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Pamulaparthi Venkata Narasimha Rao (28 June 1921 – 23 December 2004) who was commonly known as P.V. Narasimha Rao, served as the 10th Prime Minister of the Republic of India. He led one of the most important administrations in India's modern history, overseeing a major economic transformation and several incidents affecting national security. Rao accelerated the dismantling of the Licence Raj. Rao, also called the "Father of Indian Economic Reforms," is best remembered for launching India's free market reforms that rescued the almost bankrupt nation from economic collapse. He was also commonly referred to as the Chanakya of modern India for his ability to steer tough economic and political legislation through the parliament at a time when he headed a minority government. Rao's
term as Prime Minister was an eventful one in India's history. Besides
marking a paradigm shift from the industrializing, mixed economic model
of Jawaharlal Nehru to a market driven one, his years as Prime Minister also saw the emergence of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a major right-wing party, as an alternative to the Indian National Congress which had been governing India for most of its post-independence history. Rao's term also saw the destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya which triggered one of the worst Hindu-Muslim riots in the country since its independence.
Rao's
later life was marked by political isolation due to his association
with corruption charges. Rao was acquitted on all charges prior to his
death in 2004 of a heart attack in New Delhi. He was cremated in Hyderabad. P.V. Narasimha Rao had "humble social origins". He was born in a Telugu Niyogi Brahmin family at Laknepally village in Warangal District. At the age of 3 years he adopted and brought up to Vangara village in the present-day Karimnagar district of Andhra Pradesh (then part of Hyderabad State). His father P. Ranga Rao and mother Rukminiamma hailed from agrarian families. Narasimha Rao was popularly known as PV. He studied Bachelor's in arts college, subedari in warangal, and later on went to Fergusson College at the Universities of Mumbai Nagpur now under university of Pune where he completed a Master's degree in law. He could speak 13 languages including Urdu, Marathi, Kannada, Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Sanskrit and Oriya with a fluency akin to a native speaker. His mother tongue was Telugu. In addition to eight Indian languages, he spoke English, French, Arabic, Spanish, German, Greek, Latin and Persian. Along with his distant cousin Pamulaparthi Sadasiva Rao, Ch. Raja Narendra and Devulapalli Damodar Rao, PV edited a Telugu weekly magazine called Kakatiya Patrika in the 1940s. PV and Sadasiva Rao used to contribute articles under the pen-name Jaya-Vijaya. Narasimha
Rao has three sons and five daughters. His eldest son P.V. Rangarao was
an education minister in Kotla Vijaya Bhaskar Reddy cabinet and MLA from Hanma Konda Assembly Constituency for two terms. His second son P.V. Rajeshwar Rao was a Member of Parliament of the 11th Lok Sabha (15 May 1996 - 4 December 1997) from Secunderabad Constituency. Narasimha Rao was an active freedom fighter during the Indian Independence movement and joined full time politics after independence as a member of the Indian National Congress. Narasimha Rao served brief stints in the Andhra Pradesh cabinet (1962 – 1971) and as Chief minister of the state of Andhra Pradesh (1971 – 1973).
