Book Review: Half Lion- How PV Narasimha Rao Transformed India

Book- Half Lion: How PV Narasimha Rao Transformed India
Author- Vinay Sitapati
Publisher- Penguin/Viking
391 pages

Few, until this book came along, remembered PV Narasimha Rao – except, not very flatteringly, for his exaggerated pout and his po-faced demeanour. But for Vinay Sitapati, the late prime minister is a hero, a transformational figure ranking with "revolutionary figures" of Jawaharlal Nehru, Deng Xiaoping, Franklin D Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Charles de Gaulle.

Excessive? Perhaps, Rao, even Sitapati would agree, couldn't hold a candle to any of the above in charisma. But Sitapati's yardstick is different – it is the "quantum of transformation" that the economic reforms undertaken during Rao's tenure as prime minister had on every aspect of life in India then.

There's no quarrelling with that, or the Congress' utter neglect of Rao. Even journalists who know better have tended to give the lion's share of the credit regarding the 1991 reforms to Manmohan Singh. But Sitapati shifts the balance of credit, taking care – with the help of data that Rao's family made available to him for the first time and conversations with Rao's friends and associates – to establish that it was Rao who provided agency, general direction and managed hostile reactions from the opposition and within the Congress.

Sitapati, for instance, narrates how it was Rao who called up Subramanian Swamy, then a minister in the outgoing government, two days before his swearing in. He wanted some documents that Swamy had compiled on economic reforms in order to crystallise his plans for what he needed to do to manage the balance of payments crisis. And how, from the very next day, Rao went about picking the team that would do what was required, checkmating those – among them current President Pranab Mukherjee on whom he got hold of a secret IB file – he felt would not be amenable.

There's one telling instance, Sitapati recounts, of Manmohan Singh taking a first, more cautious draft of his 1991 budget to Rao only to have him dismiss it with, "If this is what I wanted, why would I have selected you?"

But Half Lion is no hagiography. Sitapati's critical eye falls on the feet of clay as keenly as it does on the adroit political moves that saw the 1991 economic reforms through. For instance, Rao's failure to check the Punjab insurgency during his tenure as home minister, and worse, his injudicious ceding of authority to the prime minister's office under Rajiv Gandhi after Indira Gandhi's assassination which led to the Sikh massacres. "It was his vilest hour," Sitapati says.

However, Sitapati is more forgiving of Rao's role in the Babri Masjid demolition, which many consider to be the darkest hour of his tenure. Recounting in great detail the turmoil of the months leading up to December 1992, Rao's indecision over whether to dismiss the state government and impose central rule, his misreading of the BJP and VHP, perhaps, on the fact the he himself was an unabashed, and devout Hindu, Sitapati concludes, "History has judged Narasimha Rao harshly." Sitapati also says, somewhat befuddlingly, "the enduring political victim of the Babri demolition was Narasimha Rao himself".

Sitapati is, however, frank about the way he writes of Rao's personal life, his difficult relationships with his sons and his long-term relationship with Lakshmi Kantamma and Kalyani Shankar. One would have wanted to know more about Satyamma, whom he married at the age of 10 and who bore him eight children. Rao rarely visited his wife, Sitapati recounts uncritically, leaving Satyamma to manage his farms and sons as he pursued his life elsewhere.
 

Half Lion is fast paced, lucidly but evocatively written, and has enough masala to sustain interest across its 300-odd pages. Also, there's relevance to recent political events – the Congress under Sonia Gandhi's decimation in the 2014 general election and the ruling BJP's attempts to appropriate Rao's reforms legacy in order to shame its opposition and scotch murmurs of not being bold enough to bring about a "second wave" of reforms.

Rao was a prolific writer himself. The former prime minister even wrote a novel, The Insider, a thin, fictionalised account of his life. The book, when it came out in 1998, created a huge splash. Everyone expected important revelations, but Rao was, as ever, cautious. Readers, who managed to plough through its nearly 900 pages, gained little for their pains. It's finally taken someone with Sitapati's story-telling skills to paint the man with all his successes and human frailties.