Why it worked for Congress to have a non-Gandhi face like Narasimha Rao

The fact that PV Narasimha Rao was sitting at home on the morning of 20 June with just one friend, a relatively unimportant party leader, paints a somewhat misleading picture. We now know from the memoirs of Natwar Singh, Sharad Pawar, Fotedar and the late PC Alexander that much was going on in political and party circles in Delhi.

PV’s friends and supporters were active, lobbying politicians and business leaders. Knowing his rival Pawar was close to Mumbai’s business leaders, PV’s friends reached out to them, seeking their support or at least assurance of their political neutrality. 

By end of day on 20 June, the Congress Parliamentary Party (CPP) elected PV leader. President Venkataraman then established an important parliamentary convention by deciding that he would invite the leader of the single largest group in the Lok Sabha to form a government and secure parliamentary approval within a month.

Venkataraman was keen to ensure political stability at a time of economic crisis. He floated the idea of a "national government" that would have the support of most, if not all, political parties. There were no takers for this idea. He then opted to invite PV but spoke informally to opposition leaders to ensure that the new government would not be voted out till it had pulled the economy out of crisis.

At 7.30 pm, on 20 June 1991, PV was invited to form the government. On 21 June, exactly a week before his 70th birthday, he was sworn in as prime minister. 

Most recent memoirs of that time suggest that PV scored over Pawar and other aspirants like Arjun Singh, because Sonia Gandhi and the "family loyalists" backed him. The behaviour of the coterie and the Congress leadership at the time seemed predicated on the premise that Rajiv Gandhi was destined to return to power as his mother did in 1980.

They assumed India’s prime ministership was there for Rajiv’s taking; that, upon his death, it was for the heirs of Rajiv to decide who would be India’s next prime minister. Perhaps they assumed PV would be more biddable than any of the others. That he would be a loyal yes man, a mere rubber stamp, who would do as he was told because he was very old and a political non-entity.

However, this remains a simplistic explanation. What is plausible is the theory that Sonia loyalists had few credible options apart from PV. According to Natwar Singh, Sonia was willing to back Shankar Dayal Sharma for the post, but he turned down the offer on account of poor health. Sharma was India’s vice-president at the time and had an entire year to go.

He may well have preferred the guarantee of another year in that job to the uncertainty of heading a minority government. Sharma would have also assumed that he would be in line for presidentship in a year’s time. Five assured years as head of state seemed more reassuring than the uncertainty of heading a minority government. ? Historians do not fancy counterfactuals. Economists, on the other hand, like to debate "what if". Political scientists tend to be agnostic on the issue. 

Surprisingly few political analysts have asked the obvious counterfactual about 1991. What if Rajiv Gandhi had not been assassinated? Would the Indira Congress have been voted back to office? If the Congress had failed to get a clear majority, would Rajiv still have headed a Congress-led coalition? The simple answer to those questions is: unlikely.

Consider the facts. In 1989 Rajiv Gandhi led his party to ignominious defeat. The Indira Congress’s vote share had gone down to 39.5 per cent from 49.1 per cent in 1984. The number of Congress candidates elected to the Lok Sabha went down even more precipitously from 404 in 1984 to 197 in 1989. This resounding defeat did not cost him the leadership of his party as one would normally expect in democratic politics.

For one thing, those who had already challenged Rajiv’s leadership, led by former colleague VP Singh, had left the parent party to form the Janata Dal. As for those who chose to stay within, loyalty to the Nehru-Gandhi family became the cheapest ticket to political relevance. The coterie of loyalists, ranging from those whose political career was made by Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, to those who entered the party as friends and followers of Rajiv or Sanjay, ensured that Rajiv remained the party boss. 

Indira Gandhi’s populist political platform, her international reputation as a strong woman leader, and her assassination had created such an aura around her that many Congress leaders were happy to even refer to their party as "Indira Congress". Rajiv was the beneficiary of his mother’s personality cult and there were enough of his acolytes within the party to foster his personal brand. But all that was of no use when popular support slipped away and rival political platforms gained ascendance.

