Half Lion

Title: Half Lion – How P. V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India

Author: Vinay Sitapati

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2016 (First)

ISBN: 9780670088225

Pages: 391

Pamulaparti Venkata Narasimha Rao (1921 – 2004) was the first Indian prime minister outside the Nehru family who had lasted a full term in office. He assumed office at a time of great upheaval not only in India but abroad too. Kashmir and Punjab were rife with militancy and LTTE cadres were treading roughshod over Tamil Nadu as part of their insurgency in Sri Lanka. The country’s foreign exchange reserves were at the very bottom of the pit. Its long term ally, the Soviet Union, was visibly crumbling under the crushing weight of communism. The Shah Bano alimony and Ayodhya issues had vitiated the atmosphere. It was a tough time even for a politically strong man to start. Rao was not one, yet when he demitted office five years later, India was a far better place. The central theme of this book is about understanding how Narasimha Rao achieved so much despite having so little real power and influence. It also explains how Rao tweaked the right knobs of the system to bring about the world’s second largest middle class. Vinay Sitapati is a political scientist, journalist and lawyer. He teaches at Ashoka University and writes for the Indian Express.

Narasimha Rao is remembered for his procrastination and indecision in matters of vital interest. Humorous epithets were cast on him such as ‘analysis till paralysis’, ‘when in doubt, pout’, ‘symbol of procrastination, delay and the status quo’, ‘charisma of a dead fish’ and ‘death is not a precondition to rigor mortis’. Sitapati has been successful in dispelling such long accumulated cobwebs on Rao’s intellectual caliber. He was quick and sharp in making a decision and when he dithered, it was not because he was unable to tell good policy from bad, but because sometimes the correct policy didn’t make good politics. This is especially poignant in the Ram Janmabhumi issue. Constitutionally, Rao had to heed the advice of the governor and chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, who were insistent that the disputed structure at Ayodhya would be safe and there was no need of enforcing central rule in the state. But when it was demolished by karsevaks a few days later, politicians accused him of inaction and bayed for his blood. On the economic sphere too, as protests mounted, the pace of reforms slowed by 1995 in view of the elections scheduled for the next year. The insurance reform bill had to wait twenty years to see the light of day when Narendra Modi made it into his kitty of reforms in 2015. Rao’s triple mantra of devaluation, trade liberalization and delicensing became tainted with corruption scandals by mid-1990s. Harshad Mehta and Enron scams took place. Mehta in fact alleged that he had paid Rs. 1 crore directly to Rao. The welfare, power and labour sectors were where Rao could not do anything. India’s foreign policy was, however, moved away from Nehruvian idealism to a more realist and pragmatic pursuit of national self-interest. He was also instrumental in developing the nuclear devises and keeping it ready for testing. Sitapati argues that logistical and technical issues prevented him from testing it.

Narasimha Rao was not a charismatic leader. Never in his career did the crowds eagerly thronged the maidan to listen to him. He was always in a half-smirk, neither fully committed to a smile nor fully to a frown. His political weakness endeared him to the Nehru family who wanted a protégé. He was made the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh to run Indira’s writ. But when he overstepped his mandate and announced land reforms, he was summarily thrown out to political exile for a while. Rao personally lost 1000 out of his 1200 acres of ancestral farmland due to the ceiling on individual possession envisaged in the act. When he was made the home minister in Rajiv’s cabinet after Indira’s assassination, he was bypassed in the measures to suppress anti-Sikh riots in Delhi. Rajiv’s office directly controlled the police while Rao was forced to keep a studied silence. A large part of the blame for the riots which killed 2733 Sikhs must thus be apportioned to Rajiv Gandhi.

When one considers how Rao transformed India, it is imperative that a clear view of what existed before and what he brought in should be presented. The author makes a brilliant assessment of India’s economic woes in the pre-Rao era. He claims that it was Indira Gandhi and not her father who was responsible for the economic disaster. Nehru’s policy was somewhat agreeable in the post-World War period. However, by 1965, the thinking had changed when national economies began to open up in East Asia. But India remained impervious to ideas from abroad. Indira thundered on the economic front with three draconian measures designed to thwart entrepreneurs in the country – large parts of the economy was reserved for public sector enterprises, limited the size of business houses so that they did not threaten the hegemonic power of the Congress party through licenses, anti-monopoly laws, harsh labour laws and nationalization of banks and finally by isolating India from the global market. The hallowed term ‘self-reliance’ had also become a byword for mediocrity. The economic collapse caused the growth rate to tumble leading to welfare schemes getting unable to make a dent in poverty. This was not missed by experts in the government. By the mid-1980s, policymakers had become convinced of the need for economic liberalization. What was sorely missed was a political environment to support them. Rajiv Gandhi had begun some reforms in 1985, but that sputtered to a stop two years later when he became embroiled in the Bofors corruption deal.

