Former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi
Among the few rewards for a print journalist is the gift of being granted a ringside view of history-making events. I have had my share which is now getting rather dated, a clear sign of professional diminishment.
Today marks the 32nd anniversary of for former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s macabre assassination. In keeping with my tangential connections with seminal events in India’s contemporary history since 1981-82, when I began journalism, this is one such. I tried to capture it in a 1992 biography where I wrote:
“The dessert cooler outside my bedroom made a squeaky noise that night. I had postponed lubricating it for far too long. Behind the door a cricket chirped incessantly. God had omitted lubricating it altogether. The two noises combined to produce an eerie effect. I was gradually slipping into sleep when the phone rang. There is nothing more exasperating than being interrupted in the first stages of sleep. I have this habit of looking at the clock by my bedside every time I am woken up by a phone call. It was 11 p.m. on May 21.
Shreyans Shah was calling from Ahmedabad. Shah, the owner of the Gujarat Samachar, the largest Gujarati daily in the world, asked me a matter-of-fact question. “Is it true that Rajiv Gandhi has been assassinated?” Without realising the shattering import of his question, I said I didn’t know. Shah sounded pretty certain about the news, but since I live in New Delhi, he probably thought that I would be better informed about such matters. I promised to get back to him as soon as I found out the truth.
I called Sam Pitroda to ask him if he had heard anything about Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination. There was silence on the other end, a silence jagged by anguish. Pitroda had just recovered from a quadruple bypass surgery a few months before, and despite his protestations to the contrary he was still not fit enough to take such news with equanimity. If hurt could be seen on telephone, I saw it that night.”
The quote accurately situates me in the context within 40 minutes of a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber setting off her explosive vest barely five feet away from Gandhi at 10.10 p.m. in Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, where he had gone to address an election rally.
It was inevitable that as a journalist I did not sleep that night. Among the callers was the host of a news show on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation asking me to report on the assassination. I remember he asked me if there was any immediate suspicion as to the identity of Gandhi’s killers. I told him that given that it was a suicide bomber in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu it was more than likely that it would turn out to be a plot by the Tamil Tigers separatists of Sri Lanka. It did. As far as I can tell it was the first time that a journalist had indicated who the killers might be.
I had met Gandhi a few days before his assassination at a “high tea” in the forecourt of his residence. During a brief exchange I had reminded him that I was waiting for him to give me a couple of hours to finish my interview with him in order to complete Pitroda’s biography. “I promise you as soon as the campaigning is over,” he said.
The next time I was anywhere close to him was at the Delhi airport when his badly dismembered body was flown in by a special aircraft in a casket. Since those were pre-24/7 news channel days, there was no media frenzy at the airport. There were only two journalists—my friend and colleague Tarun Basu and I. Gandhi’s close friend and journalist Suman Dubey was among the men shouldering the casket as the former prime minister’s wife Sonia Gandhi came down from the aircraft looking poised but inscrutable. However, her eyes gave a glimpse of the profound sense of loss she must be feeling.
The passage of over three decades has done nothing to erase the vividness of those 24 hours. I watched Gandhi’s career rather closely but I find it instructive that apart from the night he was assassinated, an incident that I remember about him the most by had nothing to do with his career.
It was sometime in March, 1991, just a couple of months before Gandhi’s assassination that Tarun and I had an unusual encounter with him. If memory serves, it was the day when Gandhi’s Congress Party had withdrawn support to the government of Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar. Chandra Shekhar lasted barely seven months as prime minister before resigning on March 6, 1991.
Tarun and I were returning to office from the parliament after the collapse of the government. Tarun was driving his blue Fiat. As he reversed without looking back we almost crashed into a convoy of cars transporting Gandhi who was at the wheel himself in his SUV. Tarun managed to jam the brake in time but not before causing great anxiety to the former prime minister’s security detail, members of which jumped out with their weapons drawn.
Gandhi saw Tarun and I, both of whom he knew somewhat, smiled and implied that he recognized that Tarun had screwed up. He told his security to let us go even as he waved at us, chuckling.
As people reminisce about Gandhi today, many are pointing out his civility. However, I do remember how reviled he was for precisely that reason. His passion for technology and modernity in particular were the prime target of his detractors’ derision. It is interesting that among his most vocal critics were members of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) who dismissed his idea about computerization with contempt and ridicule. Gandhi was described as “baba log”, someone from a background of great privilege and utterly out of touch with ordinary citizens.
Gandhi was as much a product of his time as he was of his circumstances. Think about that sentence. It sounds rather insightful but it actually does not mean much other than the fact that it is true of any human being on the planet. I wrote it because it sounds as if I know something that you might not. But for his mother, the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s equally gruesome assassination in 1984, Rajiv Gandhi would perhaps never have entered politics. It was the fact that he came unencumbered of doctrinaire ideas about Indian society that he chose the path of modernity for its polity that he did. He succeeded to a reasonable extent but was devoured by some of the very things he tried to stand up against both within his party and outside in government.
His vision of India was articulated by him in 1985 during the centenary celebrations of the Indian National Congress. In a speech that reverberated because of his candor about corruption in the country Gandhi spoke of themes that sound so distant now given his party’s decimation.
Let me quote a bit from that 1985 speech. I happened to report the centenary celebrations for the Associated Press (AP).
“What has become of our great organisation? Instead of a party that fired the imagination of the masses throughout the length and breadth of India, we have shrunk, losing touch with the toiling millions. It is not a question of victories and defeats in elections. For a democratic party, victories and defeats are part of its continuing political existence. But what does matter is whether or not we work among the masses, whether or not we are in tune with their struggles, their hopes and aspirations. We are a party of social transformation, but in our preoccupation with governance we are drifting away from the people. Thereby, we have weakened ourselves and fallen prey to the ills that the loss of invigorating mass contact brings.
Millions of ordinary Congress workers throughout the country are full of enthusiasm for the Congress policies and programmes. But they are handicapped, for on their backs ride the brokers of power and influence, who dispense patronage to convert a mass movement into a feudal oligarchy. They are self-perpetuating cliques who thrive by invoking the slogans of caste and religion and by enmeshing the living body of the Congress in their net of avarice.”
His reference to power brokers struck a lot of people as a refreshing change for the party president to talk about. It is ironic that nearly three decades hence even as the Congress struggles to retain its relevance under the leadership of Gandhi’s son Rahul, it continues to face some of those very ills on top of some very serious existential challenges.
I remember a contemporary Indian leader having used perhaps for the first time the term “medieval obscurantism”. I wrote that down and underlined it in my pad. I suspect the term was coined as well as the speech written by Mani Shankar Aiyar, who went on to become Gandhi’s speech writer and adviser.
“As we have distanced ourselves from the masses, basic issues of national unity and integrity, social change and economic development recede into the background. Instead, phony issues, shrouded in medieval obscurantism, occupy the centre of the stage. Our Congress workers, who faced the bullets of British imperialism, run for shelter at the slightest manifestation of caste and communal tension,” Gandhi said.