Meanwhile: The unsung genius of India's reforms Sunanda K. Datta-Ray International Herald Tribune Wednesday, December 29, 2004
CALCUTTA The truth of the saying that prophets are seldom honored in their own country was demonstrated when the true architect of India's modernization, former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, who died a lonely and embittered man just before Christmas, was not allowed a last resting place in New Delhi. His body was flown 1,500 kilometers to be cremated, albeit with full state honors and heaped with posthumous tributes, in the southern town of Hyderabad he had left decades ago. . At our last meeting, in April, I found him sitting hunched over, lost in thought, in the shabby gloom of his New Delhi bungalow. Head sunk in his shoulders, he resembled a small turtle. But a turtle bursting with passion. . "I am the only Congress prime minister not of the family," he exploded, referring to India's Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, "to complete a full term, and I am still paying for it!" His relations with the Congress Party boss, the all-powerful Sonia Gandhi, were cool at best. . Foreign minister under two prime ministers - Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv - and prime minister from 1991 to 1996, Rao released India's economy from more than 40 years of socialist shackles, established strategic links with Washington, and developed economic ties with Southeast Asia. Singapore's leader Lee Kuan Yew called him India's Deng Xiaoping. "I'm rooting for Rao, the secular prime minister, who is more likely to move toward free markets than Vajpayee, his leading opponent," William Safire wrote in The New York Times. . His greatest coup as prime minister was to persuade Manmohan Singh, a distinguished economist but at the time an outsider to India's turgid politics, to accept the crucial job of finance minister. It proved a sound partnership. "When he gets into political trouble, I bail him out," Rao told businessmen in Washington, "and when I get into economic trouble, he bails me out." Singh, of course, is now prime minister himself. . Rao was less a committed free marketeer than a pragmatist who recognized that India, on the verge of bankruptcy, needed American support and capital. There "will be blood on the streets," he told me in 1991, if foreign investment did not free domestic funds for social welfare. Asked if liberalization violated the legacy of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, he referred cryptically to a mythical king who had drafted Hindu jurisprudence 1,800 years ago: "Manu the lawgiver gave the law. It is up to each Brahmin to interpret it." . Everything about him was enigmatic. "When in doubt, pout," mocked his officials. But the joke was on them. "When I don't make a decision, it's not that I don't think about it. I think about it and make a decision not to make a decision," he explained. He called himself "a prime minister of consensus" with good reason. Before unveiling their far-reaching reforms, Rao and Singh defused political resistance by consulting the leader of the opposition, Lal Krishna Advani. . Indian politicians are not noted for their humor. Rao was the exception. His dry wit reflected his lack of any sense of consequence, another un-Indian trait. When a former president of India broadcast his lost designation on his bungalow gatepost, Rao remarked self-deprecatingly that as "a lover of obscurity" he had never had a visiting card. When Singh complained that people were accusing him of selling out to foreign interests, Rao retorted, "Who would want to buy this country anyway?" . He was fluent in English, Hindi and Urdu, in addition to his native Telugu. He learned Sanskrit and taught himself Spanish. At 80, he began playing the piano to exercise his arthritic fingers. . Rao's real failure was not that he was defeated or hauled before the courts for corruption - they exonerated him anyway - but that he allowed Advani and his Hindu fundamentalist mobs to destroy a 15th-century mosque in 1992 that they claimed marked the site of a temple commemorating the birthplace of the mythical god-king Rama. Clearly, the vandalism troubled him, for 12 years later he asked me for critical questions and comments about it. "Don't spare me," he urged. "Be as harsh as you can!" . I don't know whether he was seeking material for the second volume he was writing of his autobiographical novel "The Insider" or to salve his own conscience. But I regret that I never got around to honoring a sad old man's last request. . [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> $4.98 domain names from Yahoo!. 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