While politicians slept, trucks were loading gold—67 tonnes of it—at the Reserve Bank of India’s vaults in South Bombay. Essentially all of India’s gold reserves. The trucks drove 35 kilometers to the airport under armed guard. There, the gold was loaded onto chartered cargo planes.
Commercial airlines had refused the job. Too risky. Too desperate.
The gold was collateral. India was pawning its jewelry.
If you want to understand what this meant culturally, consider: In India, gold isn’t just an asset. It’s sacred. The goddess Lakshmi is depicted sitting on gold coins. Indian weddings feature kilograms of gold because “Does she have gold?” is the first question asked about brides. Women remove their gold only at death or divorce.
And here was the nation shipping its treasure to its former colonizer. At night. In secret. Like a family selling heirlooms to pay the landlord.
When the news leaked, there was public outrage: “We have pawned our mother’s jewelry!”
The operation raised $600 million.
It bought India about three weeks.
Foreign exchange reserves had fallen to $1.2 billion—enough for roughly fifteen days of imports. Fifteen days until the food shipments stopped. Fifteen days until the oil stopped. Fifteen days until a nuclear-armed nation of 900 million people defaulted on its debts.
What happens when a country that size defaults? What happens when the imports stop?
We know what happened to the Soviet Union. It collapsed. India was heading there—fast.
The Most Important People You’ve Never Heard Of
Three men you’ve probably never heard of—P.V. Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia—may be the three most important people of the late 20th century.
Bold claim. Audacious, even. Let me defend it.
Here are the numbers. In 1991, over 45% of Indians lived below the poverty line—roughly 400 million people. By 2024, extreme poverty in India had fallen to under 3%.
That’s 400 to 500 million people lifted out of poverty.
The largest democratic poverty alleviation in human history. (...)
Nothing else comes close to democratic poverty alleviation at this scale.
And here’s the thing about crises: they don’t automatically produce reform. Crisis alone doesn’t fix anything.
Argentina has had crisis after crisis—and keeps defaulting, keeps returning to the same failed policies. Greece in 2010 accepted bailouts, changed almost nothing structural, and remains economically fragile. Venezuela’s oil crises led not to reform but to doubling down on socialism, and now people eat from garbage trucks.
The Soviet Union faced a crisis and collapsed. It didn’t reform. It disintegrated.
India could have gone any of those directions. What makes these three men remarkable isn’t that they faced a crisis—it’s that they converted crisis into transformation. That almost never happens.
And because it worked—because the catastrophe was prevented—nobody remembers.
You can’t feel gratitude for the plane that didn’t crash. You can’t celebrate the engineer who prevented the disaster you never experienced. The counterfactual isn’t real to anyone.
This is why India forgot them. But that’s for Part 3. First, let’s understand what they were saving us from.
by Samir Varna | Read more:
Image: uncredited
