What I read in 2024: Part 8 of 9
A Hero Extremely Constrained; The Last Act of World War II
This is the eighth part of my reading reviews for 2024 (Read the seventh part here). These are the books I read as the year drew to a close - on flights back home, and during the welcome Diwali break.
Illustration 1: June 21, 1991. P V Narasimha Rao takes the oath of office at the President’s House - marking the beginning of a most remarkable Premiership in economic terms since India’s Independence; Source: The New Indian Express
The first is perhaps the finest political biography that I have read in the last 10-15 years, something that needs just a touch more rigor to place it in the same class as Robert Caro’s biographies of Lyndon Johnson. This too is an account of a single-term Head of Government, whose reign ended in humiliation, but whose posthumous reputation, unlike Johnson, continues to burn brighter with each passing year.
The other is the last act of inarguably the most important six-year period of the last century - the Second World War. It is an epilogue to the victory of the Allies, a prologue to the modern political order and an account of all the discordant scenes that were left on the director’s floor, in order to create a smooth narrative.
In some of my previous essays, I have been extremely critical of the poorly regurgitated and hagiographic style common among all contemporary Indian biographers. It is a style that switches between trying to mine inspirational anecdotes from their lives for light reading and one that flips the protocol by going into annoying details about every single date, person and career milestone in the life of the said person. Vinay Sitapati’s Half Lion is a magical relief from that despondence. It ranks among the best political biographies I have read.
While reviewing “Anatomy of a Moment” by Javier Cercas, I talked about the concept of Heroes of Retreat. People, who after having been part of an unfair/outdated system, have the courage to undo all of their legacy and discard all of their beliefs. Their exceptionalism lies in their ability to dismantle and retreat and to pave the ground for something new. Political scientists count Deng Xiaoping of China, Mikhail Gorbachev of the USSR and Adolfo Suares of Spain as great examples of this concept.
But think of someone whose inheritance was the polar opposite of the strengths of these heroes - a weak control of his party, a country contemporarily deeply divided on the lines of religion and region and an economy unable to withstand the pain of political and economic reform. Someone who succeeds despite these handicaps.
That was PV Narasimha Rao. A Prime Minister who confronted an economic crisis that could have crippled India for a generation (as it has for Greece in the present), with neither a parliamentary majority, nor internal stability nor a robust industrial base. In the pantheon of Heroes of Retreat, he emerged like Narasimha does in the Vishnu Purana, a being that could not have been imagined, until it manifested itself before you.
Liberalization of regulations, a greater role for the private sector, and an opening up of Indian markets to the world weren’t ideas original to PV Narasimha Rao. During Indira Gandhi’s second term (1971-77), Sanjay Gandhi had assumed the mantle of de-facto liberalization czar, with his flagship project being the development of India’s first car, made entirely by a private company. Rajiv’s “reforms” such as New Computer Policy of 1984 and tax reforms in the mid 80s, recognized the idea that institutional rhetoric on “self-reliance” had gone too far in muzzling the private sector and foreign capital and too wrong in its efforts to create economic freedom for all. However, they were simply window dressing for a prime minister and a party whose focus was to re-consolidate its hold on all the state institutions after their drubbing following the Emergency. And because these ideas about freeing up the economy had come from their rivals, they were automatically delegitimized in the eyes of the Janata socialist coalitions of 1977-79 and 1988-91.
PV Narasimha Rao inherited a country where enterprise was evil. A hard working laborer was always the hero, and an industrialist was always the villain. Rao’s genius lay in the lessons in political manipulation that he had learnt in his long career as a 12th Man in Congress’s squad. He never declared openly for reform.
He simply plugged in the relevant pieces - reduction in tariffs, de-regulation of capital markets, removal of private sector ownership restrictions from key sectors. He positioned them as a necessary evil that India would have to tolerate in order to protect itself from a bigger humiliation - “pawning of national gold reserves to Europeans” - that brought back the memories of colonial rule. Rao as a PM was the “rate defining step” in India’s transformation from a closed, moribund economy to an open one. Manmohan Singh and C Rangarajan, the other two heroes of economic reform, would have had nothing to work with, without Rao’s shrewd maneuvering around the retainers of the First Family in Congress, who were staunchly opposed to reforms.
And yet, Rao’s journey to India’s highest directly elected political office is not a spotless fairytale. He is not an enterprising hero in these pages. After having resigned himself to never being in the in-group of Rajiv Gandhi, who was seeking a second term in 1991 elections, Rao was looking to fade away after serving a sinecure position in the lower house, if he won. Otherwise, if he lost his seat, he was contemplating retiring to a Hindu monastery in Tamil Nadu - a path that some of his close friends had already taken earlier.