The book ruefully portrays the morass the country had fallen into by the early 1990s. Rajiv’s lavish policy of deficit financing required overseas short-term loans to be taken and repayment was due. By mid-1991, the country possessed foreign exchange reserves worth only two weeks of imports whereas the minimum safe level was funds for three months of imports. A default on external debt obligations was round the corner. To add insult to injury, the IMF required India to physically transfer 21 tons of solid gold from its coffers to that of the Bank of England in London as surety to a loan. Contrary to many people think, the ‘solution’ to the economic problem was not devised by Manmohan Singh who was Rao’s trusted finance minister and a world-renowned economist. Sitapati claims that the blueprint for economic reforms was prepared by senior bureaucrats and handed over by Naresh Chandra, the Cabinet secretary, to Rao a day prior to swearing in. It talked of fiscal discipline, dismantling trade barriers and removing the licenses, permits and anti-monopoly laws that tightly bound domestic entrepreneurs. Not only that, Manmohan Singh was only the second choice of Rao. I G Patel, a former RBI governor and director of the London School of Economics, was the first, but he politely declined the offer. Thus the mantle fell on Singh who got a free hand to dislodge arcane regulations which he himself was also partly instrumental for implementing in the Indira era. The Rao-Singh team did wonders. Within just a month after swearing in, the currency was devalued by 20 per cent, a new industrial policy that scrapped the license-quota-permit system was announced and the first budget did away with many controls that unnecessarily throttled the economy. In ten months’ time, reserves grew to comfortable levels, enough for six months of imports.

The change in fortunes of a politician happens fast and totally unforeseen. This book narrates it in good detail. Rao was denied a party ticket to contest the 1991 elections. That also meant the end of his political career – he was already seventy. He was to turn to spirituality as the head of a Hindu ashram at Courtallam in Tamil Nadu. Then everything changed on that fateful night of May 21, 1991. Rajiv Gandhi’s death by a suicide squad of the LTTE catapulted Rao to the most powerful chair in India. However, managing his widow Sonia Gandhi was a tiresome task. Not content with donating Rs. 100 crores of tax payers’ money to the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, Rao conferred the Bharat Ratna, India’s highest civilian honour on Rajiv and even extended elite commando protection to Sonia’s family. As prime minister, he spoke to her on phone twice a week, visited her every week and obliged her whims in the party and government. However, by mid-1993, rifts developed. When Sonia accused him on the slow progress of the investigation into Rajiv’s death, he stopped meeting her altogether. After Sonia became Congress president in 1998, Rao – the person and his legacy – was wiped clean from its history books. He was denied a party ticket for the 1999 elections. When Rao died in 2004, the Nehru family plotted to deny him a place for eternal rest in Delhi. Even his body was not given a chance to lie in state in the Congress party headquarters.

The book neatly argues its case for rehabilitating Narasimha Rao to the rightful place he deserves in the pantheon of Indian leaders. This is mostly hindered by the opposition from the Congress party – Rao’s own party – which is motivated by spiteful sycophants of the Nehru family who cannot digest the fact that Rao was the only Congress prime minister not from the Nehru family, yet managed to complete his full term in office. The author had access to the diary and personal recordings of Rao, which helped him bring out a book that presents some new facts unknown to anybody. A good number of photographs are included, as also a comprehensive section of end-notes and a good index.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 4 Star

India Moving

Title: India Moving – A History of Migration

Author: Chinmay Tumbe

Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2018 (First)

