What must it feel like to do a job you were not yet ready to do, which your family begged you not to take, and which could well cost you your life?
I thought about that last Tuesday because it was Rajiv Gandhi’s birth anniversary. Rajiv was assassinated in 1991. Very few of the people who now offer opinions about him or assessments of his term as Prime Minister, which lasted from 1984 to 1989, have any real memories or much knowledge of what those days were like. Certainly, hardly anyone talks about what Rajiv himself was like.
Instead, his memory has become victim to a barrage of internet propaganda and Sanghi rewriting of history. The man himself, his essential decency and his considerable achievements have all been buried under a heap of bogus stories made up by people with agendas. The Congress’s political opponents consider it necessary to demean Rajiv to be able to attack his children and his party.
With the passage of time and the advent of WhatsApp history, we have forgotten the circumstances under which Rajiv became prime minister. While it is now routine to praise Indira Gandhi, the truth is that by 1984, her best days were long behind her. India was riven by secessionist movements that she had mishandled (most notably in Punjab). There was no clear policy direction (Indira had stopped being Left-wing but wasn’t quite ready to believe in the market), and the institutions of democracy had been subverted and belittled. The second most powerful person in India wasn’t a holder of an elected or constitutional office; it was her private secretary RK Dhawan.
‘They will kill you too’
Rajiv was determinedly non-political (he was a pilot with Indian Airlines) till his mother drafted him to fill the gap caused by the death of her politically-minded son Sanjay in a plane crash. Rajiv’s wife objected to his joining politics – “I fought like a tigress for the life we had made together”, she would later write about that decision. But he gave in to his mother’s request. When he joined politics in 1981, nobody expected Indira, who was 62 then, to die for at least another decade. But just three years later, she was assassinated. Rajiv got the job before he was ready.
PC Alexander, who was Indira Gandhi’s Principal Private Secretary, has written about seeing Rajiv at AIIMS, where his mother’s body lay, comforting and reassuring his wife who begged him not to take the job. “They will kill you too”, she said. “They will kill me anyway,” he responded.
It was not an auspicious beginning, especially as the government failed to prevent the Sikh massacres, many conducted by Congress members in the aftermath of the assassination. And yet Rajiv moved swiftly to call an election – that he won by a landslide – and began to try and heal India. Accords were signed with those who had rebelled against the Centre’s authority. Peace returned to Assam, Mizoram and Nagaland and though it took longer, eventually to Punjab.
Unlike his mother, Rajiv believed in the market though he was convinced that India needed its own economic model. While he maintained a deep bond with those at the margins of society, he was the first prime minister to recognise the importance of the middle class.
He was certainly the first man to occupy that office who, before he became PM, had actually held down a salaried job, seen income tax deducted at source from his pay, and had made provident fund contributions. He urged his first finance minister, VP Singh, to take middle-class interests into account, and recognised that if India was to move into the 21st Century, it had to empower its middle class.
We forget now how many obstacles the bureaucracy threw in his way. We do not remember how he was attacked for favouring the middle class, a class that Indira had never had much time for. We also forget that his obsession with digital solutions and computers made him the butt of countless jokes and was continually opposed by the old guard in his party. But he would not be deterred. India missed the Industrial Revolution, he said. And he would not let it miss the electronic revolution.
Did he know how to implement everything he wanted to do? Clearly not. He had not fully understood how the government worked and he was often frustrated by how much the system resisted his attempts to make changes. In 1990, after he had lost power, he said to me in an interview: “Yes, I was young, I made mistakes.” Off-the-record he added: “If you become prime minister tomorrow, you would make the same mistakes.”
Unable to fathom the intricacies of the system, he relied too much on old friends and cousins who disappointed, betrayed or embarrassed him. In the early years, when he was wildly popular, the adulation heaped upon him gave him the confidence to go on. But by the end, when his popularity had begun to ebb, he often seemed bemused and impatient and there were flashes of temper.
Also read: Rajiv Gandhi launched his 1989 election campaign from Lucknow. This is what he said
No time for mistakes
Rajiv Gandhi worked to restore the primacy of the Constitution. There was no more government by personal assistants. All dissent was not swiftly put down (A mistake, Congress members would say later.) He made himself accessible to the press and spoke his mind at interviews, even when it may have been more politically expedient to be discreet. In all his face-to-face dealings with the media and with people from outside politics, he came off as candid and spontaneous.
