The Man Who Remade India by Vinay Sitapati

Author:Vinay Sitapati
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

A year into Rao’s premiership, the opposition parties were coming to the same conclusion as Arjun Singh: the prime minister was not going to fall on his own; he needed to be pushed. On 30 June 1992, the National Front and Left parties decided to bring a ‘no-confidence motion’ against the government for ‘all round’ failure and ‘anti-people’ economic policies.28 Rao had already survived two opposition votes in Parliament. This was to be the first of three official ‘no-confidence motions’. The BJP joined in. The numbers, it seemed, were stacked against Narasimha Rao. After days of debate, the motion was put to vote on 17 July.

Against the odds, Narasimha Rao won by fifty-two votes.29 Jayalalithaa’s AIADMK had voted for Rao, along with sections of the TDP, and four of Ajit Singh’s MPs. The parliamentary affairs minister, V.C. Shukla, was active in splitting the Opposition. ‘I had made [an] informal arrangement with [Ajit] Singh that he would never issue whip. He kept his word and I used to draw from his 20 MPs,’ Shukla later said.30

Around the same time, the five-year terms for the President and vice president of India ended. Though the posts were largely ceremonial, a prime minister as weak as Rao could have done with a friendly Raisina Hill. The vice president, Shankar Dayal Sharma, was the obvious choice for the presidency.

The problem was that, by 1992, vice president and prime minister, thick friends in the past, had grown weary of each other. Sharma—a senior of Rao’s in the Congress hierarchy—expected the prime minister to brief him regularly when it came to affairs of state. A former professor, Sharma had a long-winded and didactic style of conversation; Rao had grown tired of wasting entire afternoons over tea with the vice president. Sharma had noticed. An aide to Rao says, ‘Sharma knew he was being ignored. He resented it.’ On the occasion that the prime minister would phone on some official work, Sharma would sometimes refuse to answer, demanding that the prime minister call in person. Rao’s archives contain snappy exchange of letters between the two of them.31 Rao was tempted to offer the presidency to someone else. But he considered the alternatives, and eventually realized that he could not refuse the man who had turned down the chance to be prime minister before him.

That selection left open the post of vice president. Rao was keen to offer it to P.C. Alexander, who had played a key role in turning the monk into monarch a year earlier. But since the Congress was in a minority in Parliament, they needed the support of opposition MPs in filling these posts. The communists agreed to support Sharma for President, but wanted K.R. Narayanan, a left-leaning diplomat and a Dalit, as vice president.32 To add to the clamour, V.P. Singh swore he would resign from Parliament unless a scheduled caste was elected vice president.

Narasimha Rao reluctantly appointed Shankar Dayal Sharma as President and K.R. Narayanan as vice president. He was to have a tense relationship with them both.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.