Would an older, wiser Rajiv Gandhi have meant a different India?

The night Rajiv Gandhi was killed I had just returned from a reporting visit to Rajasthan. I worked for the now-defunct Business and Political Observer, Anil Ambani’s failed attempt to become Rupert Murdoch (and his father Dhirubhai’s vehicle to settle scores with all those who had tormented him throughout the 1980s) that was known by its decades-ahead-of-its-time acronym, BPO. I was the junior-most political correspondent and was thus saddled with covering elections in the hottest part of the country, the Thar Desert, which contains India’s largest Lok Sabha constituency Barmer. Jaisalmer falls in this constituency, and though it is one of the prettiest places in India, it is no place to drive around in an old, rattling Ambassador at this time of the year (remember, this was historical moments before economic liberalisation, at a time when the Maruti 800 was considered a ‘sexy’ car). While going around, asking sharper-than-a-city-boy rural-folk who they would vote for, a thought kept returning to me: what was the use of this election, just a year-and-a-half after the last one, and probably a year-and-a-half before the next one. Though voters looked forward to a visit by “Raju bhaiya”, as they called the Congress chief and ex-prime minister, matters appeared headed towards a hung Parliament once again.

All that changed when an LTTE suicide bomber embraced Rajiv Gandhi a short distance outside Chennai. I had returned to New Delhi that very evening, exhausted and thirsty, and was squeezing a lemon into my wife’s watery Old Monk when the bureau chief called up and ordered me to haul my butt out to the ex-PM’s house at 10, Janpath, and then to office. I stopped to pick up a colleague, also recently married and returned from a reporting tour, both of us worried of a repeat of the November riots that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, this time directed at Tamils (fortunately, Chandrashekhar’s government allowed no nonsense).

Rajiv Gandhi’s murder was genuinely saddening. This was despite the fact that the Bofors scandal had turned many of us youngsters against him during the last two years of his government (how quaint it now seems compared to the mind-boggling monies of the 2G scam); despite the fact that none of us were impressed by the way he reacted to either the reservations issue as recommended by the Mandal Commission report or to the anarchy in Kashmir (which, at the time, looked as if it was on its way out of India forever); and despite the fact that his achievements are more appreciable with the lucidity of hindsight - he was modern in outlook and arguably forced the country on to a path of computerisation which has contributed to India’s emergence in IT. His death was saddening because he was youthful and came across as sincere. I met him once: his warmth and genuine desire to do right by the country was unmistakable, and was also a lesson in how different a person can be from his/her media caricature.

Of course, sincerity is no substitute for direction, resolve and a proper agenda, and it is telling that we sniggered when we saw Rajiv Gandhi’s post-mortem details as published on the front page of The Hindu, in which one line read: “Brain — absent” (meaning, of course, that the blast had been so powerful it blew his organs out of his structure). Yet I felt positively about Rajiv Gandhi and it irked me to see, during my recent four-year stint in Chennai, the venality of ex-chief minister M Karunanidhi, who continues to be unrepentant about a former Indian prime minister’s murder simply because it was done by fighters for Tamil Eelam (which is why his silence over the genocide of Tamils by the Sri Lankan government in 2009, as documented by the UN, is baffling). If Rahul Gandhi never bothered to pay a courtesy call on Mr Kalaignar, then Rajiv has a reason to be proud of his son.

Sometimes I wonder what Rajiv Gandhi, and India, might have been like had he not been assassinated. India probably would not have been much different, whether it be economic liberalisation or religious polarisation or poverty alleviation. We wouldn’t have had either PV Narasimha Rao or Manmohan Singh as prime ministers; Congress would no doubt have been headed by a wiser, mature and more experienced Rajiv Gandhi. A wiser and mature PM like AB Vajpayee, however, could not make headway with Pakistan despite trying as hard as he could.
The one thing no one could ever deny about Rajiv, though, was his determination to push India into modernity. Perhaps, if he had been alive today, he would have jumped on the chance presented by India’s and China’s rise in the 21st century. He would have been more alive to the moment than our Abdul Kalams, our Nandan Nilekanis and our Manmohan Singhs. It’s a thought that is all the more rueful considering the political pygmies that our confused country is saddled with at the moment.