Read To the Brink and Back: India’s 1991 Story Online
Authors: Jairam Ramesh
To the Brink and Back: India’s 1991 Story (23 page)
The appointment of
A.N. Verma as principal secretary was also fortuitous. Verma had wide experience both in the Commerce and Industry Ministries, commanded respect in the bureaucracy, had a low-key but effective style, and was able to execute the prime minister’s instructions well.
There is a Tolstoyan perspective of history which holds that individuals are irrelevant and circumstances create events. Another view is that individuals matter and do decisively shape the course of history. My own feeling is that what got accomplished in June-July 1991 was inevitable, if our goal was to avoid the opprobrium of default.
The Rao-Singh duo happened to be at the right place at the right time. They had neither bargained nor lobbied for the responsibilities they found themselves with; but there they were, saddled with onerous tasks.
‘
Carpe diem
,’ wrote Horace in his immortal
Odes
. This is exactly what the Rao-Singh jugalbandi did—they seized the day. There was no guarantee of success, and certainly no likelihood of quick positive outcomes; indeed, the results of the reforms started becoming evident only after 1993. Consequently, theirs was a huge leap of faith. It was, in fact, a gamble of sorts. The most risk-averse of gentlemen took this wager only because the alternative—namely a default—was an anathema to both. Besides, they were men intent on carving a distinctive niche for themselves in India’s political and economic history.
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And let there be no mistake about it—they definitely did.
To borrow an analogy from Isaiah Berlin, if Manmohan Singh was the hedgehog who knew only one big thing and that is economic reforms, Rao was the fox who knew many things. It is this fox-hedgehog combine that rescued India in perhaps its darkest moment. India in 1991 could well have mirrored Greece in 2015. That it didn’t is due to the Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh combine.
June-July 1991 was a revolution, but it was an evolutionary one—some years in the making. There was, no doubt, a huge element of chance in what Rao-Singh did, but as Louis Pasteur said, ‘Chance favours only the prepared mind.’ Narasimha Rao’s political astuteness and Manmohan Singh’s economic wisdom brought India back from the very brink. Together, they demonstrated that a consensus can, on occasion, be created by tough executive action. They proved that sometimes, if you listen intently but do what you have set out to do unwaveringly, accord can emerge. They converted an unprecedented crisis into a not-to-be-lost opportunity. Of course, circumstances were ripe for a mindset change, but more than being lucky by being there at the right time, they were plucky—they challenged set minds.
The hand of destiny took me close to Rao and Singh as they began saving the country. And although I remained in their vicinity for an exceedingly short while, I was privileged to play a small role—in the words of one of Rao’s closest aides—in setting history in motion.
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Sharad Pawar was the defence minister in Narasimha Rao’s cabinet.
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Indian Oil Corporation’s executive director, K. Doraiswamy, was abducted by activists of the Ikhwan-ul-Muslimeen in Srinagar on 28 June 1991, and was released on 20 August in exchange for the liberation of four terrorists. The year 1991 saw the government plagued by several such incidents of kidnapping in the Kashmir Valley.
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Troubled by an armed separatist movement, the tense state of Punjab witnessed the killing of at least eighty train passengers near the city of Ludhiana in June 1991. The attacks came less than five hours after polling closed in the national elections.
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T.N. Seshan, the then election commissioner—known to have said, ‘While I am here, it is I who will decide how elections are to be held; politicians have got away with nonsense for far too long’—had several run-ins with Narasimha Rao.
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The Cauvery river water dispute hit the headlines once J. Jayalalithaa succeeded M. Karunanidhi in 1991 as chief minister of Tamil Nadu. She secured an interim award from the Cauvery Water Dispute Tribunal—Karnataka was ordered to release 205 tmcft each year to Tamil Nadu, which Karnataka decided to challenge in the apex court. Subsequently, Jayalalithaa went on a four-day fast in 1993, demanding the release of the Cauvery waters.
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L.K. Advani, then the president of the BJP, had, in 1990, undertaken a rath yatra from Somnath to generate support for a Ram temple in Ayodhya, which was to be his final stop. In 1991, the
BJP intensified its campaign, which would eventually spiral into the demolition of the Babri Masjid.
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This was made available to me by P.V. Prabhakar Rao, Narasimha Rao’s youngest son, for which I’m indebted to him.
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Michael White,
Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer
(New York: Fourth Estate, 1998).
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Some hilarious stories revolving around Chandraswami have been recounted by K. Natwar Singh in
Walking with Lions: Tales from a Diplomatic Past
(New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2012) and
One Life is Not Enough
(New Delhi: Rupa Publications, 2014). When asked about his friendship with the self-styled godman in an interview with Prabhu Chawla of
The Indian Express
on 8 July 1991, the prime minister said, ‘I know the gentleman. He belongs to Hyderabad from where I also come. That’s about all.’ He was being disingenuous, to say the very least.