His resurrection to relevance in 1991 sounds uncannily like that of Roman Emperor Vespasian - a regional general called back from retirement to bring peace to a highly factional Roman senate. For a man who could be lion at critical moments, his general demeanor, through the long reign of Rajiv Gandhi and his mother, was more like that of a back bencher who actively avoids attention. This tendency of being non-confrontational in the face of open political battles, and his love for backroom guerilla tactics mars his legacy - whether as a silent observer during ‘84 Sikh Riots as the Home Minister or as a patron of underhand/delaying shenanigans when it came to the Babri Masjid case.
Illustration 2: Chandraswami and Prime Minister Rao; their friendship would permanently stain the latter’s legacy with infamy and mystery; Source: Asian Voice
One aspect where this book remains silent is the facts and narratives surrounding Rao’s fall from grace in 1995-96. Given that the author had access to Rao’s personal papers and classified files, the lack of attention given to Rao’s relationship with Nemichand Jain aka Chandraswami jumps out. Considered by many to be Rao’s grey eminence, Chandraswami is accused by businessmen and MPs to have been the conduit to the PM - someone who carried out his wishes/facilitated access to him - invariably at a price. Rao was acquitted in three cases of corruption against him brought to the courts immediately after he demitted office.
It was expected that the judiciary would “respect” the Prime Minister’s Office. However, after the defeat in the 1996 general elections tainted by corruption accusations against the PM, his political career was over. Sitapati remains mum on whether any of the allegations had any substance. Or to what extent, like an attempt to malign his predecessor VP Singh, this too was a fraudulent campaign undertaken by his own partymen who were expecting him to be a more pliable prime minister.
It is a cliche to call Rao an “under-rated” prime minister. It is true, in most senses. However, this book shows how he preferred being under-rated. Like a scheming samurai in Japan's warring states period, his conduct in his office was so clandestine that it seemed like non-decision. The net result of not taking credit for a lot of his own pet initiatives - development of a nuclear weapons program, normalization of Indo-US relations, computerization of India, the telecom revolution - was that their reflected glory fell on his successors - IK Gujral and Atal Bihari Vajpayee. The tenures of the latter two have also been contrasted -- as equally self-effacing and non-charismatic, compared to its predecessor (Indira-Rajiv era) and successor (Modi era). That assessment might be explained if we consider the period from the fall of Rajiv Gandhi in 1988 to that of the rise of Narendra Modi in 2014 as an interregnum, with rampant factional politics, a bold and audacious press, and an inability of any single leader to hog the political limelight.
Highlighting Rao’s achievements on the internal security front is another under-discussed aspect of his premiership that this book explores. Rao’s tenure was the first time when the Pakistani military establishment’s new strategy of waging a perennial war against the Indian state through non-state actors revealed itself. While he vacillated between action and non-action on matters like Babri Masjid demolition, he acted quickly and aggressively when he found that his policies had popular support.
He can rightly claim to have convincingly defeated the violent, secessionist Khalistan movement during his term, which had already claimed the life of one Prime Minister. Another of his enduring, but incomplete legacies is India’s attempts to build a modern internal intelligence network that exposed, beginning after the Bombay bomb blasts of 1993, the hand of Pakistan backed proxies in terrorist activities on Indian soil. Thousands of Indians who today work in Singapore and Malaysia also have Rao to thank, for the seeds of India’s Look East policy, which prioritized relationship building with ASEAN nations as a counterweight to China, were sown in his time in the office.
In the end though, Rao’s legacy within Congress remains that of a forgotten hero. 20+ years since his death, he has become one of the many stalwarts of Congress - from Sardar Patel to Morarji Desai- who have been indifferently sold by the loyalists of Gandhi family and have been gladly accepted by the Bharatiya Janata Party in its pantheon.
The book highlights the pettiness of Ms. Sonia Gandhi, who at the height of her powers when Rao died, refused him a cremation in Delhi. The act would have symbolized his stature as a “national leader”.
This is not just a book for Indians. It is one for anybody who wants to understand modern India. Rao’s term led to a cultural shift in the international perception of India - from a country of spiritual gurus and mystics to one of technicolor bollywood, IT exports and a powerful diaspora in the west.
Without Rao, there would have been no Sundar Pichai or Satya Nadella. I hope that this reluctant Prime Minister, along with his colleague who would become an “accidental” one, will soon hopefully be placed on the same pedestal as Deng Xiaoping and Lee Kuan Yew when the historians of the future look at the Asian Century.
Illustration 3: Shiro Ishii, Microbiologist and Lt. Colonel in the Imperial Japanese Army. “Granted Immunity from Prosecution” by the US despite his direct involvement in live experiments on thousands of Chinese citizens in Unit 731 in Manchuria. Source: Pacificatrocities.org
Indian literature has the concept of an “Uttar Kand” - or rather the “later episode”. It is similar to the concept of epilogue in the Greco-Roman literary tradition, but somewhat different. In the Indian traditions, Uttar Kand emphasises connecting the finale of the novel/epic poem with the present. It tells, in brief, all that happened from the end of the story until the world we see today. Year Zero, though it is the history of a single year, is the Uttar Kand of the Second World War.
