Facts about India's PMs

The book is a very comprehensive effort at capturing the main points of modern Indian history

The author is a good friend so whatever really rude things I have to say about this book I will tell him in private. Here, it is enough to say that this is a very comprehensive effort at capturing the main points of modern Indian history.

What’s more, the facts have been thoroughly checked. That, in itself, is a major positive in recent books on contemporary history. It is, thus, an excellent and very valuable reference volume.  Incoming diplomats will find it especially useful.

In writing it prime minister-wise Mr Bhagwati has gone back to a time-honoured tradition in history writing because that is how old history used to be written — king-wise or emperor-wise. In the 20th century this sort of periodisation largely gave way to party-wise or government-wise histories. The exception is the US where the president is, to all intents and purposes, a king on probation for four years, extendable by four more years.

In India we have tended to fall between the two stools where the Nehru- Gandhi dynasty has been treated as royalty and the rest as hired help while the royals are taking a break. This general approach can be discerned in the overall tone of Mr Bhagwati’s writing which suffers from a natural human tendency to be more sympathetic to some leaders, or what are called confirmation bias in statistics and anchoring beliefs in psychology.

While this is not a serious flaw in a book that comprises facts, it does tend to wobble the narrative a little bit. 

For example, Mr Bhagwati says that as home minister in 1984, P V Narasimha Rao allowed the anti-Sikh riots to get out of hand. Three thousand Sikhs were killed in those riots. But why blame him alone or him at all?

The Prime Minister was Rajiv Gandhi, a member of India’s political royal family. Mr Bhagwati asks if Rajiv had been too distracted by grief after his mother —  the Queen Mother if you will — had been assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards. He also suggests that perhaps he should have taken office after a couple of weeks when he was less in shock.

But the fact remains: When the riots happened, he was the prime minister. It is disingenuous to blame the home minister. 

Also, as it happens, the notion that it was not Rajiv’s fault became the received wisdom only after his wife Sonia Gandhi became Congress president in 1998. Before that the prime minister was held responsible if not accountable.

Similarly, where Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah are concerned, Mr Bhagwati is very charitable towards the former’s kindness to the latter. Like many others, he attributes it to Nehru’s sagacity and his helplessness in the face of British intransigence. 

But a little more questioning of Nehru’s reasons would have worked better. After all, he did write to Edwina Mountbatten about his emotional ties to Kashmir. 

And about the internal Emergency that Indira Gandhi imposed in 1975 suspending fundamental rights, Mr Bhagwati appears to blame the wrong judge —Jagmohan Sinha of the Allahabad Hight Court who set aside her election rather than V Krishna Iyer of the Supreme Court who went along with the specious plea that there could not be a vacuum. He ruled that Mrs Gandhi could continue as prime minister but not vote in Parliament.

That this was nonsense became clear on October 31, 1984, when she was assassinated. In fact, that is exactly what had happened once before: On January 11, 1966, when Lal Bahadur Shastri suddenly died of a heart attack. 

Lastly, Justice Sinha was only applying the existing law in setting aside her election and disqualifying her for six long years. That he had based his ruling on a very minor technicality is not relevant. A paragraph on this technicality would have been helpful as an illustration of a Black Swan event.

 Mr Bhagwati is very careful when describing the three Bharatiya Janata Party-led governments, two by Atal Bihari Vajpayee (1998-2004) and Narendra Modi (2014 to date). It is a deadpan recounting of the facts with which most well-informed Indians are familiar. 

The way Mr Bhagwati tells it we don’t get any real sense of the mind of these two prime ministers. Both represent discontinuities in Indian political approaches and attitudes. The difference is only of degree. Mr Bhagwati is content to say that Vajpayee and Mr Modi think very differently.

But that is like saying Nehru and Indira Gandhi thought differently.
 

The Promise of India: How Prime Ministers Nehru to Modi Shaped the Nation

Jaimini Bhagwati

Penguin/Viking

Pp 385; Rs 799