At the hinge of history: R. Venkataraman and the Republic in turbulent times

Yesterday’s meeting and conversation with Ms. Lakshmi V. Venkatesan, Founder and Managing Trustee of the Bharatiya Yuva Shakti Trust, unfolded less as a formal meeting and more as an intellectual passage through time — where memory, history, and contemporary purpose converged with uncommon clarity. 

It was a dialogue anchored in ideas, but animated by lived experience, shaped equally by inheritance and independent conviction.

As the daughter of Shri Ramaswamy Venkataraman, President of India from 1987 to 1992, Ms. Venkatesan stands at a unique vantage point in the story of modern India. Those five years of her father’s presidency were not merely a constitutional interlude; they were a hinge in history. India, in that brief span, crossed from one social, cultural, moral and economic imagination to another. 

In 1987, the republic still largely spoke the language of socialism, egalitarian restraint, and state stewardship. By 1992, it had begun to articulate a different grammar—of markets, aspiration, cultural nationalism, and a newly assertive middle class.

Four Prime Ministers—Rajiv Gandhi, V. P. Singh, Chandra Shekhar, and P. V. Narasimha Rao—passed through office during that single presidential term. Rarely has the continuity of the Republic been tested amid such political volatility. Yet, as history would later reveal, turbulence was not a sign of decay but of transformation. Democracies, after all, often renew themselves through disorder.

The early 1990s compressed multiple revolutions into a single moment. The Rath Yatra of 1990 reconfigured India’s cultural and political discourse, bringing questions of faith, identity, and nationhood into the electoral mainstream. 

The economic reforms initiated by Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao in July 1991 dismantled the old command economy and set India on the path toward liberalisation, competition, and consumerism. In 1992, the demolition in Ayodhya irreversibly altered the tone of political mobilisation, embedding cultural nationalism as a feature of democratic contestation.

Together, these events did not merely change policies or parties; they reshaped the Indian psyche. The Congress party, once the natural party of governance, entered a long decline, while the Bharatiya Janata Party began its steady ascent. 

Looking back, it is evident that Shri Ramaswamy Venkataraman’s presidency spanned the most tumultuous and consequential phase of post-Independence India—when old certainties dissolved and new forces gained legitimacy. Ms. Venkatesan’s reflections on this period were marked by nuance rather than nostalgia. She spoke of history not as a sequence of victories or failures, but as a series of choices made under constraint. 

Her insights moved effortlessly from India to the wider world — from the political churn in the United States to the shifting moral and economic frameworks of Europe — suggesting that national destinies are increasingly shaped by global currents, even as they remain rooted in local realities.

It is precisely this synthesis of historical consciousness and practical engagement that animates her work at the Bharatiya Yuva Shakti Trust. Through BYST, she has devoted herself to nurturing grampreneurs and micro-enterprises — those quiet architects of economic resilience who operate far from the glare of stock markets and policy summits. 

In her view, grassroots entrepreneurship is not a peripheral activity but a civilisational necessity. “A nation does not grow only from its capitals,” she implied, “it grows from the confidence of its smallest producers.” If the economic reforms of the 1990s unleashed markets, the challenge of the present is to democratise opportunity. By mentoring young entrepreneurs from underserved communities, BYST affirms a deeper truth: that economic dignity is the most sustainable form of social justice. 

In a country still negotiating the meaning of growth, Ms. Venkatesan’s work reminds us that history is not only something we inherit — it is something we actively build, enterprise by enterprise, choice by choice.

The secret history of regime change—and why Venezuela fits the pattern

Regime change is often sold as precision engineering. Remove the leader, manage the transition, restore order. Clean. Surgical. Final.

Lindsey A. O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War exposes why this story almost never survives contact with reality.

Between 1947 and 1989, the United States launched 64 covert regime-change operations. Most failed. Even the “successful” ones rarely delivered loyalty, stability, or legitimacy. Power did not dissolve nationalism; it inflamed it. Installed leaders discovered that domestic politics does not disappear simply because Washington prefers a different outcome.

