Five reasons why we should remember Rajiv Gandhi today, his birth anniversary

India’s seventh prime minister was genial, a moderniser, and despite events such as the Sikh riots, believed in secularism.

File photo of Rajiv Gandhi | Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

New Delhi: Rajiv Gandhi would have been 75 years old today. A man ageing gracefully with his wife, Sonia, by his side, playing computer games with Priyanka’s children — after all, he was the one who pushed its introduction into India — and, perhaps, wondering why Rahul refuses to get married.

Instead, he was cut down in the prime of his life, aged 46, at Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, in 1991. And India was never the same again.

Rajiv Gandhi’s five-year term as India’s seventh prime minister, from 1984-1989, is remembered by a series of events that seared the Republic.

In the wake of his mother’s assassination, even before he won the elections in December, he infamously wrung his hands with his “the earth shook” remarks during the 1984 Sikh riots, in which several thousand people were killed — most have still not got justice.

By 1986, he had angered the liberal Indian by abandoning Shah Bano to the predatory instincts of the religious Islamic patriarchy. By 1987, he tried to overcompensate by foolishly ordering that the locks to the Babri Masjid be opened.

In the middle of all this, he was tainted by the Bofors scandal, in which he and his family and the Congress party were accused of receiving kickbacks for an artillery gun that India bought from Sweden.

But there are several more reasons why India should remember Rajiv Gandhi, and not only because it is his birth anniversary today. Here are five:

A charmer, genial fellow

Rajiv Gandhi’s “natural goodness” never failed to touch anyone he met. As an Indian Airlines pilot, as prime minister and as Opposition leader in the Lok Sabha, he was the original hail-fellow-well-met. His manners were impeccable, of course, but more than that he seemed genuinely interested in you.

There are oodles of information about how Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia Maino fell in love in the UK, how he told his mother about this Italian girl he wanted to marry, how she came to India on 13 January, 1968 — 50 years ago this January — to marry the man she loved.

There’s a wonderful black and white photo of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi eating ice-cream at India Gate. She’s wearing a simple dress, looking gorgeous, while he, the boy-next-door, is just hanging out with his girlfriend. (They were married by then).

The moderniser

His instincts were in the right place. He deserves credit for the introduction of the telecom revolution in 1985 and for taking information technology to the masses.

When the US refused to sell the Cray supercomputer to India in the mid-1980s, because it believed India would use these dual technologies to promote its nuclear weapons and missile programmes, India set up the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing in March 1988, which was mandated to develop an indigenous supercomputer.

Rajiv Gandhi turned to the scientist Vijay Bhatkar, and asked him three questions:

RG : Can we do it?

VB : I have not seen a supercomputer as we have no access to one. I have only seen a picture of the Cray. But yes, we can.

RG : How long will it take?

VB : Less time than it will take us to convince the Americans to let us import the Cray.

RG : How much will it cost?

VB : The whole effort, including the development of the technology, commissioning and installing the supercomputer – building an institution – will cost less than the Cray.

Within three years, the PARAM was born.

Kept the nuclear file alive 

Rajiv Gandhi kept the nuclear option alive, even when he went to the United Nations in 1988 to put on the table a step-by-step plan for nuclear disarmament. By now, Rajiv Gandhi was fully embroiled in the Bofors and Ayodhya disputes, but he never forgot that it was his responsibility as prime minister to keep India’s nuclear option open.

He had inherited the mission from his mother, Indira Gandhi, but he took great pains to see that India never succumbed to international pressure to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

If he had, the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government, 10 years later in 1998, could have never gone overtly nuclear. In fact, Vajpayee took a leaf out of Rajiv Gandhi’s book soon after, by announcing India’s no-first-use doctrine.

Panchayati raj

Rajiv Gandhi’s determination that democracy must be taken to the grassroots came early in his prime-ministership. With 450 out of 542 seats in the Lok Sabha predominantly rural in the mid-1980s (how things have changed!), Rajiv Gandhi told district magistrates in 1986, “Your task is to see how to marry the Panchayati Raj institutions with the demands of district planning.”

By 1988, he had summoned chief secretaries of all states for a discussion on a report given by the district magistrates. In February 1989, he called for a Panchayati Raj sammelan in Delhi and in May of the same year, the AICC session passed a resolution saying that “the tenth milestone in Independent India will be conferment of Constitutional status on Panchayati Raj”.

A secular man

Much of the public evidence militates against this statement – the Sikh riots, the Shah Bano affairs, the 1987 opening of the locks on the “temple” in the Babri Masjid complex – but the truth remains that Rajiv Gandhi firmly believed in the fundamental secular foundations of the Republic.

The fact is that he wasn’t a politician. Then, there were his friends, notably Arun Nehru, who is believed to have fully known what was happening during the Sikh riots of 1984 (he knew, for example, that Congressmen were being encouraged to kill Sikhs), but he had no control over them – a major prime ministerial failing.

Worse, he listened to the advice of these new courtiers because he didn’t know any better – his mother’s trusted old Congress guard, including R.K. Dhawan, was shown the door by these courtiers.

But unlike the RSS, which believes in Hindu fundamentalist politics, a Hindu Rashtra, Rajiv Gandhi was no demagogue. He didn’t keep quiet when Muslims were killed, when the mobs came for them, in Meerut, for example, in 1987. Certainly, men didn’t wreak vengeance on other men during his time, in the name of the cow – he would never, ever have allowed it.

All the signs are that he had learnt from his terrible mistakes — when death claimed him, a much-too-young man, in 1991.

Rajiv Gandhi’s story is the story of a wonderful man, a prime minister who should have known better. He loved India and was loved by it.