RAJIV GANDHI TO NARENDRA MODI : BROKEN POLITY, FLICKERING REFORMS BY PARSA VENKATESHWAR RAO JR (PAPERBACK)

For the first time, the political story of India from the mid-1980s to the second decade of the present century is reconstructed through the first-person narratives of political leaders, revealing their inmost thoughts in their public utterances, offering weak arguments for their unforgivable lapses, speaking in eloquent terms of their achievements and sometimes showing uncharacteristic humility in what they said in their public speeches, in the Lok Sabha, in their blogs. From Rajiv Gandhi’s confession about how and why he came into politics, Narendra Modi’s graphic description of his inner agony during the Gujarat riots, Vajpayee’s disarming confession about Nehru, Narasimha Rao’s stoic stance in a letter to his childhood friend, Advani’s confessions in the Lok Sabha about why television was pressed into service during the Kargil War, what emerges is a historical drama of Shakespearean range and an intensity which is more than what brilliant historians and acute political analysts can hope to achieve. The book shows that the first draft of history is found in the words of politicians in parliament and in the government. It captures the immediacy of history-in-the-making, and the palest platitudes of politicians that acquire rare poignancy. Excerpt Gandhi and Modi, the parties and the politics they represent, are an external image of the inner uneasiness and turmoil. The 1984-2018 period is a tale of political turmoil and economic achievement. The old truth that man does not live by bread alone is borne out by the state of the nation in these three decades. In our times, politics is the mirror of the heart of the nation. It is tempting to believe that cracks in the mirror give a distorted image of the heart. It looks like that there are cracks in the country’s heart as well. How it can be mended is beyond the scope of this book. What this book intends to do is to hold up the mirror and to show the cracks, call them fault-lines if you will, of the political landscape.