Who's Who In Afrozabad

AS the hype over The Insider pipes up, one question looms: will Narasimha Rao do a Shobha De? In other words,will the Telugu bidda send his political peers scurrying to see if he has included them and their peccadilloes in it—like De did to the denizens of the chattering class with Socialite Evenings? These are early days yet, but extracts published in the inaugural issue of this magazine in October '95; Rao's decision to postpone the book's launch in January this year until after the general elections were over so as not to ruffle delicate feathers; and his thanks to "scores of friends, colleagues and others" for lending their "flesh and blood, their tempers and idiosyncrasies" have justifiably heightened expectations in the capital's political circles.

But a sampling of the dense 767-page tome, and Rao's mundane, pedestrian descriptions of their shenanigans in the anterooms of power makes the task of deciphering "who's who" and "which's bitch" a hazardous, almost impossible, and in the end, a pretty pointless exercise.

For one thing, the action in The Insider ends in 1973. Which means there is no Chandraswami, whom he met roughly around then. So out goes all the colour and controversy of a notorious friendship. It also means that we will have to wait for the sequel (coming soon) to read about the Emergency, Operation Blue Star, Indira Gandhi's assassination, the Delhi pogrom over which he presided, and then Rajiv's killing which plonked  him in the hotseat.

And for another, it's all happening in Afrozabad—Rao's Andhra Pradesh—which until 1991 lay outside the Weltanschaaung of the average (north) Indian, except when Indira contested from Medak in 1980. This also renders his alter-ego Anand's rise from prodigy to rebel to legislator to minister to chief minister too local to arouse nationwide curiosity, 25 years down the line.

But his long, laborious look at the regimes of two chief ministers, Mahendranath and Chaudhary, leaves little doubt that it's essentially the saga of Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy and K. Brahmananda Reddy he's trying to paint. And then again, maybe he is not. But with both long dead and gone, Rao's on safe ground here, too.

Yet, The Insider is a courageous effort by the 77-year-old. Rao's Anand "whose experiences are often derived from my own" goes public with his private affair with Aruna, a legislator. Critics are sure to compare this with what Rao's successor as CM, Jalagam Vengal Rao, wrote in his memoirs two years ago. That "PV did nothing but flirt around with Lakshmikantamma", a three-term Congress MP from Khammam.

That apart, the book offers more insights into Rao than the others in his penumbra. His Anand is an "exceptionally efficient...bundle of virtue". There are so many references to "Mr Brilliant" ("I hope he'll become another Ramanujam," says a school official) and his scholarly intellect (Chaudhary calls him the cabinet's Brihaspati after the God of Wisdom) that Rao reveals what he thinks of himself. But it's Rao as Voyeur—be it in examining his cousins' genitals, in attending a four-year-old's circumcision, in watching his uncle straddle his aunt in the dead of night, in his encounter with a butcher's daughter, or even in his outspoken views on matters carnal—that The Insider offers the greatest, perhaps the only, insight.