After Party’s Defeat, Rao Says He’ll Go

NEW DELHI —  “I am always better as No. 2,” Indian Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao once confided to a friend after being unexpectedly transmuted by assassination and political calculation into the leader of one of Asia’s great nations.

On Thursday evening, after piloting his Congress (I) Party to a humiliating defeat in national elections, Rao called on Indian President Shankar Dayal Sharma and announced he was ready to quit.

According to official sources, Rao plans to tender his resignation after chairing a Cabinet meeting today.

Who will succeed the shy, intensely private 74-year-old Brahmin as India’s head of government is unclear. Votes are still being tallied from the nationwide parliamentary elections that ended this week, but it is already certain that no single party will receive an outright majority.

Rao could theoretically make a political comeback as leader of a coalition government, but veteran Congress watchers say that is very doubtful.

In his nearly five years as prime minister of the world’s most populous multi-party democracy, Rao turned his back on the old Indian-style socialism and launched a series of market-driven economic reforms. This break with orthodoxies, though incomplete and not universally popular, is likely to be his most durable legacy.

“They [political opponents] were the ones who accused me of selling away India to foreigners,” Rao said during a visit to Calcutta in September. “Now the same people, including the Communists in Bengal, are getting investments by following our policies.”

But Rao’s uninspiring performance as president of Congress has probably resulted in the electoral might of one of the world’s great political machines--founded in 1885--sinking to a historic nadir. As ballot counting continued Thursday night, Doordarshan state television predicted that Rao and his supporters will win only 130 to 140 seats in the 545-member lower house of Parliament. The party’s previous low had been 154 under Indira Gandhi in 1977.

Computer projections said the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies would emerge with up to 185 seats. The National Front, an alliance of socialist, regional and low-caste parties, was projected to win 140 to 150 seats.

The government Rao presided over was widely considered the most corrupt in India’s history, though his own role in numerous scandals has yet to be clarified.

Last autumn, Rao allowed the draft of a novel he was writing to leak, catching New Delhi by surprise. For the fictional protagonist of “The Other Half,” he chose a member of an upper-class Indian family “sucked into the political whirlpool willy-nilly.” The parallels with Rao’s own recent career track were too obvious to miss.

In 1991, one year after Rao underwent heart surgery, and as he was preparing to leave New Delhi and retire from a distinguished if unglamorous career, then-Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was murdered by a suicide bomber while on a campaign swing for Congress through the southern state of Tamil Nadu.

Exactly a month later, on June 21, 1991, Rao, a former minister of external affairs, home, defense and human resources, was sworn in as prime minister, the first southern Indian ever to hold the job. He turned 70 a week later.

A scholar, a poet and a widower with eight children, Rao was perceived by power brokers in Congress to be a stopgap leader, maybe for six months, until the party found a permanent figure who could match the members of the Gandhi-Nehru clan in charisma, vote-getting power and acceptability in the ranks.

Such a candidate never materialized, and Rao, who had been tapped in part because of his perceived lack of ambition and his proven ability to negotiate, turned out to be a cagey maneuverer once he became Congress president.

He marginalized some party stalwarts who might have posed a challenge to his leadership, earning their everlasting enmity, and used his well-known reputation for indecisiveness to keep others loyally waiting for plum appointments.

Rao’s biggest blunder may have been his failure to prevent the destruction of the Babri Masjid mosque at Ayodhya in December 1992. That act by Hindu zealots, and Rao’s singular lack of zeal in preventing it, alienated tens of millions of Indian Muslims from Congress overnight.

A senior leader of the Janata Dal, a leftist party, estimated Thursday that had the Muslims, India’s largest minority, stuck with Congress, they would have provided swing votes in enough constituencies to clinch 300 seats for Rao’s party, and his own job.

In a 1991 partial election, he entered Indian record books with an unparalleled 580,000-vote margin of victory in Andhra Pradesh’s Nandyal parliamentary district. This time he was reelected, but by a margin of 98,530 votes.

Born into a family of farmers, Pamulaparti Venkata Narasimha Rao earned degrees in science, astronomy and law, and began his political activities in nationalist student movements. He knows Telugu, Hindi, English, Marathi, Urdu and Spanish, and has a sound grounding in Sanskrit. In 1977, he entered the national Parliament for the first time.

Rao served as external affairs minister in 1980-84 and 1988-89, and was regarded as a fine performer in that job. Yet his tenure as prime minister saw India’s most important regional relationship, with its unfriendly neighbor Pakistan, deteriorate dramatically.

The trigger was the countries’ territorial quarrel over Kashmir, and the 6-year-old separatist insurgency there that Rao attempted to staunch with a mixture of armed repression and political blandishments.