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P.V. Narasimha Rao,
Ayodhya: 6 December 1992
(New Delhi: Penguin, 2006). Not surprisingly, Rao’s media adviser P.V.R.K. Prasad’s memoirs has much more information on Narasimha Rao’s thoughts on Ayodhya and his actions than the prime minister provided in his account. See
Wheels Behind the Veil
(Hyderabad: Emesco Books, 2012). Other ‘participant’ accounts of the events leading up to 6 December 1992 are Arjun Singh,
A Grain of Sand in the Hourglass of Time
(New Delhi: Hay House, 2012) and M.D. Godbole,
Unfinished Innings
(New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 1996). Godbole was union home secretary at that time.
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Interestingly, Narasimha Rao did not make Singh a member of the CWC— something that was done by his successor, Sitaram Kesri.
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P.N. Haksar was also Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s principal secretary.
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Morarji Desai and H.M. Patel appointed
I.G. Patel as governor of the RBI in 1977, and Indira Gandhi appointed Manmohan Singh to the same post five years later.
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Yashwant Sinha starts his memoirs,
Confessions of a Swadeshi Reformer
(New Delhi: Penguin, 2007) with a chapter entitled ‘The Original Reformer?’ The question mark is misleading because he makes a self-serving case for himself to be considered so, on four counts: (i) he was the first to introduce the concept of a fiscal deficit as opposed to a conventional budget deficit; (ii) he was the first to talk about public sector disinvestment; (iii) he talked about rationalizing expenditure on subsidies, reducing allocations on major subsidies and better targeting of subsidies for the poor; and (iv) he stated his commitment to fiscal discipline in an unambiguous manner. He overstates his case. It is true that he was the first to suggest public sector disinvestment which was to be implemented by later administrations, but the Rao-Singh claim to fame is based on much firmer and larger grounds. The Chandra Shekhar government wanted to introduce trade policy reforms but didn’t. The Rao-Singh-Chidambaram troika did that and earned a permanent place in history for that accomplishment. Sinha never even mentions industrial policy reforms; actually during a debate in the Rajya Sabha on 7 August 1991, he was very critical of the industrial policy reforms announced on 24 July.
A Note of Thanks
I thank Pranab Mukherjee, Dr Manmohan Singh and M.L. Fotedar for extended conversations.
P.V. Rajeshwar Rao and P.V. Prabhakar Rao allowed me to see their father’s private papers and spoke to me about people and events of those months. I am grateful to them for allowing me to use two of Narasimha Rao’s unpublished pieces.
Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Mani Shankar Aiyar,
Naresh Chandra and a very close aide of Narasimha Rao who prefers anonymity, have been liberal with their recollections.
Daman Singh gave me easy access to all her father’s academic papers, speeches and interviews. Her own delightful
Strictly Personal: Manmohan and Gursharan
(New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2014) has important recollections of Manmohan Singh on his tenure as finance minister.
Pramath Sinha gave me whatever papers A.N. Verma had left behind. Sumit Chakravartty was most helpful in locating his father’s articles that appeared in
Mainstream
.
Vinay Sitapati—whose much-needed comprehensive biography of Narasimha Rao will be published soon—and I have had useful chats. Sanjaya Baru, who is also writing a book on Narasimha Rao, encouraged me to write this account saying, ‘This is the least you can do for our Telugu PM, considering we Telugus sent you to the Rajya Sabha for two terms!’ The persistent insistence of Ritu Vajpeyi-Mohan of Rupa made this recollection possible.
The originals of all the primary and secondary sources used or quoted in this book have been deposited with the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library.
I asked Naresh Chandra—amongst the most impressive of civil servants I have known over the past three decades and more—why he had not penned his memoirs after almost half-a-century of distinguished service to the nation. He said that he was against self-glorification and that any honest account must also include mistakes made. I hope I have avoided the first and have been candid about the second!
Finally, why this memoirs-of-sorts at this time? For two reasons, really. First, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the July 1991 reforms is approaching and I thought this would be an appropriate occasion to look back and place what I saw and knew in the public domain. Second, after the Congress’ electoral debacle in 2014, I found myself in need of worthwhile things to do to keep myself intellectually busy. Therefore, after two books on my stint as environment and forest minister and on the 2013 land acquisition law, this one appears. I thought there was an interesting
story
to tell and that is what I have tried to do, without attempting ‘to etch my name like a schoolboy on a small tree in the forest that is history’.
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This phrase is borrowed from the introduction to H.Y. Sharada Prasad,
The Book I Won’t be Writing and Other Essays
(New Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2003).
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