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.
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