P. V. Narasimha Rao
P. V. Narasimha Rao was prime minister of India from 1991 to 1996, the first from the south, the seventy-year-old Congress veteran who had packed his books to retire when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in the middle of the election campaign of May 1991, and who, chosen as a caretaker because he threatened nobody, took a country with two weeks of foreign exchange and its gold pledged in London and, with Manmohan Singh as his finance minister, dismantled in a month the licence raj that had governed Indian industry since 1947. The rupee was devalued, the industrial licences abolished for all but eighteen industries, the import tariffs cut from three hundred per cent, foreign investment allowed, and the public sector's monopoly ended, which made the economy that grew at seven per cent for the next thirty years. He did it with a minority government and a party that did not believe in it, by saying as little as possible, and he was also the prime minister who let the mosque at Ayodhya be demolished in December 1992 and did nothing for the day it took. He was born in 1921 in a village in the Telangana of the Nizam's Hyderabad, fought the Nizam's rule as a young Congressman, was chief minister of Andhra Pradesh in 1971-73, where his land reforms cost him the office, and was Indira Gandhi's and Rajiv's foreign, home and defence minister in turn through the 1980s, a scholar who spoke seventeen languages, translated novels from Telugu and Marathi, and wrote his own, The Insider, about a politician much like himself. The reforms of July 1991, the budget and the industrial policy announced in the same week, were sold to the party as an emergency and kept as a policy. The Ayodhya demolition, by the Hindu nationalist crowds the BJP had brought to the site, set off riots that killed two thousand and the Bombay bombings of March 1993, and his inaction was the charge his party never forgave. He also began the Look East policy toward south-east Asia, opened relations with Israel, approved the nuclear test that Vajpayee carried out in 1998, and survived a no-confidence vote in 1993 by votes that were later found to have been bought. Congress lost the election of 1996, he was charged in three corruption cases and acquitted in all of them on appeal, and the party led by Sonia Gandhi kept him at a distance until he died in Delhi in December 2004; his body was not allowed into the party headquarters, and the reforms he made are credited to others.
- Lived: 1921 CE – 2004 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: prime minister, politician
