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.
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