MANIPAL, India, Dec. 27 (UPI) -- Appropriately for the capital of India, a country that has witnessed the demise of so many dynasties and empires, Delhi is a city dotted by tombs. To the many built to encase the remains of the numerous emperors of the Mughal era has been added their post-1947 potentates of democracy: Mohandas K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Sanjay Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Charan Singh and Jagjivan Ram.
While neither Mohandas Gandhi nor Sanjay
Gandhi was ever the holder of any public office, some may claim that the
contribution to Indian history of the second son of Indira Gandhi may not
entirely be on the same scale as that of the Mahatma. However, such niceties
were not allowed to stand in the way of Sanjay, too, being granted the same
privilege that was given to the Mahatma, a cremation site and memorial, or
samadhi in New Delhi.
Both Rajiv Gandhi and Charan Singh --
former prime ministers of India -- died while they were out of public office,
while Jagjivan Ram, who never became prime minister, was cremated outside of
New Delhi. But his ashes were brought back and re-interred in New Delhi as a
mark of respect by the country that he served for four decades.
Four of the eight post-1947 tombs have
been created to honor members of the Nehru family, whose names are etched on
airports, ports, roads, townships, public conveniences and much else in a
country that has rewarded them with power and more in abundance.
Pamulaparthy Venkata Narasimha Rao, who
was prime minister from 1991 to 1996, was not a member of the Nehru family. He
was, however, the first prime minister from south of the Vindhyas, the first
outside the Nehru clan to last a full five-year term in office, and the
individual who -- together with his then finance minister, Manmohan Singh --
began the transformation of India through economic reform
Most would say that Rao after death had
at least the same right to a slice of prime New Delhi land as did Charan Singh
or Sanjay Gandhi.
The English-language newspapers in India
are extremely deferential to the powers-that-be after what happened to
publishers Ashok Jain and Ranjan Raheja, who were slapped with criminal charges
after their editors grew too frisky. They have been told and have reported that
Narasimha Rao was cremated in Hyderabad in deference to the wishes of his
family.
This statement contains the same measure
of economy of truth as Sonia Gandhi's comment that the former prime minister
was "regularly consulted on all important matters" by her. In actual
fact, despite being a former Congress Party president and later a Congress
prime minister, Narasimha Rao was excluded by Sonia Gandhi from the Congress
Working Committee after the current heir to the Nehru dynasty took charge of
the party in 1998, and was not even made one of the numerous "special
invitees," most of whom get selected for their cheerleader skills rather
than any other contribution.
Given that former Prime Ministers Rajiv
Gandhi, Charan Singh and a non-prime minister, Sanjay Gandhi, were given state
funerals and a final resting place in what may be termed the National Capital's
"Zone of the VVIP Dead," the reasons why such a routine privilege was
denied to Narasimha Rao are obscure. They are, however, depressingly in line
with a pattern that dogged Rao after 1992, when after being anointed the prime
minister of India, he refused to act as though he were not a public servant,
but a Nehru family retainer. For that crime, Sonia Gandhi treated him as an
outsider, even after his death on Dec. 23, 2004, in a New Delhi hospital
Days before he was hospitalized on Dec.
10, Narasimha Rao was informed of a plan by senior politicians in his own party
to implicate him and another former prime minister, Chandra Shekhar, in the
assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. For eight years, Rao had been the only former
prime minister to endure the torture of a series of criminal cases filed
against him. These had been masterminded -- and the legwork for them funded --
by the very same individuals in the Congress Party (not coincidentally, all of
whom were close to Sonia Gandhi) who, he was now credibly told, were plotting
to implicate him in one of the most heinous crimes of the century.
The motive presented for Chandra Shekhar
would be revenge -- Rajiv made his brief life as prime minister of India a
misery and finally made it impossible for him to remain in office, by putting
conditions on Congress support that would have caused the aged "Young Turk"
his prized dignity. The alleged motive for Narasimha Rao to take out Rajiv
Gandhi would be the job that he stepped into after the 1991 Lok Sabha
elections, because of Rajiv's assassination.