This book shines a light on those stories of World War II that were discarded because they did not fit into a heroic victor's narrative. Modern historians often talk about how the years after World War 2 saw a mass displacement and settlement of populations across Europe and Asia. This was done so that one would never see another Sudetenland or Saarland. Linguistic and cultural minorities were moved across borders into their new designated homelands. The Balkans and Central Europe were torn apart as a consequence. The idea behind aligning geographical and cultural national identity was to prevent simmering, sub-national independence movements within Eurasian borders.
This is the first account, in my knowledge, of the human toll of this displacement. Thousands of Poles and Germans moved westwards. Postwar settlement ended the last vestiges of the multicultural Holy Roman Empire, which had allowed Italian speakers to settle in Croatia and German to be spoken in significant numbers in what is now Latvia and Estonia. In a perverse way, the American, French and British settlement of Europe in this manner, led to the realization of Hitler’s dream. German speakers were now living in a more contiguous area. Albeit a much smaller one, ruled by foreign powers.
The signing of instruments of surrender by Germany (May 1945) and Japan (August 1945) ended the war. However, there was still vengeance to contend with. Buruma shows that if you were among the defeated- a proportionate punishment for your part in the conflict and a due process of law were too much to ask for in the summer of 1945. There are accounts of rape and assaults on “horizontal collaborators” in France and Italy - women who agreed to live-in with German military and administrative officers to feed their children and families.
Buruma talks about revenge getting petty, as a filthy way to stamp one’s nationalist credentials, and feel “cleansed”. As some Dutch citizens did by lynching merchants who conducted business with German occupying forces. Revenge was co-opted by a Revolution. As it happened in China where the Japanese civilians in Manchuria were massacred in cold blood by the Communists.
And people sought revenge for centuries old injustices, as Indonesian, Vietnamese and Algerian nationalists - believing that Europeans could be defeated, set about uprooting all traces of Dutch and French colonial presence in these countries.
Year Zero is a book about moods - of happiness, of hunger, of revenge and most importantly of looking for normalcy - that filled the collective psyche of those who had lived through the war. Like Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee returning to the Shire, repatriating soldiers would physically return home, but their minds would eternally wander.
They returned to a world where people wore hardship as a badge of honour. In 1945, talking too much about one’s sufferings as a soldier could incite jealousy. There were victorious homecomings that ended in screams, broken marriages, assaults on children and some, which ended in suicides.
Three years ago on my Eurotrip, I had met a senior colleague’s mother who was then a 106. She had worked as a nurse in her 20s, during the war, in a German military hospital. She went back home; waited for a husband that never returned; looked for children who were never found. She moved to Switzerland. Remarried. Had a Family. Reading this book, I wondered what she would have felt going home. Is she still looking for one, 80 years later?
As an intermediate draft of history, this is also a book about “heroes” who appropriated someone else’s victory. And of villains who spectacularly got away. For instance, there were French Resistance members, whose actual role in the defeat of German forces in France, in most cases, was much shorter than they were given credit for by the Allies. This elevation in stature was a way in which these new heroes could be legitimized as credible future leaders of a new post-war French state.
Political pragmatism was also in play in Japan, where the bulk of the political brass, including the Emperor, were absolved from any war crimes committed - as a concession. American forces did not yet want to “bring democracy and justice” to Japan in 1945 as was their intent for Afghanistan and Iraq in the 21st century. This also meant that people like Shiro Ishii, who ran the infamous Unit 731 that used Chinese POWs for medical experiments and Nobusuke Kishi, the administrator of Japanese Manchuria, were allowed to go scot free. One can argue whether these actions were animated by a bias against Asian lives.
The allies had their answer. Their voters were more horrified by the atrocities committed during the Holocaust and there was greater support for justice for the Jewish people, as against avenging the Chinese.
For all the imperfect administration of justice and attribution of valor around them, the victors of World War II must yet be celebrated. Just for the fact that their terms of peace did not have the same errors in the Treaty of Versailles, that had sown the seeds of the Second World War.
The enduring achievement of the occupying forces, led by Eisenhower and Montgomery in Europe and MacArthur in Japan, was to not provide any state sanction to the lynchings and acts of vengeance carried out by civilians against one another. This was critical to allowing the Germans and the Japanese to accept their current situation and move on. The existence of a borderless Europe, a peaceful and industrialized Japan and Germany and the lack of a third world war even eight decades post its conclusion - these aren’t trivial legacies. Especially for the chaotic, imperfect but the well-intentioned steps that world leaders took in 1945 - making it the year zero of a new world order.
If you are a history buff looking for a comprehensive account of the closing days of World War II, this isn’t your book. It is relatively slim - a cross-section of moods that the world felt as the war came to a close - accurately punctuated by scenes from civilian life. It helped me understand the imperfection of all narratives. To pay attention to truths that might have fallen off the cracks. And to know that all reparations and retributions are always incomplete. I will take this book as an account of the raging emotions that the world felt at the end of a war, before it moved on to a new phase.