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 about the failure of Rajiv Gandhi, under whose leadership the Congress was returned to power in General Election 1985 with the largest majority in Indian history, to reverse the continuous ruination of the Indian economy. Nevertheless, the high praise the author showers in this book on PVNR is implicit criticism of the inorganic neta-babu socialist model imposed on the economy by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty which — let’s face it squarely — wiped out the modest material aspirations of an entire generation of post-independence India’s citizens.

In this connection, the effusive compliments Ramesh lavishes upon Dr. Manmohan Singh strike a jarring note. The plain truth is that for over 40 years, Singh was a willing servitor and enthusiastic architect of the licence-permit-quota system which plunged the Indian economy to the depths.

Singh’s sudden metamorphosis into an economic liberaliser doesn’t strike the author as opportunist. As subsequent history proved (during his two mediocre terms as prime minister), far from possessing “academic brilliance and administrative experience”, Singh was a mere kiss-up and kick-down careerist used to taking orders. Like most Indians Ramesh is presumably impressed by Singh’s Oxford qualifications, but by now it’s well-proven that British universities have done a more thorough job of devastating post-colonial third world economies than the rulers of imperial Great Britain.

In 2004 when he was appointed prime minister by the naïve and unschooled Sonia Gandhi after the Congress scored an unexpected election victory, by his unquestioning servitude, Singh accomplished the complete demolition of the Congress party and offered General Election 2014 on a platter to the BJP, which despite national unease about its prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, was swept to power with the largest Lok Sabha majority since 1985.

As an overdue revisionist narrative according PVNR — a well-read scholar fluent in seven languages including Spanish and Sanskrit — his rightful place in the economic history of India, To the Brink and Back serves a useful purpose. But in failing to adequately explain why the economy came to such a pass in the first place and who was responsible, this personalised history is unsatisfying because it is insufficiently contextualised.

Equally dissatisfying is that although this narrative was completed this year, there’s no mention of the turbulent events of the past two decades when the mother-son duo of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty reasserted their ownership of the Congress party and (the Central government), and led it to an electoral disaster from which it may never recover. Ramesh writes well and engagingly, but he needs to tell another broader story of the decline and fall of the Nehru dynasty which has done post-independence India incalculable harm.

Dilip Thakore

Academic decline story

Three Rivers and A Tree by Neelum Saran Gour; Rupa Publications; Price: Rs.295; Pages: 373

The known academic culture of India also harbours within it another unknown culture consisting of provincial universities rooted in the spirit of the area. Allahabad University (AU), gently fading amid the dust and decay that surrounds the northern plains, is one such phenomenon.

Neelum Saran Gour calls her saga of the decline and fall of this renowned institution, “a storyteller’s history of Allahabad University, not a historian’s”. As a record of the progressive failure of India’s institutes of higher education, this well-researched, though on occasion sprawling, history should be interesting even for those, who (unlike the writer and this reviewer) have neither studied nor taught there.

The first part of the book presents a rare teleological perspective on the birth and steady growth of Allahabad University and sister Indian universities in post 1857 India. The last chapters unfurl an alarming story of how our campuses teeming with politically motivated militant students and their unions are wrecking the system from within and how the ruling political establishment, and the power hungry bureaucracy is denying help to university authorities and encouraging militant students for electoral gains.

As Gour reveals, India’s 19th century colonial masters had never really aimed to create totally autonomous universities for their colonies. After the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the inglorious departure of the East India Company, officials of the Queen’s government felt that to rule this huge land mass effectively, they would need educated native intermediaries whose loyalty to the crown could be banked upon. Thus the Indian universities, whose promotion was announced in the historic Agra Durbar under the 1887 Act of Incorporation, were created with a conscious and firm denial of the type of autonomy the great British universities had.

As to why Allahabad was chosen as a site for a prestigious university when several other colleges for higher learning existed in more prosperous neighbouring towns like Lucknow (Canning College), Banaras (Queen’s College), Kanpur (The Christ Church College), and Bareilly, there’s no academic answer but as always in India, a clear political one. During the immediate post-mutiny years when Britain was introspecting over its colonial legacies and trying to restructure ways of governing a multi-ethnic land, locational choices were made by little known army men guided by political expediency.

By the early 20th century, Indian nationalism had made its appearance on the campus and the British were worried about seditious activities sprouting in various affiliated colleges. The question then arose: how much and what sort of English education did the natives need to transform them into loyal citizens of the British empire? The old chestnut about teaching just enough so Mukherji could understand Chatterji no longer sounded funny.

So three enactments (of 1904, 1905 and later the Allahabad University Act of 1912) came in quick succession. They first created a separate board for conducting high school and intermediate exams and then reorganised territory for the university, reconstituting the senate and the syndicate.

The next four decades are recorded as golden years when the institution acquired national influence. It began with Dr. Ganganath Jha as vice chancellor, under whom the departments of English, Hindi, Urdu and Sanskrit flourished with multi-language creativity unthinkable today. Celebrated teachers like Meghnad Saha and K.S. Krishnan attracted the best and brightest students from the northern plains.

It was at this point that the first students’ union was born. It had a grand beginning with Pt. Govind Ballabh Pant laying the foundation, and for the next three decades the union building was to be the locomotive of students’ participation not only in the academic life of the campus, but also in the freedom movement.

The portrait gallery Gour presents in chapter V has its share of heroes and villains, geniuses and snobs, and of course wits, prime among them (and for good reason) being the eminent Urdu poet Raghupati Sahay, ‘Firaq’ Gorakhpuri. His devastating wit and multilingual erudition is the stuff of legends.

Till the late 1970s, this cultural vitality of the campus was led by great teachers and poets of varied political ideologies. By the late 1980s, however, partisan politics had begun to exploit the inherent structural weaknesses of the system and the campus was fighting a losing battle against petty and divisive caste and communal politics.

The three ‘M’s — Mandal, Mandir and McDonald’s — according to the writer, have whisked away what the university and the town of Allahabad once were, leaving behind empty shells seething with meaningless activity and a steady deconstruction of languages. Spelling and grammar have gone for a toss as a quirky new prose meshes Hindi with English, creating a postmodern jargon through text messaging.

As a central university today, AU is flush with Central funds after years of deprivation. It’s easy to restore heritage buildings, upgrade and update computers and spruce up the lawns and gardens, but money cannot buy functionality in Uttar Pradesh perennially grappling with corruption, shortages and communal violence.

Allahabad University today has 11 constituent colleges. But the faculty everywhere displays gaping holes with most seats reserved for teachers from the SC/ST and OBC categories, lying unfilled due to paucity of suitable candidates. Funds lie unutilised, and academic sessions are sapped of energy by frequent clashes among frustrated students on and outside the campus.

This should be a riveting read for all who care not only for Allahabad and the university, but also wish to understand the decline and fall of our great institutions of higher learning.

MRINAL PANDE (The Book Review, September 2015)