To those scripting this future
Stalin-style show trial, it did not matter that Narasimha Rao had himself
insisted in 1991 that Rajiv Gandhi gave him permission to retire, and was
looking forward during and after the polls of that year to abandoning politics
for writing, music and the company of friends. Or that Rao was the sort of
individual who was incapable of violence or vengeance, even against those who
were his enemies.
In Narasimha Rao, forbearance grew to the
level of a vice. It was absurd to imagine him plotting to see Rajiv Gandhi
dead.
However, to the scriptwriters within the
Congress Party who hated Rao for his perceived lese-majesty, truth and logic
nothing would be allowed to remain in the way of a show trial that would
demolish the reputation of Narasimha Rao for good.
A month before his death, Narasimha Rao told
this writer that it had indeed been a very "ugly" past few years,
thanks to the constant threat of imprisonment hanging over his head as a result
of the cases against him that had been instigated by his Congress rivals. He
saw these legal entanglements as a way of paralyzing him, designed to remove
his capacity to emerge as a player once again, and added that because of their
fear of what he could potentially do to counter the near-complete grip of the
Nehru dynasty on the Congress Party, "they" would keep immobilizing
him through more such stratagems.
Rao was calm, cynical in his humorous
way, but far from defeated or cowed. The old fox -- whom his father had at his
birth hoped that he would someday become the headman, or patwari of his village
-- felt that despite his 83 years, he had in him another round in the political
game in which he could emerge as a winner.
Even in hospital, in his final days of
life, Rao exuded confidence when his friends visitedhim. Strangely, his
physical collapse had led to a toughening of his will. The eyes were tired but
glowing fiercely, the voice, though almost unable to reach the level of
becoming audible, had a hardening that had never been present during the years
in office.
Despite a special Union Cabinet meeting
on the subject of Rao's funeral, those who rushed to his home after getting the
news of his death saw to their dismay that there were no arrangements made to
receive the body and place it on a platform. There were no flowers or carpets
on the floors and on the lawns by the local administration for the mourning
crowds to sit down on -- not even a tent, or shamiana, on the lawns. Finally,
Kishor, an old friend of Rao's, made arrangements for both.
Narasimha Rao's family members and the
crowd of mourners would have expected to see the first prime minister from the
south of the country in the history of free India be given at least the same
honor in death as Sanjay Gandhi or Charan Singh, a state funeral in New Delhi
and an appropriate memorial.
However, Home Minister Shivraj Patil came
several times to the Rao residence to insist to the family and to others in his
own courteous way that the funeral would have to take place not in New Delhi
but in the provincial capital of Hyderabad. It was clear to those witnessing Patil's
exchanges with family and friends of Rao that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was
not being consulted on the matter of Rao's funeral, there was not even a
pretence of that.
It had been decided that Rao's body would
be sent back to his home state, Andhra Pradesh. Ironically, Rao had spent the
previous 30 years in New Delhi as a Cabinet minister, as a Congress Party
general-secretary and as prime minister. Even when he had been the prime
minister, no member of his family lived with him -- they would come only on
infrequent visits. To his last weeks, he lived alone in New Delhi. Thus the
attempt by Nehru dynasty loyalists to justify a funeral in faraway Hyderabad on
the grounds that "Rao was not a Delhi resident" was somewhat
inaccurate. Rao's family behaved with quiet dignity throughout.
Also that day, several individuals who
looked like Intelligence Bureau officials began furtively nosing around the
private rooms of the former premier. It had been no secret that Narasimha Rao
had kept voluminous records, including the draft of a book on the 1975-1977
Emergency during which Indira Gandhi suspended democracy in India. It is
unlikely that any of these writings and notes and records will ever emerge into
daylight, except as fully sanitized.
The next day, Dec. 24, the body of the
former Congress prime minister was brought up to the gates of the All-India
Congress Committee and kept there for 20 minutes without his bier being taken
inside. Apparently, Rao's tiny body was so heavy that it would not have been
possible to lift him from the gun carriage into the Congress headquarters. And
thus, even in death, Narasimha Rao remained outside the seat of Congress power.
After this final humiliation,
Pamulaparthy Venkata Narasimha Rao left New Delhi for Hyderabad, this time for
good. History will not ignore him the way the Nehru dynasty did.
-(M.D. Nalapat is a professor of
geopolitics at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education.)
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