The coterie would not give up so easily. When an internal coup in the Janata Dal forced Prime Minister VP Singh to quit office in November 1990, an attempt was made to re-install Rajiv as a minority prime minister. Family loyalist Fotedar claims he made the case to President Venkataraman. With 197 MPs in the Lok Sabha, Rajiv was the leader of the largest party in Parliament, Fotedar reminded the President.

The Janata Dal had only 143 MPs, but had formed the government with the support of the Communist and other regional parties. Since that coalition had come apart, the leader of the single largest party should be asked to try and form a government. Venkataraman did not bite. The Congress, the president presumably calculated, would need the backing of 75 more MPs and he wasn’t convinced that Rajiv could muster the required support.

As has been mentioned, according to Fotedar, Venkataraman was willing to swear in Pranab Mukherjee as prime minister. Clearly, he felt Mukherjee would be able to win over the required number. Mukherjee himself has a very different recollection of what transpired at the time.

"The President sought Rajiv’s views on the situation," recalls Mukherjee. "He then asked if, as the largest party, the Congress was willing to form the government. But the Congress once again declined. Rajiv indicated that the Congress would extend unconditional support to Chandra Shekhar if he formed the government." 

If Fotedar was right, why then did Rajiv Gandhi extend his party’s support to Chandra Shekhar rather than risk Mukherjee’s elevation to prime minister? Circumstantial evidence suggests Rajiv had intended to bring the government down at a time suitable to him so that he could return to the voters and seek another mandate to rule.

Sharad Pawar, at the time chief minister of Maharashtra, concurs with this view: "Rajiv had propped up the Chandra Shekhar government merely as an ad hoc arrangement. Rajiv was only buying time so that the Congress could gear up for the next general elections." 

Perhaps Rajiv felt that had he allowed a Congress-led government to be formed with Mukherjee at the helm, the party, the government and the game could very well have slipped out of his hand.

The Chandra Shekhar government fell earlier than Rajiv had planned. It was not on account of Rajiv’s political initiative that Chandra Shekhar had quit, but because the latter was no longer willing to remain a prime minister at Rajiv’s beck and call. 

Unlike VP Singh, who was a junior colleague of Rajiv’s before turning against him, Chandra Shekhar was a Congressman of the 1960s. He was angry about being pushed around by a political Johnny-come-lately and his coterie. Whatever the reasons, the Chandra Shekhar government was terminated.

Elections were called. Had the Congress secured a clear majority in the Lok Sabha in the elections that followed, the president would have had to invite Rajiv to form the government. But the question that is moot is would the Congress have had the numbers? That’s the key counterfactual of 1991.

An India Today opinion poll conducted on 20 May, a day before Rajiv’s assassination, forecast only 190 seats for the Congress in the ongoing elections. The 1991 Lok Sabha elections were to be held in several phases. When Rajiv was killed on the second day of voting, other phases were postponed and subsequently held on 12 and 15 June. Electoral data clearly shows a 9 percentage point swing in votes in favour of the Congress in the post-assassination phase. 

This "sympathy wave" in favour of the Congress has been analysed by psephologists who make three points: first, that if voting on 20 May (in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Chandigarh, Delhi, and Lakshadweep) was adequately representative of the national mood and subsequent voting followed the same pattern, then the Congress would not have secured anything close to a majority of seats.

Second, the swing in favour of the Congress after 20 May was mainly on account of a sharp rise in the votes cast by women, Muslims, Scheduled Castes and Backward Classes - the traditional support base of the Indira Congress. This fact suggests that traditional Congress voters had not felt enthused enough to come out in large numbers and vote for Rajiv Gandhi on the first phase of polling. It is only after his assassination that they ventured out and voted in large numbers in favour of the Congress.