ISBN: 9780670089833

Pages: 285

India’s northeastern state of Assam was recently in the news when a process for identification of illegal immigrants found four million people who had infiltrated from Bangladesh in this state with a total population of 30 million. Assam is heavily scarred with the ill-effects of migration. Its Sylhet district had to be ceded to East Pakistan in 1947 as decades of immigration from East Bengal had made the district a Muslim-majority one and consequently was annexed to Pakistan. The same game is repeating there, with constant flow of people from Bangladesh which is changing the demographic pattern of the state that can cause great havoc in the near future. However, migration in India is not limited just to Assam and it is not always a bad thing. The lure of better economic prospects drives people from their hearths and homes to seek gainful employment in other provinces or even other countries. India is greatly benefitted by the remittances these people make back home and also by the entrepreneurial spirit exhibited by some of them. In politics also, migrant leaders excelled as seen in the best example of them all – Gandhiji, who had lived in South Africa for two decades before steering the freedom movement to victory in India. Not much research has gone into this phenomenon of migration in India yet and the author rectifies this anomaly with a good comparative survey of the causes and effects of migration from and to India. Chinmay Tumbe is a faculty member at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. He is passionate about migration, cities and history and was a 2013 Jean Monnet Fellow at the Migration Policy Centre, Florence and the 2018 Alfred D. Chandler Jr International Visiting Scholar in Business History at Harvard Business School. He had published widely on migration for a decade and has served on policymaking groups. This is his first book.

Even though India was well known in the ancient world, there was practically not much outmigration. The history of migration from the middle of the first millennium BCE to circa 1300 CE is one of immigration mainly from central Asia, instances of emigration to the west and the east and internal migration accompanying urbanization, colonization and deportation. The foreigners gave the name of India to the land east of the river Indus, and the Indians named the foreigners yavana and mleccha in the medieval period. This later changed to firangis to denote people from Europe. Curious it may seem, but the word came from the root term ‘franks’ which was an ancient Germanic tribe. Indians were not very particular in the racial profile of those coming in. In the sixteenth century, the Habshi slaves from Ethiopia were brought to Deccan states, who were later merged into the mass of Indian society.

Thumbe identifies a phenomenon known as the ‘Great Indian Migration Wave’ around the nineteenth century. By that time, the economic might of the country had fallen through the relentless conquests and invasions from Afghanistan, Iran and central Asia and also a century of colonial rule. The land and society were impoverished on all counts. It is said that Nadir Shah carted away so much treasure from India in 1739 that he remitted the entire taxation in Persia for three years! Around the first half of the eighteenth century, slavery was outlawed in most British colonies and the slaves were freed. The sugar plantations needed an alternate labour force for their fields. Indentured labour was introduced as a substitute in which the workers toiled in the farms for a fixed tenure. Thumbe enumerates the characteristics of this migration wave as male-dominated, remittance-yielding and semi-permanent. Almost 70 per cent of them were male workers who had to undergo decades of separation for supporting their families back home. Railways and postal services aided in this process. The money order was the financial lynchpin of migration. Postal money order traffic constituted 2-3 per cent of GDP between 1900 and 1960. Eventually, this was lost to banks and private money transfer operators. The book then makes a summary review of Indian migration in various countries around the world. The wave of migration was cut across regions and communities. Marwaris, Chettiyars and Gujaratis were a few societies specifically mentioned. The Indian diaspora is now 25 million strong and it can be safely surmised that the sun does not set on them. This has reached considerable proportions in some countries such as Mauritius where two-thirds of the population is of Indian origin.

The author jestingly identifies two common practices followed by Indian communities residing anywhere in the world. Use of water in toilets and pressure cookers in the kitchen are two characteristics we seem unable to live without. Even though casteism is a bane of Hindu society in India, the caste system has dissolved itself in the case of expatriates of the second or third generations. In that sense, migration has changed the leopard’s spots. Thumbe illustrates this with examples from Fiji and Guyana. The indentured labourers who arrived in Fiji were called girmitiyas. They belonged to all castes and became jahaji bhais during the month-long sea crossing, a bond that lasted for a long time in the remote islands where caste identities would eventually fade away (p.124). In Guyana too, on the face of common adversities encountered by Indians as a whole, the caste system began to disappear as identities were reshaped along racial lines.

A good description of internal migration inside the country is given in the book. India’s position is unique in the global migration map. It sustains considerable volume of immigration, emigration and internal migration alongside involuntary transfer of populations as seen in the partition days and communities dislocated by developmental projects such as construction of dams or factories. Hindu Pandits who had to flee Kashmir in the early 1990s is a case in point. The stereotypes associated with internal diaspora are also identified, such as Bengali economists, Kerala nurses and Odiya cooks and plumbers. Thumbe also makes some guess about future migration patterns in the country. A wave of migration from the north of India towards the south is probable on account of the large wage differentials existing in those regions. While the history of the twentieth century was essentially a clash between capitalism and communism, the role of antagonists in this century might be taken up by cosmopolitanism and nativism because the large inflow of cheap labour from abroad is bound to instigate resentment in the native population.

