March 30, 1998

"All my life I had the feeling of being dressed up and conducting formal interviews with strangers," former Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao says. But on the eve of the release of his fictionalised autobiography, The Insider, there was an easy familiarity and a sense of bonhomie about him as he spoke to Deputy Editor Swapan Dasgupta and Associate Editor Binoo K. John at his Delhi residence for over an hour. Excerpts:

Why did you resort to a fictionalised story of your life?

The book has evolved over a period of 20 years, out of which not a single word went on paper during the five years I was prime minister. In fact much of it has been virtually rewritten in the later part of 1996 and some months during 1997. Since it has evolved this way, it was not a planned and structured work. I had not kept any model before me; as I said, it just evolved. My role in the book is that of a political activist. I thought I had something to say, as an insider.

You have indulged in some semantic jugglery when you talk in the blurb of the "truth (albeit fictionalised)". What did you have in mind?

Fictionalised truth is not semantic jugglery. What has been described is not literally true in toto, but is based on certain basic reality observed and experienced by the author with all its poignancy and also with the required embellishments that are classified as uddeepan in our classics.

How much of Anand is there in Narasimha Rao?

A good deal but not in its entirety.

At some stage during the writing of this enormous book, you must have thrown up your hands in despair? The struggle, the effort, the trauma that writers experience.

I did have my moments of despair; but since no one expected me or commissioned me to write a book of this nature in two volumes, it did not matter whether I completed it or not. I was charged to do things -- such as land reforms and conduct of foreign policy -- and not necessarily to write about these hardly interesting subjects. If I chose to write, it was because I felt that doing the things entrusted to me, in a way, also entailed writing in detail about them, like the minute documentation a scientist maintains about a 60-year-old experiment he happens to undertake. So it was entirely out of my free option. I can't, therefore, complain of any trauma.

Talking about land reforms, it is an issue which dominates the book. It seems to be Anand's raison d'etre. Is this autobiographical?

It is autobiographical in the sense that having been born in a village and having seen how the village economy works, I feel that the most important thing in India is land. If you don't start with the land there is nothing else for you to do in the village. At least then. Now it is not as current an issue as it was then. I have also said that now hunger for jobs has taken the place of hunger for land. So I have hinted at this social change. After 1973 we were not able to take the land programme as the centre piece.Other things like loan melas are there. But we lost focus. Maybe now it is being solved in its own way. But not by the government. No status quo is going to help the people. You have to have emphasis on land. Even today the finance minister talks of the monsoon. Even in the Congress there has been a tussle between the pro-changers and others.

There seems to be an overwhelming sense of loss running through the narrative. Is it just the fact that Anand was taken away from his mother. Did that sense of loss shape your character?

Those who are aware of the feeling of deprivation by being torn asunder from their own families for education from the age of five and feeling like strangers all their lives can easily understand my emotional isolation. All my life, I had the feeling of being immaculately dressed and conducting formal interviews with strangers. I can't change into a lungi as it were and savour informality. I found it a terrible feeling. Fortunately, with today's educational facilities, such as they are, the present generation, rich or poor, are largely spared this isolation and invisible tension at a very young age. This is an invaluable asset.

Your intellectual superiority as you yourself suggest, made you aloof from a very young age. This aloofness makes you often look down at things and people.

This was also one of my handicaps. What do you do when your studies occupy very little of your being? You complete the following year's class books -- especially mathematics and English -- during this summer vacation and thereafter the whole academic year becomes vacant as in a virtual vacation. I taught optional mathematics to my own class, to facilitate a sickly teacher's afternoon siesta and manage his moods for an academic year. You are neither a teacher nor a student; what exactly are you at this rate? I smarted under this imposed precocity.

Throughout the book the character of Anand is in the thick of politics. But at the same time he is aloof. At times he seems even aloof from the party.

I don't think he is aloof from the party. His interpretation of the party programme is different from that of some others. As I have said in the author's note, all this is just an infinitesimal part of the experience of one person.

There is a certain amount of cynicism that runs through the book.

You find cynicism all around. Activists who come to politics first encounter cynicism. It is all because of partial successes, failures, square pegs in round holes, so many things. I have tried to go below the surface of things and find out why it is happening this way. Then there is the question of legislation. As far as changing the society is concerned legislation is as radical a weapon as any. I will look at these issues in the second volume. See what happened in 1973. Things were going extremely well for Indira Gandhi. In 1973, we stopped the import of rice. We stopped PL 480. There was the triumph of Bangladesh, so many things to take Indira Gandhi to the peak. Then suddenly Emergency was declared. What were the factors that forced the prime minister to take recourse to this? That, according to me, is the most difficult question to answer. There has to be some reason for this. A person does not become a dictator overnight.

There will be speculation about the characters. Particularly Choudhury and Mahendranath. Some may identify them with former chief ministers of Andhra Pradesh.

This is not strictly true. Several identities can be attributed. See, how do you write a book if it is not based on your own observations? Show me one novelist who can write fiction 100 per cent. There was a great writer in Andhra Pradesh called Viswanath Satyanarayana. He once identified to some of us 40 to 45 characters who were in his book. But the idea is not to write about those people. Otherwise I would have been their biographer. I am now the biographer of all that has happened. I'm tied up with events. It is difficult to slot my book. That's why I've not called it a novel.

Which is why the novel ceases to be a story and reads like a political essay at times ...

Absolutely. Because to me, politics is not different from life.

One of the institutions that has been shown in poor light is the Fourth Estate ...

No, no...

The reference to the special correspondents, planting stories ...

(Smiles) I will be happy If I am proved entirely wrong. I am not slandering, I am just showing how the Fourth Estate is becoming a party to all that I think is undesirable.

In the early parts you show yourself as a rebel, a revolutionary with a gun in hand. Were you attracted towards the communist movement?

No. We had an anti-Nizam movement. Two streams. One with the gun, the other movement parallel to the Indian National Congress. We had the State Congress in those days. The Communist Party in Telengana had its own programme. In fact, the party was involved in the killing of some Congressmen also. Both parties were anti-monarchy. We had no integral link with the National Congress. Revolutionary literature and weapons were smuggled in.

Another undercurrent of the anti-monarchy movement is the Hindu-Muslim question.

What I say is that they lived together for centuries there. This problem was imported from outside. Nobody there asked why there is a Muslim ruler. Actually, the culprit is feudalism. That is what has come out very clearly. I have given the contrasting picture of a state ruled by a Muslim king where there was no communalism for long periods.

There were suggestions that it was going to be a steamy novel. Readers are going to be disappointed with this.

Those who had written about it earlier, had only shown their interest. Those passages were not representative. I did not want to waste my life writing that.

The last para says, "Anand who had decided to retire from active politics was called upon to shoulder the prime minister's tasks ..." Do you wish the turn of political events had not happened?

Of course I do. Today if you take me back to 1991, I would be very happy to say that Rajiv Gandhi should be brought back. What we have lost in Rajiv is much more than a person. I am not saying this because I was the Congress prime minister. I am saying this from many points of view. Whoever came in could not have underwritten the stability of the country for 20-30 years. You cannot estimate the loss the country suffered by Rajiv's assassination.

You always seemed to be a lonely man.

I cannot possibly deny that I feel good in solitude, despite being in crowd situations always. But to me there is a world of difference between solitude when you are in your own company and loneliness when you are with no one.

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