His tenure as Chief minister of Andhra Pradesh is well remembered even
today for his land reforms and strict implementation of land ceiling
acts in Telangana region. President rule had to be imposed to counter
the 'Jai Andhra' movement during his tenure. When the Indian National Congress split in 1969 Rao stayed on the side of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and remained loyal to her during the Emergency period (1975 – 77). He
rose to national prominence in 1972 for handling several diverse
portfolios, most significantly Home, Defence and Foreign Affairs
(1980 – 1984), in the cabinets of both Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. In fact it is speculated that he was in the running for the post of India's President along with Zail Singh in 1982. Rao
very nearly retired from politics in 1991. It was the assassination of
the Congress President Rajiv Gandhi that made him make a comeback. As the Congress had won the largest number of seats in the 1991 elections, he got the opportunity to head the minority government as Prime Minister. He was the first person outside the Nehru-Gandhi family to
serve as Prime Minister for five continuous years, the first to hail
from South India and also the first from the state of Andhra Pradesh. Since Rao had not contested the general elections, he then participated in a by-election in Nandyal to join the parliament. N.T.Rama Rao (then
leader of the Chief Opposition party of Telugu Desam) did not want to
put a contestant against Rao, because he was the First Prime Minister
of India from Andhra Pradesh, and NTR did not want to create an
obstacle on his path. By that, Rao won from Nandyal with a victory
margin of a record 5 lakh (500,000) votes and his win was recorded in
the Guinness Book Of World Records. His cabinet included Sharad Pawar,
himself a strong contender for the Prime Minister's post, as defence
minister. He also broke convention by appointing a non-political
economist and future prime minister, Manmohan Singh, as his finance minister. Rao's major achievement is generally considered to be the liberalization of the Indian economy. The reforms were adopted to avert impending international default in 1991. The reforms progressed furthest in the areas of opening up to foreign investment, reforming capital markets, deregulating domestic business, and reforming the trade regime. Rao's government's goals were reducing the fiscal deficit, privatization of the public sector, and increasing investment in infrastructure. Trade reforms and changes in the regulation of foreign direct investment were introduced to open India to foreign trade while stabilizing external loans. Rao wanted I.G. Patel as his finance minister. Patel was an official who helped prepare 14 budgets, an ex-governor of Reserve Bank of India and had headed The London School of Economics and Political Science. But Patel declined. Rao then chose Manmohan Singh for the job. Manmohan Singh, an acclaimed economist, played a central role in implementing these reforms. Major
reforms in India's capital markets led to an influx of foreign
portfolio investment. The major economic policies adopted by Rao
include: The
impact of these reforms may be gauged from the fact that total foreign
investment (including foreign direct investment, portfolio investment,
and investment raised on international capital markets) in India grew
from a minuscule US $132 million in 1991-92 to $5.3 billion in 1995-96. Rao began industrial policy reforms with the manufacturing sector. He slashed industrial licensing, leaving only 18 industries subject to licensing. Industrial regulation was rationalized. Rao energized the national nuclear security and ballistic missiles program, which ultimately resulted in the 1998 Pokhran nuclear tests. It is speculated that the tests were actually planned in 1995, during Rao's term in office, and that they were dropped under American pressure when the US intelligence got the whiff of it. Another
view was that he purposefully leaked the information to gain time to
develop and test a thermonuclear device which was not yet ready. He increased military spending, and set the Indian Army on course to fight the emerging threat of terrorism and insurgencies, as well as Pakistan and China's nuclear potentials. It was during his term that terrorism in the Indian state of Punjab was finally defeated. Also scenarios of plane hijackings, which occurred during Rao's time ended without the government conceding the terrorists' demands. He also directed negotiations to secure the release of Doraiswamy, an Indian Oil executive, from Kashmiri terrorists who kidnapped him, and Liviu Radu, a Romanian diplomat posted in New Delhi in October 1991, who was kidnapped by Sikh terrorists. Rao also handled the Indian response to the occupation of the Hazratbal holy shrine in Jammu and Kashmir by terrorists in October 1993. He
brought the occupation to an end without damage to the shrine.
Similarly, he dealt with the kidnapping of some foreign tourists by a
terrorist group called Al Faran in
Kashmir in 1995 effectively. Although he could not secure the release
of the hostages, his policies ensured that the terrorists demands were
not conceded to, and that the action of the terrorists was condemned
internationally, including by Pakistan. Rao also made diplomatic overtures to Western Europe, the United States, and China. He decided in 1992 to bring into the open India's relations with Israel, which had been kept covertly active since they were first established by Indira Gandhi in 1969, and permitted Israel to open an embassy in New Delhi. He
ordered the intelligence community in 1992 to start a systematic drive
to draw the international community's attention to alleged Pakistan's sponsorship of terrorism against India and not to be discouraged by US efforts to undermine the exercise. Rao launched the Look East foreign policy, which brought India closer to ASEAN. He decided to maintain a distance from the Dalai Lama in order to avoid aggravating Beijing's suspicions and concerns, and made successful overtures to Tehran. The 'cultivate Iran' policy was pushed through vigorously by him. These policies paid rich dividends for India in March 1994, when Benazir Bhutto's efforts to have a resolution passed by the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva on the human rights situation in Jammu and Kashmir failed, with opposition by China and Iran. Rao's crisis management after the 12 March, 1993 Bombay bombings was
highly praised. He personally visited Bombay after the blasts and after
seeing evidence of Pakistani involvement in the blasts, ordered the
intelligence community to invite the intelligence agencies of the US,
UK and other West European countries to send their counter-terrorism
experts to Bombay to examine the facts for themselves.
