POLITICS-INDIA: In Death, Father of Economic Reforms Gets Credit

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Dec 24 2004 (IPS) - It is an irony of public life that only death could give former Indian prime minister P V Narasimha Rao – who died of heart failure on Thursday aged 83 – any credit for the momentous economic reforms that he began in the early nineties and continues to transform this large and populous country today.

In 1991, when Rao took over as prime minister, few eligible politicians wanted the job of leading a country that was in massive external debt, facing militant Hindu fundamentalism and traumatised by the assassination of the charismatic former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

Rao launched the LPG (liberalisation, privatisation, globalisation) programme in the face of stiff opposition from the ultra-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the doctrinaire communist parties.

But much of the opposition came from within his own Congress party. During its long years in power following independence from colonial rule in 1947, it created the quasi-socialist ‘licence-permit raj’ that created artificial shortages and protected private monopolies and a bloated bureaucracy.

Monumentally, Rao failed to stop the BJP and its Hindu fundamentalist sister organisations from demolishing the 17th century Babri Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, northern Uttar Pradesh state, plunging the country into nationwide communal rioting.

On top of that, his rule was plagued by several instances of high corruption. He himself faced charges of bribing members of parliament to keep his minority government going by voting in favour during a critical confidence vote.

At the end of his term in 1996, the Congress party suffered its worst ever electoral debacle in its more than-a-century-old history – and his party members found it convenient to blame him for troubles that were building up much earlier.

Unruffled by the criticism, Rao, a formidable intellectual who spoke 17 languages including Spanish, French and Portuguese, took to literary endeavour. He produced the bestselling ‘The Insider’, a semi-autobiographical expose on the convoluted, sycophantic workings of Indian politics.

But Rao himself remained a lonely outsider fending off a raft of corruption cases, one of which earned him the title of being the first Indian prime minister to be convicted – though a higher court later absolved him.

Rao’s party members regarded his term in power as but an interregnum in India’s dynastic politics, dominated by the Nehru-Gandhi family. But his successor as Congress party president, Sonia Gandhi, who finally rallied the party to its comeback in May polls, was known to consult him frequently.

Of the many tributes that have been pouring in from home and abroad since Thursday, the most valuable are those from Manmohan Singh, a World Bank economist Rao brought in as his finance minister and who went on, rather unexpectedly, to become prime minister earlier this year.

Calling him a ”father figure”, Singh described Rao as a ”unique phenomenon ”who would ”forever be remembered as the father of economic reforms in India”, and acknowledged the political backing that Rao gave him in effecting a paradigm shift in the country’s economic policy.

That is a lot, coming from the mild, scrupulously honest economist and former university don who was embarrassed not a little by the scandals that rocked the Rao regime.

Among these scandals was one in which a stock broker declared publicly to have personally handed over to the then prime minister a suitcase stuffed with currency notes, in return for being allowed to manipulate stock values with government money.

As for the charges of bribing parliamentarians to stay on in power, even the noted economist and commentator on public affairs, Prem Shankar Jha, has said that the alternative would have been worse and possibly resulted in political chaos and a halt to the process of economic reforms.

It is a tribute to Rao’s visionary policies that successive governments, even those run by the BJP, only deepened and widened the reforms he began.

Likewise, the Congress party could return to power once it promised a ‘human face’ to the sweeping changes that enriched a small urban elite and further impoverished farmers and other marginalised groups in India.

When he died, Rao was close to finishing a sequel to ‘The Insider’. A few months before his death, he said that it would be explosive and embarrass all political parties, including the Congress.

”All political parties make mistakes and the Congress is no exception. There is no use seeing things in just black and white. There is also the grey area and my second volume deals with this grey area in Indian politics,” he had said.

It is not known whether the second volume will now see the light of day or for that matter, the other book he was writing on the true events that led to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992.

But it is known that Rao was not all that masterfully inactive when he realised that the BJP and its allies were about to demolish the Babri Masjid. He actually consulted the chief of India’s armed forces to see if army intervention was appropriate.

In the end, Rao appears to have decided not take on Hindu fundamentalism head-on, as many of his partymates would have preferred, but to let it fizzle out on its own as it now appears to have done.

There was certainly no masterful inactivity in Rao’s policy in western Punjab state, where he finally stamped out Sikh militancy by handing over the Punjab to a tough Sikh police officer, K P S Gill, who drew up his own ‘hit list’ of known troublemakers and ruthlessly eliminated them.

But Rao’s best contribution was in skillfully steering India’s foreign policy into new alliances with the Western world that were in tandem with economic reforms. He saw them as the only viable response to the collapse of the Soviet Union, with which India was militarily and economically aligned at the time.

It was also Rao who first forged ties with the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN), the main regional grouping in South-east Asia that was once dismissed by Indian leaders as the ”Coca Cola countries”. Later, he drew up the ‘Look East’ policy that has now begun to bear fruit – and may yet pave the way for an Asian common market. (END/IPS/AP/IP/RDR/JS/04)