The book is neatly and lucidly argued with clear logic and a lot of illustrative examples. It is graced with a foreword by Arvind Subramanian, the economic adviser to the prime minister of India, in which he comments that the book should be read, savoured and applauded. These words are never far from what it actually deserves. It includes a comprehensive collection of end-notes and a commendable index. Some photographs are also included which serves the requirement of form rather than utility.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

Atomic

Title: Atomic – The First War of Physics and the Secret History of the Atom Bomb, 1939-49

Author: Jim Baggott

Publisher: Icon Books, 2015 (First published 2009)

ISBN: 9781848319929

Pages: 576

The mushroom cloud and radiation fallout over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are forever seared into human conscience. Close on its heels, the world watched with bated breath as the Cold War antagonists built up their nuclear arsenal which was capable of destroying the entire civilization many times over. However, even with all their ideological disagreement with capitalism, the Soviet Union didn’t help proliferate nuclear weapons in the world. This was to change when the weapon reached the so-called rogue states. When Pakistan made the bomb with centrifuge designs stolen by Abdul Qadeer Khan from Germany, the world was again put on tenterhooks. They have already sold the secrets to North Korea, Iran and Libya. A theocratic state like Pakistan, which upholds terrorism as an instrument of state policy, is extremely vulnerable to leakage of nuclear material and it is only a matter of time before Islamic terrorists get hold of it from a pliant Pakistani military. Civilized societies can only shudder at the thought of these deadly weapons finding their way into the cache of the numerous mujahideens and suicide squads out there, always in the ready to kill indiscriminately in the name of Allah. In that respect, this book which narrates the story of the atom bomb is quite relevant today. The anxiety and fear of the people towards the end of World War II is still palpable. Jim Baggott is a British science writer with interests in science, philosophy and science history. He has authored many books and is a regular contributor to New Scientist magazine.

The book is structured into four parts – the mobilization of nuclear scientists from across the world following the outbreak of war, early frustrations and progress of weapon design, use of atom bombs in war and origins of the Cold War associated with Soviet nuclear tests. First light on nuclear secrets was shed in pre-war Germany. Otto Hahn discovered nuclear fission in 1938. Frisch and Meitner established the theoretical framework for its materialization. Germany under Hitler quickly realized the potential of fission to produce a weapon of immense destructive power and subsequently banned the export of uranium. This rang the alarm bells across the Atlantic. Einstein wrote a secret letter to President Roosevelt in 1939, advising him about the plausibility of ‘extremely powerful bombs of a new type’. Nuclear research began with fervent interest on both sides of the ocean. America obtained the services of all notable scientists fleeing war-torn Europe and kick started the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos under Robert Oppenheimer. Germany responded with the formation of Uranverein (Uranium Club) under Werner Heisenberg. But Germany was constrained by lack of resources and raw materials. Its Norwegian source of heavy water was under constant attacks and sabotage by the Allies. The manpower for the research job was selected on the basis of Aryan racial purity which was doomed to fail from the start. Even with technical knowhow from Paris, which came under German occupation in 1940, they could not catch up with America. By June 1942, Germany secretly dropped the work on bomb design. This was not known to the Americans. Or, if they had known it, they chose to ignore it. There was concern in the US that instead of an explosive device, Germany might still go for a weapon that rained radioactive material in an area.

The book contains a few detailed descriptions of the nuclear processes that led to production of fissile material. Either Uranium-235 or Plutonium could be used to make a bomb. It was not an easy laboratory task to produce the material. Electromagnetic separation and purification of U-235 required magnets 250 feet long. Their construction exhausted America’s supply of copper. The US Treasury loaned 15000 tons of silver to complete the windings. The magnets were so powerful that it pulled the nails of men’s shoes and hairpins of women workers. The army immediately took control of the project. With the introduction of formal management structures, bureaucracy increased. The scientists were really fish out of water when communication between them was restricted for secrecy. Compartmentalization of various areas of the research ensured that only a few people could have an overall view of the game. Baggott describes in some detail the first above-ground testing of the bomb called Trinity and the bombardment of the two unfortunate Japanese cities. Kyoto was dropped from the target list as it was Japan’s ancient capital city and a major cultural centre. The bombers had to fly 2500 km from Tinian Island in the Pacific to drop the A-bombs. An attempt was aborted on 1 August 1945 due to bad weather. It is chilling to read that the planes turned away from the city of Kikuri at the last minute due to poor visibility and instead flew to Nagasaki and dropped the bomb.