The canonical cases are well known, yet their lessons remain unlearned. The 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran produced not durable compliance but revolutionary backlash. The failed 1958 effort to unseat Sukarno in Indonesia exposed the limits of proxy manipulation in a postcolonial society. 

The 1963 coup in South Vietnam, intended to strengthen American influence, resulted instead in the unintended assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and deeper instability. In Angola, decades of covert support for rebel groups neither secured victory nor legitimacy. 

These episodes reveal a consistent pattern: secrecy may enable action, but it corrodes accountability and strategic foresight. Regimes propped up from the outside either collapsed under popular pressure or turned hostile once they confronted the same social forces that undid their predecessors.

The most uncomfortable finding is also the clearest. The U.S. did not export democracy; it often replaced elected governments with authoritarian ones. Dependency, not shared values, produced compliance—and dependency bred fragility, resentment, and revolt.

This is why Venezuela matters. Not because it is unique, but because it is familiar. The belief that “this time will be different” accompanies nearly every failed intervention in the American record. History shows otherwise.

O’Rourke’s book is not anti-American. It is anti-illusion. Power cannot substitute for legitimacy. Secrecy cannot override society. And fear-driven interventions accelerate decline rather than prevent it. The Cold War may be over. Its covert reflexes are not.

From WMDs to narcotics and illegal migration: How allegations become weapons and oil the prize

Maduro at 2023 South American summit

History has a habit of repeating itself, first as justification and later as regret. Venezuela today stands where many resource-rich nations have stood before—accused, isolated, and finally struck, not because it is uniquely evil, but because it is inconveniently endowed.

Oil, in the modern world, is not merely a commodity. It is power in liquid form. And power, when held outside the preferred architecture of empire, becomes suspect by definition. The language changes with time—communism, terrorism, narcotics, migration threats—but the destination remains the same: regime collapse followed by resource realignment.

The latest allegations levelled by Donald Trump against Caracas arrive wrapped in familiar moral packaging. Criminal networks. Security threats. Hemispheric instability. These are serious words, meant to close debate before it begins. Yet history urges caution. It reminds us that certainty in geopolitics is often manufactured, not discovered.

Two decades ago, the world was told—repeatedly and confidently—that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The claim was treated not as a hypothesis, but as a verdict. Iraq was invaded. Its state dismantled. Its oil sector opened. The weapons, famously, were never found.

That absence did not reverse the war. It merely arrived too late to matter.

Venezuela’s story now carries an unsettling resemblance. The charges are different, but the structure is identical: demonize the regime, compress complexity into slogans, and present military action as a reluctant necessity. Propaganda succeeds not by lying outright, but by speaking with absolute confidence before facts have time to breathe.

If, years from now, investigations reveal that today’s accusations were exaggerated, selectively constructed, or strategically misleading, the damage will already have been done. Governments can be toppled in weeks; truth takes decades to recover its dignity.

The deeper reality is this: control over petroleum remains central to the maintenance of the American global order. This is not conspiracy; it is doctrine, openly articulated across decades of strategic literature. Energy flows shape alliances. Energy chokepoints define red lines. Energy independence for others is quietly viewed as strategic disobedience.

Oil-rich states that lack institutional resilience are not seen as partners. They are seen as opportunities.

The Venezuelan crisis is therefore not an aberration but a pattern—one that has touched Iran, Libya, Iraq, and others in different forms. The moral language shifts, but the economic geometry remains constant. Empire rarely announces itself as empire; it arrives disguised as concern.

For countries watching from afar, the lesson is sobering. Resource wealth does not guarantee sovereignty. It tests it. Weak institutions invite intervention; strong ones complicate it. The danger is not having oil. The danger is having oil without the capacity to defend political autonomy, economic competence, and narrative control.

Venezuela may yet be remembered not for what it did wrong, but for what it possessed. And history may again ask an uncomfortable question: was the real crime a security threat—or was it oil?