The sympathy wave was also more pronounced in peninsular India than in the Gangetic Plain. The data also shows the main losers in this switch between the pre- and post-assassination phases of polling were the BJP, the CPI (M) and the Telugu Desam Party (TDP), all of which had done well in the pre-assassination phase and saw a sharp dip in their vote shares after 21 May.

While the Congress won 50 of the 196 seats for which polling was held on 20 May (a success rate of 25.51 per cent), it won 177 of 285 seats for which polling was held in June 1991 (a success rate of 62.11 per cent). 

Now, suppose the final result in June 1991 was such that the Congress had 190 seats, as the India Today poll data suggested it would, the BJP had 140, the Communists had 45, Janata Dal had 75 and the assortment of regional parties had about 60 - all in the realm of possibility given the voting trends recorded.

Who would have been able to form the government? The Communists and the Janata Dal, with their 120 MPs, may have preferred the Congress over the BJP, but would they have agreed to Rajiv heading that government?

The post-2004 bonhomie between Sonia and the Communist parties was not the state of affairs that existed with Rajiv. The Communist parties supported VP Singh’s government in 1989 and opposed Rajiv’s economic policy initiatives. Would the Communists and Janata Dal have supported a Congress-led government albeit with a more acceptable Congressman as prime minister? If so, would it have been Mukherjee or PV or someone else? 

If that coalition was led by the Congress, would President Venkataraman have been able to persuade Rajiv to name Mukherjee as its head, or would PV have been Rajiv’s choice? The purpose of this counterfactual thought experiment is to make the point that by the summer of 1991 the Congress Party was already grappling with the consequences of the decline of the dynasty.

It was only natural that senior Congress leaders like Venkataraman, Mukherjee and PV were thinking about their party’s future beyond the Nehru-Gandhis. Could someone other than Rajiv Gandhi head a Congress-led coalition? If, in 1991, the Congress had managed to win no more seats than it had in 1989, how would that have impacted the party and Rajiv’s standing in it?

If the BJP had done better and had secured more than the 119 seats that it finally did, who would have been its allies? Could the Third Front of 1996-98 been formed in 1991? Who would have been its prime minister? Consider the facts again. We know from Pranab Mukherjee’s autobiography that there was no love lost between him and Rajiv. As we know, Rajiv had expelled Mukherjee from the Congress Party in 1986. He returned from political exile to rejoin the Congress in 1988, but was not given any important responsibilities.

At the time of the 1989 elections the Congress Party’s manifesto was in fact drafted by PV, and it was PV who sought to rehabilitate Mukherjee by seeking his help in its drafting. Finally, between 1980 and 1989, PV had held four of the five most important portfolios in the Union government - home, defence, external affairs and human resource development. Mukherjee had only been finance minister and that too for three years from January 1982 to December 1984. 

So the upshot of it all is that even if Rajiv Gandhi had not been killed in May 1991, the Congress could have at best formed a coalition government. Such a coalition, like all coalitions, would have required a compromise candidate as its head. The odds are that PV would have been the Congress prime minister despite not even being given a party ticket to contest the elections.

Apart from the fact that he was considered a family "loyalist" by the Nehru-Gandhis, he had other qualifications. He was not a Brahmin from UP and so wouldn’t undermine the political base of the Nehru-Gandhis. But he would be acceptable to UP’s upper-caste politicians, given his caste and language credentials.

Interestingly, there are now several theories about how PV became prime minister. As mentioned earlier, while Natwar Singh’s view is that Shankar Dayal Sharma was Sonia’s choice, Fotedar does not even mention this possibility. He suggests that Sonia had to choose between PV, Pawar and Arjun Singh and that it was her decision to back PV that clinched the deal. Pawar has a slightly different recollection of events.

While he admits that PV emerged as a consensus choice after efforts were made to "gauge the mood" of elected MPs, he credits Sonia Gandhi with tilting the scale in PV’s favour "because he was old and was not in good shape". Pawar thinks PV had an edge over him by as many as 35 MPs. This, however, is an underestimation.

