NEW DELHI: Prime Minister P.V.Narasimha Raois well-versed in the use of bombs and other firearms and even acted as a gunrunner for the militants fighting the Nizam in the erstwhile Hyderabad state.

This has been revealed in a just published book on Narasimha Rao, The Right Prime Minister, A Political Biography of P.V.Narasimha Rao, authored by V.R.Adiraju, a senior journalist from Andhra Pradesh, the home State of the Prime Minister.

Adiraju says Narasimha Rao indulged in gunrunning from Chanda in the erstwhile Bombay province, where the Telengana revolutionaries were mining a camp headed by his own relative and fiend K. V.Narasinga Rao. His wife also accompanied him to the Chanda camp.

He shuttled between Chanda and Nagpur, Pune, Bombay and Bangalore, to smuggle arms and ammunition which he procured from the cantonment and other sources but no one at the Canada camp knew his sources,” Adiraju says.

In undertaking this daredevil acclivity, the young lawyer (Narasimha Rao), was inspired by his memones of revolutionaries like Seetharamaraju and Subhas Chandra Bose, Adiraju says in the book.

Many people at Chanda camp were from Karim Nagar and Warangal districts and were well known to Rao. It was here that he

leamed how to handle weapons ranging from the suck, birchi, sword and the firearms, Adiraju Says.

According to the book it all happened in March 1948, when the Nizam’s government resorted to a large-scale arrest of Congress workers which led to the stepping up of their activities.

“They (Congress militants) burnt down railway stations, attacked police stations, and looted their arms. They even removed the tracks of the Nizam’‘s railways and had cut the telephone wires to bring the transport and communications in the state to a stand sull.” “Some rail tracks were also blown up,” the book says. It was only after the liberation of the Hyderabad state in September 1948 that Narasimha Rao left Chanda camp and returned to his native village.

He and the camp commandant K.V.Naising Rao, another pracuicing lawyer who later became his relative, were welcomed as heroes and richly felicitated at Karminagar.

According to the author, maternal on Narasimha Rao’s activity at Chanda camp could be traced in the writings of his contemporaries, and those who worked with him, in articles published by some Telugu periodicals. The book traces the life of P.V.Narasimha Rao as a scholar, linguist, were, party minister.

The book also attempts to uncover with amazing clarity the fascinating past of Narasimha Rao or what is being billed as the “untold story of P.V.”

The book also recalls that as a student he offended the rulers by singing a banned patristic poem. He was consequently masticated.

The book also mentions that Narasimha Rao was sensitive to events around him, and evoked his gift for the muse to pen some of the most moving short stories of his time be it the havoc that the great Bengal famine had wrought on the hapless lives of the poor or the mindless communal holocaust.

Citing an example, the author Says that the long remembered story The Blue Silk Saree, reflected the nemesis of communal hatred. Typical of him, “PV” wrote under a penname.

The book provides an insight into his progressive concerns. As the general secretary of the Hyderabad Congress, Narasimha Rao pressed for land reforms, a move far ahead of its times.

Article extracted from this publication >>  January 15, 1993