Obituary: Prime minister who pulled India from the old to new

PV Narasimha Rao, who died Thursday aged 83, was the prime minister of India between 1991 and 1996; during his premiership he took the considerable risk of lifting trade barriers and opening an over-protected country to the global economy.

The gamble paid off. If India is today, along with China, well on the way to becoming one of the economic powerhouses of the 21st century, much of the credit can be given to Rao.

In introducing his reforms, he was ably assisted by his quiet but focused finance minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, who became India's 13th prime minister earlier this year.

Although economic liberalisation had started with his predecessors, Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv, the process was accelerated by Rao when he took over as India's ninth prime minister on June 21 1991, a week before his 70th birthday.

By Indian standards this was not particularly old, but Rao had been in semi-retirement for the previous 18 months and had packed his large library of books in preparation for a life of scholarly seclusion in Hyderabad.

What brought Rao back from the political wilderness was the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, who had been in power, lost it and was apparently on his way back to the prime minister's job when he was blown up by a female Tamil suicide-bomber in the middle of an election campaign. Since Rajiv's mother, too, had been assassinated [in 1984], there were real worries that Indian democracy might be derailed.

With the country in turmoil, Rajiv Gandhi's Congress Party turned to Rao as a stop-gap leader. He took over at a time when India was facing its worst economic crisis since independence from Britain in 1947: inflation was running at 17 per cent and the country had some £50 billion (Dh355 billion) of foreign debt.

But having won the election, Rao chose to stay on, and proved to be the leader who dragged the Indian economy from the old to the new.

In his personal demeanour, Rao was an austere, erudite man with a long history of service to the Nehru/Gandhi family and to India he had served as foreign minister and defence minister as well as chief minister of his own state, Andhra Pradesh.

This explains why the country was so shocked when he was convicted in 2000 of having bribed four members of parliament to support his government in a no-confidence motion in 1993.

He was given a three-year prison sentence, the first prime minister to be thus humiliated; but, because of the time taken over the appeal, he did not actually have to spend any time in jail. A court later quashed the charges against Rao and his co-accused, but his reputation inevitably remained tarnished. After stepping down as prime minister, Rao wrote a long English-language novel, The Insider. Although a dense book about land reform, it was billed as "the novel that tells the explosive truth about Indian politics''.

The book attracted some notoriety because of a sexually explicit passage, this being completely out of character with Rao's dour, unsmiling image. During a publicity tour, he launched the book at the Nehru Centre in London, where an Indian woman was unwise enough to ask him: "Mr Prime Minister, is the sexy passage from your imagination or your memory?'' An angry Rao considered the question to be in poor taste, and chastised his questioner: "I never thought NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) could be so despicable.''

In recognition of Rao's international stature, Madame Tussaud's made a waxwork model of him, one of only a very few Indians who have been so honoured. When the Indian prime minister flew to London and stood next to his model for the unveiling, as is the custom, a British journalist remarked unkindly: "The wax model looks livelier.''

Later, when Rao was going through the bribery scandal, Madame Tussaud's removed the waxwork from public view and substituted one of the Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan.

Pamulaparti Venkata (always abbreviated to P.V.) Narasimha Rao was born on June 28, 1921 at Karimnagar in Andhra Pradesh, where his Brahmin family had a large farm. After taking degrees in Science and Law at Osmania and Nagpur universities, he found a job as a reporter with a weekly newspaper.

In 1957 Rao was elected to the Andhra Pradesh legislative assembly, where he retained his seat for the next 20 years. In 1962 he became a minister in the state government, and in 1971 was made chief minister.

In 1974 he was appointed general secretary of the Congress Party's national governing committee, and in 1977 he was elected to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian parliament. Throughout his career, Rao was a loyal supporter of Indira Gandhi; he backed her after the Congress Party split into rival factions in 1969, and also when she imposed what became a two-year "state of emergency'' in 1975.

When Mrs Gandhi returned to power in 1980 she made Rao her foreign minister. Although he apparently disliked travelling, he was well-suited to the job in other respects. As well as seven Indian languages, he spoke English, French, Arabic, Spanish and Persian.

The prime minister came to rate him highly. As India's external affairs minister, he had the tricky job of maintaining a close relationship with the Soviet Union, a long-time ally of India, whilst also expressing strong disapproval of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan.

There was also the fall-out from the Iranian revolution which overthrew the Shah and ushered in the age of the ayatollahs. Next door in Pakistan, General Zia ul Haq had started the process of Islamisation which was to lead in time to a more fundamentalist country and the emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Still, Rao kept open channels of communication with Pakistan by visiting the country on several occasions and meeting its leaders. In July 1984 Rao became home minister, responsible for the police and internal security.

Three months later Mrs Gandhi was shot by her own Sikh bodyguards over the Indian army's military action at the Golden Temple in Amritsar, and Rajiv succeeded his mother. He moved Rao to the defence ministry and then to the ministry of human resource development, where his responsibilities included education. In July 1986 he was given the additional portfolio of health and family welfare before, in early 1988, Rajiv Gandhi invited him to return to foreign affairs; he remained in that post until December 1989.

After Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated on May 21 1991, for India's alleged interference in Sri Lanka, the Congress Party tried to persuade his widow, Sonia, to become its president. When she refused, Rao was offered the job; he was seen as a compromise figure who could unite the party during the national election campaign that had been interrupted by Gandhi's murder.

But, after the election, Rao emerged as a serious candidate for party leader, and thus prime minister. Although he was nearing 70 and had undergone heart surgery, he was unanimously elected and found himself head of a minority government.

In 1996 Roa was defeated in the general election because of persisting allegations of corruption in government. He was forced to resign as party president, and that December he was also compelled to stand down as the Congress Party's parliamentary leader because of the corruption scandal.

In 2000 came the bribery case which undermined his reputation. He was accused of paying bribes totalling $800,000 (Dh2,936,000) to four MPs to support his Congress Party government in a crucial vote of no-confidence in July 1993.

The MPs, who belonged to regional parties, had hidden the money in personal and party bank accounts, it was claimed. A case was lodged against Rao when one of