Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao with President Bill Clinton during their meeting at the White House in Washington in May 1994. Rao is credited with several foreign policy shifts during his tenure and laid the foundation for the current strategic partnership between India and the United States. (File photo: Press Information Bureau)

NEW DELHI: One of the first decisions that P.V. Narasimha Rao took after being sworn in prime minister of India on June 20, 1991, at the head of a Congress Party government, was to appoint as his finance minister Manmohan Singh, an internationally recognized economist with no political background whatsoever. While other ministers in his newly-appointed cabinet were kept on tenterhooks for two days about their portfolios, Manmohan Singh –– who is now prime minister –– was the only minister privileged to know beforehand the subject he was to handle.

With India’s external debt touching nearly $80 billion at the time, the third-largest in the world, and foreign exchange reserves barely sufficient to service imports for four to six weeks, Rao knew he had to take some radical decisions. And appointing Manmohan Singh was one of them.

In his first pronouncement as prime minister, he pledged economic reforms to meet International Monetary Fund conditionalities for a loan to bail the country out of the immediate mess.

In what are now seen as seminal decisions, Rao announced andoor investment policy, rapid industrialization, a more competitive market and more belt-tightening measures, including slashing the huge governmental subsidies that contributed to recurrent budget deficits.

Rao, who came under considerable flak for these decisions even from members of his own party –– believers in the socialist ideology of previous governments –– laid the foundation for a new, resurgent India that is seen today as one of the fastest-growing world economies by governments and investors.

Rao became prime minister in a most bizarre twist of destiny. Suffering indifferent health after undergoing a bypass surgery at Houston, TX, he had retired at the age of 71 to Hyderabad, saying he had “no more role to play.” Scholar, linguist, lawyer, litterateur, computer geek, political strategist, a versatile minister who has held virtually every major portfolio in the governments of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, Rao was however never considered prime minister material.

On May 20, 1991, he returned to New Delhi hoping to greet a triumphant Rajiv Gandhi when the results of the general elections came in later that week and then “retire with my books,” unless Gandhi needed to consult him for anything. Instead, he received Gandhi’s body two days later, after he was assassinated while addressing an election rally in Tamil Nadu.

Within a week, he became the president of the country’s largest and oldest party, and in four weeks he was the nation’s ninth prime minister –– a position he had neither coveted nor perhaps even dreamt of. Nothing in his 54-year-old political career till then had prepared him for that role –– other than his close association with the Gandhi family.

The man with the famous pout, who was often seen as dithering on critical decisions but at the same time gave the nod to policies that were nothing short of path-breaking, will probably go down as one who courageously sought to blaze a trail in economic and foreign policies. But when it came to domestic politics, his actions and his habit of winking at intrigue and machinations of those close to him landed him in a legal mess later on in his life.

Rao is known for initiating two major foreign policy shifts during his prime ministership ––ng up to Israel and South Africa, both till then untouchables in the foreign policy establishment. He also signed a historic peace accord with China and took the first steps to lay the foundation of the present “strategic relationship” with the United States.

The low point of Rao’s five-year reign was the demolition of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya by Hindu zealots on Dec. 6, 1992, a cataclysmic event whose political and social fallout are being felt even today. This was an episode that Rao found difficult to live down and his critics say that, by not acting in time, he may have implicitly conspired in the mosque’s razing. With his uncanny political insight, Rao himself was to in later years describe the mosque’s demolition as an “attempt to politicize and fanaticize the Hindu masses for electoral benefit”.

In 1996, a corruption scandal rocked the government and he was accused of bribing four opposition lawmakers to back him in a trust vote in the lower house of Parliament to save his minority Congress Party government from collapsing. He was acquitted after a six-year-long judicial battle during which he was even handed down a suspended term in prison –– earning him the dubious distinction of becoming the first former prime minister to be convicted in a criminal case.

There were other cases as well that marked the fag end of his tenure. In the more notable of these, Rao was implicated and later discharged for alleged involvement in trying to frame former prime minister V.P. Singh by forging his son Ajeya Singh’s signature in what came to be known as the St. Kitts scandal, after the Caribbean island in which Singh was supposed to have had the illegal bank accounts.

Rao went into virtual oblivion after leading the Congress Party to a disastrous defeat in the parliamentary elections in 1996 and stepping down as party president a year later.

Born into a family of modest means in Vangar village of Karimnagar district in Andhra Pradesh, Rao was always self-effacing, one to whom the pursuit of scholarship were more rewarding than political aggrandizement. Having lost his wife, Satyamma, in 1970, Rao became greatly attached to his grandchildren, with whom he looked forward to spending his old age.

His third daughter, Surabhi Vani Devi, a pai-nter, had once said in a magazine interview: “My father is a person who never wastes his time. He is forever hungry for knowledge. Even recently, he was learning different languages of the computer.”

When Rao read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book, ‘Love in the Time of Cholera,’ he was so moved by the Nobel winner’s intense prose that he obtained the original Spanish edition and read that as well.

His felicity in Spanish, as well as six other languages, goes back to his days as an information minister in the Andhra Pradesh government in the late 1960’s. He had his early tutoring in French and Spanish from a junior official in his ministry at the time. He followed that up by joining the School of Foreign Languages at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Predictably, Rao topped the examinations. His love of Spanish was to take him to Mexico when the Congress went out of power in 1977 following prime minister Indira Gandhi’s emergency rule. When she came back to power in 1980, Rao became her foreign minister and his aspiration for higher studies in Spanish was thwarted.

While Telugu, the language spoken in Andhra Pradesh, was Rao’s mother tongue, his linguistic talent enabled him to pick up other languages when he came into contact with them. Urdu was his medium of instruction in Osmania University, from which he was expelled for participating in the freedom movement. He then moved to Maharashtra to complete his university education in mathematics and then law, where he learned Marathi and later Persian, which was necessary for his legal practice in Hyderabad.

Rao was believed to have been working in recent months on the second volume of his book ‘The Insider,’ a book many believed would have had explosive information on Indian politics during the 1970’s and 1980’s.

“I am dealing with the culture of all political parties during those times. I am afraid I will be cursed by all parties, including the Congress, after the book is released, for what I have written,” he said at an event last July.