To The Brink and Back India’s 1991 story by Jairam Ramesh; Rupa; Price: Rs.395; Pages: 216 Arguably, no prime minister of independent India was more grievously wronged by his peers and the country’s acquiescent public than the late P.V. Narasimha Rao (1921-2004). A politician who spent almost his entire life in the shadow of lesser leaders, when Rao was fortuitously elected to the highest office — unlike all his predecessors without exception — he seized the opportunity to launch the long-languishing Indian economy into a higher orbit of sustained growth. Rao served as India’s prime minister for only one term of five years, but in that period (1991-96), he substantially freed the Indian economy bound for over four decades in the sticky red tape of the neta-babu licence-permit-quota regimen, ill-advisedly designed by free India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and perpetuated by his real and ideological heirs. Until Rao assumed office as prime minister on June 21, 1991, India’s GDP growth had averaged 3.5 percent (or 1.3 percent per capita) for over four decades. In the last three years of Rao’s term in office, it doubled to 7 percent plus for the first time in the history of post-independence India. For this signal service of unshackling the economy, Rao was neither rewarded nor eulogised. On the contrary after the Congress party lost the General Election 1996 and members of the Nehru dynasty reasserted their hold on the party, he was cast out in the cold, denied a Lok Sabha ticket, and finally when he died a disillusioned man in 2004 shortly after the Congress under Sonia Gandhi was unexpectedly voted to power at the Centre, also denied a funeral in the Delhi imperium. Jairam Ramesh worked in the PMO during the tumultuous first 90 days when Rao and Dr. Manmohan Singh, handpicked as the finance minister, rescued India from the brink of bankruptcy and default of international payment obligations, and simultaneously initiated the historic liberalisation and deregulation initiative of June-August 1991. A decade after Rao’s death, Ramesh has written an insider’s account giving P.V. Narasimha Rao (PVNR) the encomiums he never received in his lifetime. This narrative begins on June 3, 1991 when PVNR, who had been elected Congress president and prime minister-designate on May 29 after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in Sriperumbudur (Tamil Nadu) on May 21, co-opted the author as an aide in the PMO. As Ramesh, who was transferred much to his chagrin to the Planning Commission three months later observes, this book is “one ‘participant-observer’s’ narrative of the action-packed days of June, July and August 1991 during which time dramatic steps to liberalise and globalise the Indian economy were taken”. Thus, To the Brink and Back does not provide any explanation as to what happened in the interregnum between 1989 when the Rajiv Gandhi-led Congress government was ousted from power and June 2, 1991 when PVNR was sworn in as prime minister. A true party — and therefore Nehru-Gandhi — loyalist, Ramesh has nothing to say…
