Congress’s greatest prime minister was the one it chose to erase

History often reserves its cruellest treatment not for enemies, but for those who challenge entrenched power from within. Few leaders illustrate this better than PV Narasimha Rao, who rescued the country from economic collapse, redrew its foreign policy, laid the foundations of its nuclear deterrent, defeated multiple insurgencies, and yet died politically exiled by the very party he served for almost five decades.

When Rao took office in 1991, the country was on the brink. It had mortgaged its gold to avoid default. Foreign exchange reserves had nearly vanished. Separatist violence raged in Kashmir, Punjab and Assam. Rajiv Gandhi had just been assassinated. And Rao did not even enjoy a parliamentary majority.

Yet, with a fragile minority government, Rao accomplished what most majority governments failed to achieve. The economic reforms initiated under his leadership permanently altered the country’s trajectory. Liberalisation was not merely about dismantling licences and permits; it was about replacing a bankrupt economic philosophy with one that trusted enterprise over state control.

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Today’s Bharat, which is the world’s fifth-largest economy and is expected to become the third largest by the end of the decade after the United States and China, rests on foundations laid in 1991.

Like the economy, Rao transformed the country’s foreign policy with equal boldness. For decades, Indian diplomacy had been shaped by Cold War assumptions and a heavy dependence on the Soviet Union. Rao recognised that the world had changed after the Soviet collapse, and Delhi had to change with it. He opened Delhi’s strategic relationship with the West while refusing to abandon old friends. His own words captured that balance perfectly: “Never forget what the Indo-Soviet relationship was like, and how much we gained from it. We should never be ungrateful. You don’t forget friends when they are less powerful or less influential or anything like that. You have to stand by them.”

That philosophy remains remarkably relevant even today. Delhi continues to engage both Washington and Moscow, balancing strategic interests without becoming anyone’s camp follower.

Equally significant was Rao’s decision to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel while simultaneously reaffirming Bharat’s support for the Palestinian cause. More than three decades later, successive governments continue to operate within that same diplomatic framework. Long before “multi-alignment” became fashionable, Rao had already practised it.

If Rao was the first Indian Prime Minister to genuinely look West, he was equally the father of the country’s Look East policy. He recognised that Southeast Asia would become one of the engines of global growth. His outreach to Singapore, Malaysia and ASEAN fundamentally changed India’s eastern engagement. He also became the first Indian Prime Minister to visit South Korea, urging Korean companies to invest in India. At the time, Korean brands were virtually absent from Indian households. Within a decade, Samsung and Hyundai had become household names. The Modi government’s Act East policy rests squarely on the foundations built by Rao.

His role in making India a nuclear weapons state was unparalleled. It was he who prepared the country for nuclear weaponisation. Atal Bihari Vajpayee himself acknowledged this after Rao’s death in 2004, observing that Rao had prepared the bomb and that he had “only exploded it”.

Even less acknowledged is Rao’s record on internal security. He inherited three major crises simultaneously: Punjab, Kashmir and Assam. Each presented an existential challenge to the Indian state. Rather than seeking headlines, Rao quietly rebuilt institutions. He appointed governors he trusted. He placed Home Secretary K Padmanabhaiah in direct charge of Kashmir affairs. In Punjab, he retained KPS Gill despite sustained political pressure. And in Assam, he stood firmly behind Chief Minister Hiteswar Saikia even when the latter faced both ULFA violence and rebellion within the Congress itself. In November 1991, Saikia even wrote Rao a confidential letter warning that Congress leaders were conspiring to remove him. Rao backed Saikia. By the time Rao left office in 1996, the security situation in all three states had improved dramatically.

Yet, the Congress has chosen to forget him, remembering him only for his failings, especially the destruction of the Babri Masjid on December 6, 1992. No doubt, it remains the defining blot on his tenure. But to reduce Rao’s entire prime ministership to that single failure is wrong.

The treatment Rao received soon after his death revealed the depth of the Congress’s discomfort with him. In Half Lion: How PV Narasimha Rao Transformed India, author Vinay Sitapati recounts how Rao’s family wanted his last rites to be held in Delhi, which was his “karmabhoomi”, as one of Rao’s sons had said. Instead, his body was flown to Hyderabad. As Sitapati records, when the family was insisting on his last rites in Delhi, “the usually decorous Shivraj Patil” reportedly snapped: “No one will come.”

The humiliation deepened at the Congress headquarters at 24 Akbar Road. Although it had been customary for former Congress presidents to be taken inside the party headquarters, Rao’s funeral procession stopped outside the closed gates. A friend requested that the gates be opened. “The gate does not open,” came the reply.

According to Sitapati, this was not true. The gates had opened for Madhavrao Scindia, who had died in a plane crash a few years earlier. One senior Congressman later admitted: “We were expecting the gate to be opened… but no order came. Only one person could give that order.” He added: “She did not give it.”

Why has the Congress refused to celebrate one of its greatest leaders, and without doubt the most consequential prime minister?

It is because Rao committed the unforgivable political sin within the Congress ecosystem. He proved that the party and the government could function without the Gandhi family. That challenged the central myth around which the Congress increasingly organised itself.

Rao was not the first to suffer this fate. There is a long list, from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and Rajendra Prasad to Pranab Mukherjee. Each, in different ways, demonstrated an independent stature that rivalled the gravitational pull of the Nehru-Gandhi family. Each gradually found himself pushed to the margins of the party’s official memory. Rao, in that sense, was the most consequential face of the Congress’s family-first policy.

Ironically, reclaiming Rao would only strengthen the Congress. By embracing him, the party could legitimately claim ownership of economic liberalisation rather than allowing its political opponents to monopolise its legacy. It could celebrate the origins of Bharat’s pragmatic foreign policy — a policy that engages both America and Russia, values both Israel and Palestine, and balances morality with national interest. It could demonstrate that entrepreneurship is not incompatible with social justice. Most importantly, it could show that the Congress is capable of honouring leaders beyond one political family.

The Congress should realise that, by trying to erase the memory of Rao, it is committing a self-goal of Himalayan proportions. After all, as former diplomat Rajiv Dogra writes in India’s World: How Prime Ministers Shaped Foreign Policy, “if Jawaharlal Nehru ‘discovered’ India, and if Indira Gandhi made it ‘proud’, Narasimha Rao ‘transformed’ it”.

In that way, the Congress’s refusal to embrace Rao is not a judgement on him. It is a judgement on the party itself.

(The writer is the author of ‘Bharat Rising: Dharma, Democracy, Diplomacy’ and ‘Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History’. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)