Anyone following the progress of World War II would quickly discern the defeat of Japan in front after front in the Asia-Pacific region. It was only a matter of time before they would have been convincingly routed. Why then did the US use atomic bombs against them? Baggott does a great job in answering this important historical question. Even though Japan was in the jaws of defeat, it prized its honour as a nation above all else. An unconditional surrender, as demanded by the Potsdam Declaration, was hence unacceptable to them. Japanese militarists wanted to fight to the finish, as demonstrated by kamikaze suicide pilots who flew warplanes. If the war could be ended a little earlier, countless American lives could have been saved. Even as late as 21 July 1945, Shigenori Togo – the belligerent foreign minister – was adamant to continue the fight and declared that “even if the war drags on and it becomes clear that it will take much more bloodshed, the whole country as one man will pit itself against the enemy in accordance with the Imperial Will so long as the enemy demands unconditional surrender”. The Battle of Okinawa earlier in 1945 served to remind the Allies of the ferocious battle that lay ahead for the conquest of the Japanese home islands. 12,500 Americans and 100,000 Japanese were killed in that single battle. Large scale firebombing of cities were killing thousands of Japanese civilians each day, but the Emperor and his regime was blind to the suffering of its people. In this scenario, the US wanted to create a psychological impression with an A-bomb. Besides, Stalin was itching for a share in the action on his eastern border and was to declare war on Japan by 15 August. This would have inevitably led to Soviet territorial claims in the Pacific region. Above all else, a staggering $2 billion were spent on the nuclear research effort and America literally wanted a ‘bang for its buck’. Tens of thousands of people were killed in the two nuclear strikes, but it should be remembered that the first incendiary attack on Tokyo had killed more people than that. In any case, it forced the Japanese to realize the folly of continuing the war and to surrender unconditionally just five days later.

A good chunk of the book is dedicated to the story of treachery on the part of scientists with communist affinities who had worked in the Manhattan Project. Klaus Fuchs was a senior researcher while Theodore Hall and David Greenglass were two crucial contributors to the engineering design. All three of them handed over top-secret documents to Soviet agents which saved the Russian nuclear program several years of wasted research and millions of rubles. Oppenheimer himself was under the watch for a considerable time. These people were attracted to communist ideology during their student days and were totally ignorant of what life was like in the Soviet Union that was touted as a Marxist’s heaven. As the truth slowly began to dawn, they broke links with the spy ring. It is strange that none of them wanted to flee to the safety of USSR even when it was clear that the security agencies were shadowing their every move. Evidently, they valued a few years of imprisonment in the UK or the US far more than an impoverished and intellectually oppressive lifetime in the Soviet Union. Igor Kurchatov, the director of the Soviet program, found his life much easier with the wealth of data flowing in from Los Alamos. The spy racket was exposed with the defection of Igor Gouzenko, a cipher clerk in the Ottawa embassy of the USSR to the West immediately after the conclusion of the war.

The book is easy to read and very entertaining. But its immense size of nearly 500 pages presents a daunting task for the reader. The author could have easily condensed it to, say, 300 pages without losing the punch or fraying the verve. This vast real estate permits Baggott to list the names of each officer who took part and got killed in the clandestine raids on Vemork plant in Norway which supplied heavy water to the Uranverein. Such detailed coverage of a fringe effort is unwarranted. The book’s portrayal of the German physicists’ astonishment on hearing about the Hiroshima attack is an eye opener for those working in scientific research. The Germans considered themselves to be at the head of their profession and didn’t entertain the slightest notion that others could do it better in America. They had no knowledge of the American program and naively assumed that since the German program failed, the Americans also must have bitten the dust. When the news was broken to them, their illusory world of superiority was shattered and the rude sense of awakening exhibited the pitfalls of overconfidence of the scientists who should always have kept an open mind.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star