Thursday 28 September 2017

Two Accidental Prime Ministers

Daman Singh (2014), Strictly Personal: Manmohan and Gursharan, HarperCollins, pp. 452

Vinay Sitapati (2016), Half-Lion: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India, Penguin India, pp.399

1991 is increasingly considered a ‘water-shed’ year in modern Indian history because of India’s formal decision to open up parts of its economy through a process called liberalization. After decades of Soviet-style planning and a consistently lower rate of economic growth (that hovered around 3 per cent) since Indian independence in 1947, liberalization was a break from the past. However, the historic decision to open the economy was not done through parliamentary debate, but by political stealth. This was because liberalization was a sensitive issue politically, and the then imminent balance-of-payment crisis made the decision inevitable. The prime architects of this historic moment were two accidental power bearers- P.V. Narasimha Rao, the then Prime Minister of India, and his finance minister Manmohan Singh, who later became India’s Prime Minister for a decade (2004-2014). They were ‘accidental’ because both were chosen by the political establishment for being a compromise candidate who was agreeable to most members of the power coalition. Incidentally, these two historical figures have received less academic interest than the pantheon of other political figures in modern Indian history. The two biographies under review here, fill the research gap to some extent, although they are two very different kinds of books.

The first book ‘Strictly Personal’ tells the story of Manmohan and his wife, Gursharan, written by their second daughter, Daman Singh, after prolonged interviews with her parents about their life. The book reproduces the narrative of the protagonists in their own voices. This is the most personal that a published work gets to Manmohan Singh. The best part of the book is the first section, recounting the early years in undivided India (present-day Pakistan), where Singh grew up with his extended family. This part also dwells on his many loves, passion for learning, and his Oxbridge years. Manmohan speaks freely with a tinge of nostalgia for his childhood with a deeply evocative reminiscence, ‘I wish I were a child again’. In the second half of the book, he recounts his impressions of people as he went to work in high offices in New Delhi and his own convictions as he presented the decision to open up the economy as the Finance Minister of India. In this part, there is no counter voice given to Singh’s own thoughts and this decontextualizes what he attempts to reveal. Perhaps, this is the shortcoming of the book.

The second book, ‘Half-Lion’ is a sweeping and flamboyant political biography of Narasimha Rao, penned by Princeton scholar Vinay Sitapati. There is an account of his early years, but it is presented with an eye on the future, when Rao will sit on the highest political office of India after years of political wilderness. Rao’s unfailing memory, his deep mistrust of others outside his coterie of friends, his undying faith in fate and destiny and his obsession with technology bring out the inevitable contradictions in his persona that makes him an interesting character. Rao comes across as an uneasy combination of the pragmatic politics of Kautilya of the ancient past and unadulterated idealism of the Nehruvian era. It is this contradiction that makes him a ‘half-lion’- often decisive, but terribly secretive. The book also freely uses never-before-seen archive of letters from Rao’s personal collection.

Reading both the books together resurrects two important historical personalities and gives a glimpse of what really went behind the minds of the prime architects of India’s liberalization. As historian Ramachandra Guha remarks in the introduction to his edited volume ‘Makers of Modern Asia’, biography as a field of scholarship is under-developed in Asia and particularly in India. Recent interest in modern political figures in India such as Rao and Singh, is a welcome development.