Pawar was assured of the support of only 38 MPs from Maharashtra, while PV had the support of all 89 MPs from the south. He would, after all, be the first south Indian to head a government in Delhi. Mukherjee, widely credited with a very good memory, has a more precise recollection of events: "An elaborate consensusbuilding effort was initiated and MPs were summoned one by one to ascertain their views. K Karunakaran was nominated by PV and Siddhartha Shankar Ray by Sharad Pawar to hear out the MPs’ opinion. It finally became clear that the majority of the MPs wanted PV, who had served as a senior minister in the Cabinets of both Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. PV was also helped by the backing of 85 MPs from the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu."

The exact number was 89, including Pondicherry and the island territories. Numbers matter. Consider the composition of the CPP. Of the 227 elected MPs, as many as 142 hailed from peninsular India. Only 43 hailed from the four major Hindi-speaking states - Bihar, MP, UP and Rajasthan.

This weakened the case for a north Indian candidate. Shankar Dayal Sharma may have been wise enough to understand this, though he and Arjun Singh hailed from MP, which had the largest contingent of 27 from among the Hindi-speaking states. Pawar’s ambition was stoked by the fact that Maharashtra had elected the single largest contingent of 38 MPs.

In his biography of PV, Sitapati has suggested that PV may have shied away from a direct contest with Pawar by rejecting Pawar’s demand for a secret ballot. This is an over-reading of events. The fact is that the Congress high command has always adopted one-on-one confidential consultations with elected MLAs as a way of picking winners for the post of chief minister in the states.

This was the first time since Morarji’s challenge of Indira that the party had to choose between rival contenders for the prime minister’s job. It adopted the same procedure of confidential consultations in lieu of secret ballot. PV reached out to Pawar, convincing him that at 51 the Maharashtrian strongman was 20 years younger and had a long political career ahead of him.

PV was not only hitting 70, he was not in good shape and so could assure Pawar that time was on the latter’s side. PC Alexander played a role, according to Pawar, by acting as an intermediary. Both PV and Pawar trusted Alexander and so the latter was able to facilitate an accord between the Telangana and the Maratha politicians. 

There are those who suggest that some influential business leaders also opted to back PV over Pawar. Few analysts are willing to recognise that by 1990 the northsouth divide within the Congress had become quite acute. This regional divide within the party came to the fore when the southern states remained loyal to Indira Gandhi even after the Emergency.

In recognition of this fact, Indira contested from Karnataka in 1978 and Andhra Pradesh in 1980. Neither Nehru nor Indira allowed this regional sentiment to overwhelm the party. Rajiv Gandhi, on the other hand, surrounded himself with political advisers and civil servants from the north. This despite the fact that the south voted massively for the Congress in 1984.

The few south Indian leaders Rajiv had around him were either rootless politicians, like P Shiv Shankar, or those disliked in their own home states. His arrogant and rude treatment of Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister T Anjaiah, whom he publicly reprimanded on the tarmac at Hyderabad’s Begumpet airport for some lapse, had a catastrophic impact on the fortunes of the Congress in that state.

Telugu film actor NT Rama Rao’s TDP greatly benefited from its campaign against Rajiv for hurting Telugu pride and sentiment. PV counted on this southern sentiment and the southern MPs remained loyal to him. 

The problem of Maharashtra dissipated when Pawar was named defence minister. In bringing Pawar and SB Chavan into defence and home respectively, and Madhavsinh Solanki into external affairs, PV gave peninsular India its due. East India too went with PV.

In short, PV was not "nominated" as prime minister by Sonia Gandhi and her coterie. They may have tilted the scales in his favour, but that is also because they would have recognised that a large majority of MPs, almost a 100 out of the 227, hailing from the southern states, would have preferred PV over Shankar Dayal Sharma, Arjun Singh and even Sharad Pawar.

(Reprinted with publisher's permission.)

Also read: Why Congress is declining