyalty seamlessly to his daughter and political heir, Indira Gandhi. In 1971, she repaid the debt by helping to propel him into the chief ministership of his home state. Mr. Rao duly proceeded to outrage the notoriously powerful big landlords of Andhra Pradesh by reform measures, including a strict cap on the size of individual land holding. So indignant were they that a short-lived secessionist movement sprang up, upon which Indira plucked her protégé out of Hyderabad to serve in the union government.
Mr. Rao, stayed rigidly loyal to the Gandhi clan, even during the emergency of 1975-77 and was rewarded in 1980, when Indira triumphantly returned to power, with the foreign ministry.
In 1984, when Indira was assassinated by Sikh members of her own bodyguard, Mr. Rao was union home minister, and technically responsible for the most serious breakdown of security in India's history. But instead of beingbrought to account, he was appointed defense minister by the new head Rajiv Gandhi. In 1989, the dynasty lost power for only the second time, and Mr. Rao, already in his late 60s, seemed doomed to obscurity.
Then in May 1991, another assassin struck. A young Tamil woman from Sri Lanka blew herself and the Congress leader to bits at an election rally in southIndia. The party went into a tailspin. One faction announced, just 18 hours after the blast, that Rajiv's widow, would be the next leader. Another group wanted to break the dynastic connection and regroup behind the charismatic chief minister of Maharashtra.
Mr. Rao was pitch forked 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. Best of all, from the point of view of all factions, he was unlikely to stay around for long. They were wrong about that. Congress failed to garner the expected wave of sympathy for Rajiv's murder, but it still emerged as the biggest party. Mr. Rao was able to form a minority administration, and scrape together enough parliamentary support for it to survive a full five-year term.
Prime Minister Mr. 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. India was on the brink of economic meltdown: its foreign reserves were all but gone; production was stagnant, and investment was virtually zero.
He was on overdrive for the first year and half. Mr. Rao also ensured that Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir were pulled back from the brink. He appointed as his finance minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, who was an economist rather than a politician. He helped Dr. Singh and finance secretary Montek Singh Ahluwalia in pushing forward the reforms by winning political consensus. Within weeks, Manmohan Singh produced a series of drastic remedies, among them an austerity budget with big tax hikes and much industrial deregulation. The Indian economy started blooming within days of discarding several of the old protectionist measures as the GDP and economy grew by an average of 5.5%, a growth rate that was sustained over the entire decade for the first time in Indian economy.
This truly impressed the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Billions of dollars poured into the depleted national coffers, as the country embarked on a sustained period of reform and growth.
Mr. Rao became the first non-member of the Gandhi dynasty to last a full five-year term as prime minister. Moreover, he led India into a new age of economic reform, laying the groundwork for a decade or more of growth and inward investment.
As the Prime Minister, Mr. Rao's silence spoke more than his words, and he famously qualified it once when heckled about not taking decisions.
"It is not that I don't think about it (a decision). I think about it and make a decision not to make a decision," he had quipped.One such decision not to take a decision will perhaps remain his worst decision ever.
In December 1992, a braying mob of Hindu fanatics brushed aside an entirely inadequate security cordon, and tore down the ancient Babri masjid (mosque) outside the northern town of Ayodhya.
The nation was plunged into weeks of communal frenzy, in which tens of thousands died horribly. Mr. Rao was at his most infuriatingly bland and urbane. Just days after the destruction of the mosque, when "only" a thousand or so people had died, he observed: "The worst part is behind us, as of today."
Defeated decisively by the rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party in 1996, Mr. Rao never again exercised much real influence in Indian politics. He remained; however, much respected for his experience, his scholarship and his astonishing linguistic prowess (he spoke 17 languages, including English, French, Spanish and German). The Indian media regularly referred to him as Chanakya, after a brilliant kingmaker of the first millennium BC. He translated the Jnanpith Awardee Viswanatha Satyanarayana's Telugu novel Veyi Padagalu into Hindi as Sahasr Phan. Mr. Rao got his Bachelors and Masters in Law from Osmania University and Mumbai/Nagpur Universities respectively.
After his retirement from Indian politics Mr. Rao published a book named "The Insider." The controversial book, which follows the career of a person as he rises through the ranks of Indian politics, resembled events from Mr. Rao's own life. Mr. Rao however denied any connection.
For a man of such wide ranging accomplishments, it must have been degrading to be found guilty, in 2000, of having paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to minor regional parties in parliament to prop up his minority government. The conviction was later overturned, but the episode was a bleak, sad postscript to a lifetime of public service.
If Mr. Rao was an unlikely politician, Prime Minister Rao was impossibility in any conventional reckoning. He was highly competent but not charismatic, that undefined magical something that is supposed to set the Leader apart. Mr. Rao's final years were overshadowed by tragedy and neglect by a party thatdevalued 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 PrimeMinisters.
Mr. Rao had been admitted to All India Institute of Medical Sciences on December 10 after he suffered a heart attack. A few days later, Mr. Rao, in one of his rare statements to media, had said he was hale and hearty.
He died on December 23 2004. He was 83.
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