It’s a wrap for Hyd Literary Festival

HYDERABAD: On the concluding day of the Hyderabad Literary Festival, Harvard Law graduate Vinay Sitapati, an author who wrote a biography on PV Narasimha Rao, claimed on Sunday that the late Prime Minister could have stopped the violence during the Sikh riots. He called it Rao’s “vilest hour”.

Sitapati, who was speaking on a panel titled ‘PV: The Unlikely Prime Minister’, said that Narasimha Rao, who was the Home Minister in the Indira Gandhi government, had a greater role to play than anyone in the administration. This was because the Delhi police, unlike police in other States and Union Territories, report directly to the Home Minister.

“On the evening of October 31 (when Gandhi was assassinated), Narasimha Rao was out of Delhi. He heard that she was killed and flew back to Delhi at around 2 pm. He went straight to the AIIMS Hospital where her body was kept, from there he went to his office in South Block,” Sitapati said.

“The police and Station House Officers on that day was reporting to Narasimha Rao. However, in the evening Narasimha Rao received a call from Arun Nehru, who is not just a relative of Rajiv Gandhi, but is widely believed to have been speaking on Rajiv Gandhi’s behalf,” he further said.

“It is pretty clear that when you get a call from the Prime Minister’s Office and from the cousin of Rajiv Gandhi, he speaks for Rajiv Gandhi,” the law graduate said. He further quotes Arun Nehru to have said, “Look, there is going to be a lot of violence tomorrow. It will be complicated. So let the Station House Officers report to me in the PMO,” But he also added that he did not have any evidence if that was done maliciously. “The effect was that Narasimha Rao was completely declined of any power. He was not getting phone calls.

In fact, there are testimonies of a lot of people including Atal Bihari Vajpayee and others, who reportedly went and urged him to take action. Narasimha Rao was constantly going back, picking up the phone and talking to somebody, because he didn’t have the power himself,” he added.

‘Congress abandoned Narasimha Rao’

Sitapati termed Narasimha Rao’s death as lonely, claiming that he was abandoned by the party. Supporting his claims, he said, “His family wanted the funeral to happen in Delhi because he had left Andhra Pradesh in 1973. However, the Gandhi family did not want that. His funeral was organised in Hyderabad by the lake. There are visuals of stray dog pulling at his funeral pyre in the evening.”