EX-PM PV TOO WAS TREATED SHABBILY

The shabby way the Congress party treated P.V. Narasimha Rao is often quoted as an example of how it regards leaders other than those from the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.

The former Prime Minister was denied a memorial ground in the national capital Delhi, after his death. Nor was his body taken to the Congress office even for a few minutes for party workers to pay their respects.

This humiliation to a son of Andhra has been compared to the abandonment of the last Moghul Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, who died in lonely exile in Rangoon (now Yangon), in Burma (now Myanmar) and was buried there.

Similarly, the last rites of Narasimha Rao were conducted in Hyderabad. The then Congress government in AP issued an official release stating that his final rites were conducted as per the “wishes of his family members”.

Former Prime Ministers Rajiv Gandhi and Charan Singh and the non-PM Sanjay Gandhi were given state funerals and a final resting place in the national capital’s ‘Zone of the Dead,’ a privilege that was denied Narasimha Rao for obvious reasons.

Narasimha Rao was a loyal Congressman and the first prime minister from the nonGandhi-Nehru family to hold office for five complete years despite running a minority government.

When India’s economy was on the verge of collapse and was not in a position to even buy fuel due to the foreign exchange crisis, Narasimha Rao introduced economic reforms in the early 1990s and began the process of opening up the economy.