Monday, 12 December 2022

Narasimha Rao: The accidental statesman who remade India

P. V. Narasimha Rao

The irony of India’s modern history is that its strongest political and economic reforms were carried out by its weakest government—the minority administration of P. V. Narasimha Rao. History has a taste for paradox, and in Rao it found one of its richest.

When we think of twentieth-century strongmen, the mind turns to Stalin and Churchill, Deng Xiaoping and Nehru, Thatcher and Reagan. 

Narasimha Rao belongs to none of these archetypes. He was no orator, no mass leader, no populist firebrand. Dour, cautious, almost spectral in presence, he appeared less a politician than a bureaucrat lost in the folds of his files. Yet retrospect grants him a stature equal to those world-shaping figures: for in his quiet, unassuming way, Rao altered the trajectory of India.

Before 1991, nothing in his career suggested the capacity for transformation. He had held senior portfolios, but left little personal stamp upon them. His speeches were cautious, his public persona colourless, his reputation one of pliancy. 

To his contemporaries, he seemed the very image of a stopgap prime minister, installed in the aftermath of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination simply to hold office until a scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty could reclaim the throne. Rao was trusted precisely because he seemed incapable of betrayal.

But power has its own alchemy. The prime ministership did not merely elevate Rao; it transfigured him. In office, the “faceless bureaucrat” revealed himself as a strategist of remarkable subtlety and a reformer of iron will. The India he inherited in 1991 was on the brink of bankruptcy, its socialist economy collapsing under its own weight. 

With a few audacious moves Rao dismantled the edifice of Nehruvian socialism, opened the gates to liberalization, and invited the world into India’s markets. The nation’s economic history can be divided with clarity into two eras: before Rao, and after Rao.

Nor was his influence confined to economics. The Ram Janmabhoomi movement gathered unprecedented momentum during his tenure. Though led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Sangh Parivar, Rao’s government refrained from decisive suppression. Was it mere hesitation, or a tacit sympathy for the movement’s cultural undertones? The ambiguity remains, but the result is beyond doubt: the movement, unchecked, reshaped the political landscape of India.

Thus the foundations of twenty-first century India—its high-growth economy and its renewed cultural self-consciousness—were laid in those five turbulent years between 1991 and 1996. The man who seemed destined to be a footnote became the hinge of history.

Narasimha Rao remains one of India’s great ironies: the weak man who proved stronger than the strong, the accidental prime minister who became an architect of destiny. He was, in the truest sense, India’s unlikely hero.

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