"The Indian and Western elite did not regard any of Nehru’s successors as ‘thinking’ leaders. Indira Gandhi tried hard to win over India’s intellectual elite, but the Emergency broke a nascent link. When men like P.N. Haksar and P.N. Dhar were hounded out of her inner circle, India’s intellectuals deserted her. Rajiv Gandhi was never taken seriously by this elite. Narasimha Rao may have been a scholar in his own right, but he was an ‘outsider’ to India’s metropolitan elite. In Andhra Pradesh, among the Telugu-speaking elite he was known as an ashtavadhani, a literary master. But Delhi’s elite tended to conflate his intellectual achievements with the fact that he was fluent in many languages. Vajpayee too was a highly regarded poet. Indeed, Rao and Vajpayee enjoyed the company of intellectuals and could count many professors among their friends. But in the snobbish world of the metropolitan elite, an Oxbridge type like Dr Singh was regarded as a class apart from these home-grown politician-intellectuals."
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Novelists from IndiaPoets from IndiaIndian National Congress politiciansLawyers from IndiaPrime Ministers of India
Original Language: English
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Baru, Sanjaya (2015). The accidental Prime Minister.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/P._V._Narasimha_Rao
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P. V. Narasimha Rao
1991 – 1996
P. V. Narasimha Rao, born Pamulaparti Venkata Narasimha Rao (Telugu:పాములపర్తి వేంకట నరసింహ రావు June 28, 1921 – December 23, 2004) was an Indian lawyer and politician who served as the tenth Prime Minister of India (1991–1996). His ascendancy to the prime ministership was politically significant in that he was the first holder of this office from non-Hindi-speaking south India.
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