Rao decided that India, which in 1991 was on the brink of bankruptcy, would benefit from liberalizing its economy. He appointed an economist, Dr. Manmohan Singh, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, as Finance Minister to accomplish his goals. This liberalization was criticized by many socialist nationalists at that time. During
the early 1990s, Rao's administration failed to arrest the 91 per cent
fall in the value of the Indian Rupee from 17 to 32 to the US Dollar
due to haphazard credit policies. Ethnic militancy and separatism saw a rise in India spreading into the northeastern states of Assam, Tripura and Nagaland during Rao's tenure, based around Ethnic lines. The United Liberation Front of Asom was responsible for the increased militancy in Assam after Direct Peace talks had failed with the Central Government at Delhi. Meanwhile the Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir witnessed a separatist insurgency. Congress government claimed that training camps in Pakistan administered Kashmir for
militant groups, previously directed at evicting the Soviet army from
Afghanistan, were now producing the same fighters who were infiltrating
Kashmir. He
directly charged Pakistan with sheltering, arming and supplying
infiltrators. During this time Hindu pilgrims and Sikh settlers were
attacked, and hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits were forced to leave their homes in the Kashmir valley. Violence rocked and shut down parts of Kashmir, which was heavily dependent on tourism, and also struck major cities like Delhi and Mumbai. Rao's government introduced the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA), India's first anti-terrorism legislation, and directed the Indian Army to eliminate the infiltrators. Despite
a heavy and largely successful Army campaign, the state descended into
a security nightmare. Tourism and commerce were largely disrupted.
Special police units were often accused of committing atrocities
against the local population, rape, kidnapping, torture and detention
under false accusations. Members of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) demolished the Babri Mosque (which was constructed by India's first Mughal emperor, Babar) in Ayodhya on 6 December 1992. The site is believed by Hindus to be the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama and is believed by the Hindu Community to be a place of a Hindu temple created
in the early 16th century. The destruction of the disputed structure,
which was widely reported in the international media, unleashed large
scale communal violence, the most extensive since the Partition of India. Hindus and Muslims were indulged in massive rioting across the country, and almost every major city including Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Bhopal struggled to control the Unrest. Later Liberhan Commission,
after extensive hearing and investigation, exonerated PV Narasimha Rao.
It pointed out that Rao was heading a minority government, the
Commission accepted the centre’s submission that central forces could
neither be deployed by the Union in the totality of facts and
circumstances then prevailing, nor could President’s Rule be imposed
"on the basis of rumours or media reports". Taking such a step would
have created "bad precedent" damaging the federal structure of and
would have "amounted to interference" in the state administration, it
said. The state “deliberately and consciously understated" the risk to
the disputed structure and general law and order. It also said that the
Governor’s assessment of the situation was either badly flawed or
overly optimistic and was thus a major impediment for the central
government. The Commission further said, "... knowing fully well that
its facetious undertakings before the Supreme Court had bought it
sufficient breathing space, it (state government) proceeded with the
planning for the destruction of the disputed structure. The Supreme
Court’s own observer failed to alert it to the sinister undercurrents.
The Governor and its intelligence agencies, charged with acting as the
eyes and ears of the central government also failed in their task.
Without substantive procedural prerequisites, neither the Supreme
Court, nor the Union of India was able to take any meaningful steps." In yet another discussion with journalist Shekhar Gupta,
Rao answered several of the questions on the demolition. He said he was
wary of the impact of hundreds of deaths on the nation, and it could
have been far worse. And also he had to consider the scenario in which
some of the troops turned around and joined the mobs instead. Regarding
dismissal of Kalyan Singh (government), he said, "mere dismissal does
not mean you can take control. It takes a day or so appointing
advisers, sending them to Lucknow, taking control of the state.
Meanwhile, what had to happen would have happened and there would have
been no Kalyan Singh to blame either."
