P.V. Narasimha Rao

P.V Narasimha Rao

Narasimha Rao was the Prime Minister of India from June 1991 to 1996. He was a freedom fighter during the Indian independence movement and joined the Indian national Congress after Independence. His mentors were Nehru and Indira Gandhi and he was appointed Prime Minister after Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated in 1991. His major achievement was the liberalization of the economy and the abolition of the Licence Raj under which businesses required elaborate licenses and regulations to be set up. The economic reforms were implemented to avert impending international default. The reforms opened up foreign investment, reformed capital markets, deregulated domestic business and reformed the trade regime.

Kashmir faced increased terrorist activity during Rao's tenure. It was soon discovered that training camps in Pakistan administered Kashmir, previously directed at evicting the Soviet army from Afghanistan were now producing the same fighters who were infiltrating Kashmir. His government introduced the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, India’s first anti- terrorism legislation. He also sent the Indian army to eliminate the infiltrators. Another big achievement of his tenure was the elimination of terrorism in Punjab as he managed to hold public elections and bring Punjab into the mainstream. He was also responsible for initiating the ‘Look East Policy’ which aimed to form closer economic, cultural and commercial ties with south East Asian nations. He brought India’s relations with Israel into the open and permitted it to set up an embassy in India. He also made diplomatic overtures to Western Europe, China and U.S.A.

In 1992, Hindu zealots demolished the 500-year-old Babri mosque in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya. The destruction of the mosque triggered widespread Hindu-Muslim violence that claimed thousands of lives. Rao was convicted of bribing regional officials for their support, although that conviction was later overturned on appeal. The way he handled the crisis of the 1993 blasts in Mumbai was praised as he personally visited Bombay after seeing evidence of Pakistani involvement in the blasts, and ordered the intelligence community to invite the intelligence agencies of the US, UK and other West European countries to send their counter-terrorism experts to Bombay to examine the facts for themselves. He resigned as party president after the Congress suffered a defeat in the 1996 general elections.