Half-Lion: How P.V. Narasimha Rao Transformed India. By Vinay Sitapati. Penguin India; 391 pages; 699 rupees.

INDIA’S tenth prime minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, inherited a country on the point of collapse. In the run-up to the election in 1991 separatists were on the rampage in Kashmir and Punjab, the treasury was running out of foreign reserves and 800 people were killed in clashes across the country. Then Rajiv Gandhi was blown up by a Tamil Tiger suicide-bomber as he campaigned in southern India. Rao, a reticent scholar with government experience but little popular support, was his improbable successor. Power-brokers in the Congress Party believed they were installing a puppet in the prime minister’s office. What they got instead, as Vinay Sitapati writes in “Half-Lion”, was the most consequential Indian leader since Jawaharlal Nehru.

Socialist India was in an advanced state of decay when Rao entered office. Aided by his finance minister, Manmohan Singh, he devised a radical plan to devalue the rupee, liberalise trade policies and lower the barriers to foreign capital and competition. But resistance to change was formidable. Rao’s minority government was subjected to multiple no-confidence motions in parliament. Mr Sitapati, a doctoral student at Princeton University, has unearthed a remarkable document which reveals that the prime minister survived (and pushed through his reforms) in part by deploying India’s intelligence agencies to dig up dirt on recalcitrant MPs.

As foreign minister in the 1980s, Rao, who spoke a dozen languages, including Arabic, French, Persian and Spanish, disarmed world leaders by addressing them in their own tongue. As prime minister, he initiated the overhaul of India’s foreign policy, aggressively courting South-East Asia to counteract China’s growing clout in the region, and moving India away from the Soviet Union and closer to the West. He even convinced Yasser Arafat to fly to India and endorse his establishment of diplomatic ties with Israel. People who once dismissed Rao as a pushover began likening him to Kautilya, the Mauryan empire’s strategist who wrote a book on statecraft a millennium before Machiavelli.

Rao’s failure to stop Hindu zealots from razing the medieval Babri mosque after a political rally in 1992 has long been a stain on his memory. Mr Sitapati mounts a heroic defence of his subject. The worst that can be said of Rao, he writes, is that he placed a naive faith in the personal assurances given to him by high-ranking Hindu-nationalist leaders. Rao, a devout Brahmin, was accused of secretly abetting the mosque’s destruction. Mr Sitapati persuasively demolishes this charge with a careful reconstruction of events.

India was a different country by the time Rao left office. Even the communists had joined the consensus around free trade. Mr Sitapati does an excellent job of tracing India’s transformation back to Rao’s vision and leadership. Alas, he is less good at making sense of its undesirable side-effects. The rapid rise of Hindu nationalism, despite Rao’s aversion to it, is very much his legacy. So are the oligarchs and robber barons who have proliferated across the country. Rural India suffered disproportionately during Rao’s years in government. After being thrown out of power by an electorate that was overwhelmingly poor, Rao seemed appalled by his own creation. He attacked India’s widening inequality in one of his last public speeches, warning that “‘trickle-down economics’—the practice of cutting taxes for the rich, hoping it would benefit the poorer in society—does not work.”

Rao had committed the sin of being insufficiently deferential to the Gandhi dynasty while in power. He spent his final years as a pariah. His name was scrubbed from the Congress Party’s lore, and credit for his achievements was given to Manmohan Singh and Rajiv Gandhi. But Mr Sitapati makes an unanswerable case for Rao as the father of India’s economic reforms.

When Rao died in 2004, Sonia Gandhi, the head of the Gandhi family, refused to allow his body to be cremated in Delhi or displayed in the party’s headquarters. His funeral was a humiliating affair, thinly attended by the establishment and poorly guarded. Stray dogs reportedly tore at the remains of his partially cremated body.

Mr Sitapati has resurrected his subject from the ignominy and obscurity to which he has long been condemned by his party’s petty proprietors. Rao deserves a place alongside Nehru as India’s most important prime minister.