A strong earthquake in Latur, Maharashtra, also killed 10,000 people and displaced hundreds of thousands in 1993. Rao
was applauded by many for using modern technology and resources to
organize major relief operations to assuage the stricken people, and for schemes of economic reconstruction. The
most negative aspects of Rao's legacy were his direct and indirect
associations with various corruption charges. These charges were, for
the most part, viewed as fuelled by those in his party who were opposed
to his return as a major player again. Some of the more prominent examples were: In July 1993, Rao's government was facing a no-confidence motion,
because the opposition felt that it did not have sufficient numbers to
prove a majority. It was alleged that Rao, through a representative,
offered millions of rupees to members of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM), and possibly a breakaway faction of the Janata Dal,
to vote for him during the confidence motion. Shailendra Mahato, one of
those members who had accepted the bribe, turned approver. In 1996,
after Rao's term in office had expired, investigations began in earnest
in the case. In 2000, after years of legal proceedings, a special court
convicted Rao and his colleague, Buta Singh (who is alleged to have escorted the MPs to the Prime Minister). Rao
appealed to a higher court and remained free on bail. The decision was
overturned mainly due to the doubt in credibility of Mahato's
statements (which were extremely inconsistent) and both Rao and Buta
Singh were cleared of the charges in 2002. Rao, along with fellow minister K.K. Tewary, Chandraswami and
K.N. Aggarwal were accused of forging documents showing that Ajeya
Singh had opened a bank account in the First Trust Corporation Bank in St. Kitts and deposited $21 million in it, making his father V.P. Singh its
beneficiary. The alleged intent was to tarnish V.P. Singh's image. This
supposedly happened in 1989. However only after Rao's term as PM had
expired in 1996, was he formally charged by the Central Bureau of Investigation for the crime. Less than a year later the court acquitted him due to lack of evidence linking him with the case. All other accused, Chandraswami being the last, were also eventually acquitted. Lakhubhai
Pathak, an Indian businessman living in England alleged that
Chandraswami and K.N. Aggarwal alias Mamaji, along with Mr. Rao,
cheated him out of $100,000. The amount was given for an express
promise for allowing supplies of paper pulp in India, and Pathak
alleged that he spent an additional $30,000 entertaining Chandraswami
and his secretary. Rao and Chandraswami were acquitted of the charges
in 2003, due to lack of evidence. Despite this, it remained a large black mark on Rao's administration. In
the 1996 general elections Rao's Congress Party was badly defeated and
he had to step down as Prime Minister. He retained the leadership of
the Congress party until late 1996 after which he was replaced by Sitaram Kesri.
According to Congress insiders who spoke with the media, Rao had kept
an authoritarian stance on both the party and his government, which led
to the departure of numerous prominent and ambitious Congress leaders
during his reign. Some of them were: Narayan Dutt Tiwari, Arjun Singh, Madhavrao Scindia, Mamata Banerjee, G.K. Moopanar and P.Chidambaram. Rao
rarely spoke of his personal views and opinions during his 5-year
tenure. After his retirement from national politics Rao published a novel called The Insider. The book, which follows a man’s rise through the ranks of Indian politics, resembled events from Rao’s own life. According
to a vernacular source, despite holding many lucrative posts he faced
many financial troubles. One of his sons was educated with the
assistance of his son-in-law. He also faced trouble in paying fees for
a daughter of his who was then studying medicine. According
to PVRK Prasad, an IAS officer who was Narasimha Rao's media advisor
when the latter was Prime Minister, Rao asked his friends to sell away
his house at Banajara hills to clear the dues of advocates. Rao was afraid of dying before clearing his dues to the lawyers. Rao suffered a heart attack on 9 December 2004, and was taken to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences where he died 14 days later at the age of 83. For
one thing, the Gandhi dynasty’s penchant to bury non-dynasty leaders as
immaterial has kept PVN in the forgotten category. His body was refused
entry into the AICC headquarters, and they turned down the family’s
request for a site to bury him in the capital. He was cremated with full state honours in Hyderabad, after the then Chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, Dr. Y.S. Rajashekhar Reddy intervened. His body was kept in state at the Jubilee Hall in Hyderabad. His funeral was attended by the incumbent Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, former Prime Minister H.D. Deve Gowda, the incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president L.K. Advani, the Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee, the then Finance Minister P. Chidambaram and many other dignitaries. |