Writer Vinay Sitapati discusses Indian politics in detail from Jawaharlal
Nehru to Narendra Modi during Question & Answer session at Festival of Ideas, in which he sheds light on various angles encompassing politics of the country.
Q : You’ve written two books, “Half Lion” about Narasimha Rao and the second, “Jugalbandi: The BJP before Modi,” which looks at the “power of two” that has been working for the BJP since the RSS days to the Vajpayee-Advani days and now the Modi-Shah era. Keeping that in mind, who would you rank as India’s Best Prime Minister and why?
A: Let’s look at what criteria we judge Prime Ministers. One is of course, how good or bad their decisions have been. But equally, we need to look at what mandate they inherited. Did they control their own party? Did the party control the Parliament? What is the scale of problems they inherited? To give you an example, Nehru totally controlled his party, the party totally controlled Parliament, and at least in my view, in 1947 India did not have the scale of problems that came later on. So when you judge Nehru, you have to look at the fact that he had a soft landing. If you take Narasimha Rao, he is the other extreme. The party didn’t like him, the party didn’t control Parliament entirely which meant he was constantly dependent on allies to stay in power, and India inherited a huge number of problems. The economic problems are well known. But we also had a defence problem because the Soviet Union had collapsed, a large percentage of our MIG fighters couldn’t even take off, elections couldn’t be held in parts of India like Punjab and Kashmir since they were slipping out of the Indian Union. This is what Narasimha Rao inherited. Given the scale of how much he accomplished and how much his hands were tied, I would say that he was the best Prime Minister of India. To me, it’s not just what he achieved, but that he achieved so much under a very high number of constraints. If you compare that with Manmohan Singh, when he became Prime Minister in 2004, he did not control his party and the party did not control Parliament, they were dependent heavily on the left. But India did not have many external problems. The economy was doing really well, we now know in hindsight that India was shining, so you have to judge him given this mixed bag.
Q: You’ve also written a book about Vajpayee, so why not him?
A: The BJP is a far more disciplined body. Mr Sudharshan, who was the head of the RSS, was constantly criticising Vajpayee. But nonetheless, it is not a party that encourages divorce or back-biting to quite the same extent that the Congress did.
So I would say Vajpayee in his five years, especially between 1999 and 2004, was much more secure. Yes, he kept threatening resignation, but he did not have to worry that there would be a no-confidence motion against him. The real focus of Vajpayee was to make Hindu nationalism a respectable force, to make it a non-untouchable force, something that comes across famously in his resignation speech when he ended the 13-day government. I think that’s where he stands out. But I would certainly say that compared to Narasimha Rao, he did not worry that his seat would be taken away from him on a daily basis.
Q : And who would you rank as the worst Prime Minister?
A: I think this betrays a lot of my biases, but I keep thinking between VP Singh, Indira Gandhi, and Rajiv Gandhi. I, personally, find Rajiv Gandhi to be the worst Prime Minister India has had because he inherited the strongest mandate. Here is a man who had 404, 405 seats in Parliament, and unquestioned authority over his party—when he decided that Pranab Mukherjee, a man who functionally ran his party, should go, Mukherjee had to leave and form his own party. So he had an enormous amount of power. Its fair to argue that he inherited an India in difficult circumstances, (the Khalistan issue etc) but he had the might of Delhi to do something about it. What really did him in wasn’t the external circumstances as much as the party splintering from within. I also feel like when it came to economic liberalisation, he had the right instinct, but with the inability and lack of experience in seeing things through and playing both sides for majority and minority appeasement at the first sign of tension, I say his potential was enormous but he failed to live up to it.
