In one of the episodes of the Seen and the Unseen podcast I have written about earlier, this author was interviewed few months back about this book. Interview was very good. My longtime friend & colleague Sanjay Padubidri and I were discussing the episode and thought we should read the book. Lo and behold, when I saw him last March, Sanjay gave me the book as part of our regular book exchange program. So, read it, liked it.
P.V.Narasimha Rao was the Prime Minister of India from 1991 to 1996 (5 years that form one full term). This book is about his time and administration. TBH, I am not much into biographies. I generally think more than someone's personal story, I should focus on and learn from their unvarnished contributions. Naturally there are exceptions, and those who like biographies may have different perspectives that could be justified. Though this book is mostly biographical, spotlight was on this gentleman's unusual administrative style, and so it was engaging, informative.
For those who may not be familiar with Hindu mythologies, there is a story of a demon king (named Hiranyakashipu) who had a pious son (named Prahalatha). The king had boons from the Gods that said he can be killed neither by a human being nor an animal, neither in the daytime nor at night, neither inside the house nor outside the house. Thinking that he has conquered death, he becomes a tyrant. Finally answering his son's prayers, God appears in one Avatar called Narasimha that is half human (Nara) and half lion (Simha) and kills the demon king on the door sill, during the evening hour, meeting all the conditions stipulated in the boon! This Indian PM who had that name, ruled successfully for five years, by being a lion sometime and human being sometime and even a fox or a mouse as time/conditions required, as he headed a minority government throughout his term, that could have fallen down any day (as it was common in the multi-party democracy of India). While his hold on power was tenuous, he managed to herald the kind of economic reforms never seen in the Indian history, that has now lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and has set India on a course to becoming an economic superpower in the coming years. While many other leaders around the world might have brought in economic reforms that transformed their country, all of them had either unassailable democratic majority mandate or were some form of dictators that didn't have to worry about their government falling apart. Doing great/difficult things while you don't have to worry about the stability of your Govt is comparatively easier. Doing it while you don't have such stability is completely different, visionary, courageous endeavor. P.V.N.R managed to pull this off and so deserves a lot of credit that he didn't get for a long time. Thankfully he is starting to be recognized for his contributions now, due to works like this one.
First chapter of the book starts with his death in 2004. Though he was Ex-PM, he wasn't accorded the kind of state funeral/respect in the country's capital New Delhi since his own party leaders (particularly Sonia Gandhi) didn't want him to get a lot of fame/name. He was cremated in his native state of Andra Pradesh, where he served as Chief Minister decades earlier. The book then goes back to his earlier days as a party worker. He was elected as CM (equivalent to State Governor in the US), mainly because he didn't have a lot of personal fandom/base and so the party elites thought he will be easy to manage. They did knock him off power before he completed his CM term and ostracized him for a while. Instead of forming a competing party or accusing the leadership of not supporting him, he remained loyal, focused more on literature, writing, etc. for years.
Though he was born in 1921, he traveled outside India for the first time only in 1976 to visit his daughter living in the USA. That trip apparently changed some of his socialistic views. After the scion of the Nehru/Gandhi dynasty Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in 1991, when the party came to power, he was made PM, again primarily because he was considered weak with no support base of his own. But decades of his experience in state and the central level had given him enough insights into the Indian politics. Leveraging these skills, he immediately took up major economic reforms with Dr. Manmohan Singh (who became PM more than a decade later himself) serving as his finance minister. Often the reforms were painted as initiatives forced on India by IMF since India needed loans, its foreign exchange reserves were so low, etc. But the ideas for reforms were there for several years without anyone at the helm willing to take them up. PVN made good use of the opportunity, blamed the IMF rolling them out and stuck to it, even after the finance crisis was over. There are lot of interesting stories, tactics related to his administration that are quite interesting. To give another example, India becoming nuclear power is mostly thanks to him. In many of these cases, he tactfully avoided taking credit for them or intentionally gave credit to Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi, etc. so that his party base will continue to support him, while most of the actual changes he brought in were totally opposite to the party's old policies!
It was heartening to note that the subsequent BJP PM Vajpayee, who was heading the country when India became a nuclear power, gave all the credit to PVNR saying, all the prep work was already complete during the previous administration, while he only exploded the device. PVNR spoke 10 different languages, learned to do computer programming on his own, knew Unix, wrote novels, could use very clever tactics suitable to Indian politics to get things done were all very well chronicled. The author being a an academic, certainly didn't write an all-appreciation ode, but points out his negative qualities, talks about marital infidelity, areas where he failed also well. But after about chapter 10, the initial chronological writing comes to an end and so it feels like the book is starting all over again to go back and discuss specific areas (e.g. nuclear detonation prep, Babri Masjid debacle) that drags the pace down. Still, it is not too boring, and the prose is quite accessible. Though I wasn't living in India during his PM years, along with the rest of the Indian diaspora and many economic scholars around the world, I did follow his reforms closely with a lot of enthusiasm and so was quite familiar with the period and the changes he brought in that were such a breath of fresh air. Current Indian PM has a cult like following in India and these days politicians all around the world have learned to leverage social media to get the limelight on them. But PVNR's admin style was quite the opposite and so it is good to see him getting the credit he deserves through works like this one.
In case you don't think you can read this whole book, you can consider listening to this podcast episode that covers most of the details discussed in the book very well.
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