Hyderabad: Reminiscing about Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao’s tenure, well-known political commentator and senior journalist Sanjaya Baru praised him for his significant contribution to the country’s economy and foreign policy, which were followed by his successors Atal Behari Vajpayee and Dr Manmohan Singh.
Baru was delivering the PV Memorial Lecture, ‘Between Indira Gandhi and Narendra Modi: The Transformative Political Economy of Prime Minister Narasimha Rao,’ organised by the P.V. Narasimha Global Foundation, in Jubilee Hills on Saturday.
Baru, information adviser to then Prime Minister Singh, analysed the GDP growth rates from the Nehruvian tenure of the 1950s to the Modi government in 2023. “The most important factor is how PV combined his ‘post-Nehruvian new economic policy’ with ‘Nehruvian consensus politics’… The decade during which the economic performance turned was the 1990s, when the economic growth went from 3.5 per cent to 5.5 per cent, under the leadership of Rao,” he said.
Baru said that Rao’s foreign policies were in response to the new global context after the Cold War and the emergence of the United States as the sole superpower.
“The initiatives he took — the outreach to the US, his Look East policy, the diplomatic recognition of Israel, the establishment of closer economic relations with the European Union and Japan — are policies that all subsequent governments have pursued,” said Baru.
He stressed the need to re-examine economic and social policies to value the attributes of India's pluralism, liberalism, secularism and democratic values that the world has come to value.
A book, ‘Mabbula Chatuna Suryadau,’ was released on the occasion.
Narasimha Rao’s son P.V. Prabhakara Rao, senior journalist K.R. Murty, former CBI joint director V.V. Laxminarayana and journalist Maa Sarma were in present.
