![]() ![]() ![]() For instance, Rao's failure to check the Punjab insurgency during his tenure as home minister, and worse, his injudicious ceding of authority to the prime minister's office under Rajiv Gandhi after Indira Gandhi's assassination which led to the Sikh massacres. Sitapati's critical eye falls on the feet of clay as keenly as it does on the adroit political moves that saw the 1991 economic reforms through. There's one telling instance, Sitapati recounts, of Manmohan Singh taking a first, more cautious draft of his 1991 budget to Rao only to have him dismiss it with, "If this is what I wanted, why would I have selected you?"īut Half Lion is no hagiography. And how, from the very next day, Rao went about picking the team that would do what was required, checkmating those – among them current President Pranab Mukherjee on whom he got hold of a secret IB file – he felt would not be amenable. He wanted some documents that Swamy had compiled on economic reforms in order to crystallise his plans for what he needed to do to manage the balance of payments crisis. ![]() ![]() Sitapati, for instance, narrates how it was Rao who called up Subramanian Swamy, then a minister in the outgoing government, two days before his swearing in. ![]()
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