When Rajiv was prime minister, and I was the editor of a political magazine, I was frequently openly critical of his actions. There is not a shred of evidence that he profited from Bofors (and many different governments tried to find proof against him). But there is no doubt that he was so stunned by the accusations that he mishandled the investigations, allowing those involved to get away. I opposed the Anti-Defamation Bill he wanted to introduce (it was later dropped). I thought he was wrong on the Shah Bano case and overall, he misjudged the mood of the nation, allowing a Hindu backlash – which led to the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party – to build up.
Rajiv was handed a Hindu vote bank that had been nurtured by his mother and encouraged to pander to it by his cousin and adviser Arun Nehru. He refused to do so, arguing that he would not play communal politics to win votes. In the process, his government sent out mixed signals: on one hand, Nehru had the locks of the Ram Temple opened, while on the other, many of Rajiv’s decisions came to be seen by Hindu voters as appeasement of Muslims.
Would things have been different if fate had given him the time to gain more political experience before he got the top job? Almost certainly. It would have given him the understanding of the system that he lacked as prime minister.
Everybody else who has ever risen to the top has had years to make mistakes before figuring out the best way to handle political responsibility. Even a so-called outsider like Manmohan Singh became prime minister 13 years after he accepted his first ministerial post. Narendra Modi spent about 13 years as chief minister of Gujarat before moving to South Block, and many years in Sangh politics before that.
Experience always makes a crucial difference. Even Rajiv’s son Rahul Gandhi is a far more accomplished politician today than he was a decade ago. Nobody has ever become prime minister with as little experience as Rajiv had.
And yet, I don’t know if political experience would have made a difference to his basic nature. I remember waiting to see him at 10 Janpath in 1991 after Chandra Shekhar had fallen. The waiting room was full of Congress leaders who were convinced that the party should immediately form the government because it could gather the numbers. But when I went in to see him, I found that Rajiv did not agree: he was determined to fight an election. Why, I asked, did he need to force an unnecessary election? Well, he said, because we must go to the people and ask for a mandate.
This was a refreshingly idealistic view in the middle of cynical talk of defections and coalitions. I met him again during that campaign in Mumbai and then Kolkata. He had no real security, just one PSO. Everywhere he went, he reached out and spoke to ordinary people. He must have known that he was risking his life only
to give the electorate some voice in choosing who would form the next government.
But he did it anyway.
After his funeral, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who had been a vocal political opponent, told a story that few people had known before. During Rajiv’s prime ministership, Vajpayee developed a serious kidney ailment. He needed surgery that he could not afford. Rajiv found out about it and included Vajpayee in an official delegation to the United Nations, which helped him have his surgery in the United States.
Vajpayee said he did not know who had told Rajiv about his ailment, or why Rajiv had gone out of his way to help a political opponent he did not know well.
Somehow, I was not surprised by the story. It seemed to me to epitomise what Rajiv was like.
Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist, and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)
Excellent & detailed article, will certainly help people our country understand Shri Rajeev Gandhi contributions as PM
To Rajiv Gandhi goes the credit of messing up India’s economy to an extent that gold had to be mortgaged to tide over India ‘s debt crisis. It led to approaching the IMF. He was followed by a very underrated PM Chandrasekhar who Rajiv pulled down on flimsy grounds. Finally it needed India’s greatest PM PV Narsimha Rao and his more than able Finance Minister Manmohan Singh to reverse the rot by bringing in unprecedented changes. Rajiv was at best mediocre, thrust into the job by accident and probably against his own wishes. The only person who makes Rajiv look good is his own son Rahul Gandhi.
well written
good natured, decent, good intent are subjective views. what matters is objectivity and outcomes. More than anyone else RG himself probably knew he had little exp in politics. If he wanted to get experience, he must have handed PM’ship to someone senior in the party. None of these arguments are valid. When you accept a responsibility, get a brutal majority and mess it up like that, you deserve to be shown the gate. Of course, sympathies to the family bcas of the way his end came. Very sad. But beyond that, I think the five years of Rajiv and the next few years of uncertainty brought the country to the brink, until it was rescued by a much vilified man called P V Narasimha Rao. To this day, the congress party diminishes and disrespects his work and legacy… for one simple reason, they value the family over the nation.