GANDHI, RAJIV

GANDHI, RAJIV (1944–1991), prime minister of India (1984–1989). Born in 1944, Rajiv Gandhi was the eldest son of Indira Gandhi, daughter of the first Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. Rajiv's father, Feroze Gandhi, was a Parsi, a Gujarati-speaking Zoroastrian, who was briefly elected to India's Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament).

Like his grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rajiv studied at Cambridge University, but he failed to complete his engineering degree there. While at Cambridge, he met Sonia Maino, the daughter of an Italian industrialist, who was studying English at a local college. They married, and Rajiv Gandhi became a pilot for Air India, resisting a political career until he was finally persuaded to run for office by his mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, after the accidental death in 1980 of Rajiv's younger brother, Sanjay. Until then, Sanjay Gandhi was being groomed to succeed her as prime minister. Rajiv was elected to Parliament in 1981 from the rural constituency of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh. Following the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, the Congress Party persuaded Rajiv Gandhi to succeed his mother as head of the Congress Party and as prime minister of India.

Forty years old at the time, Rajiv Gandhi led his Congress Party to victory and was welcomed as prime minister on a wave of sympathy for his assassinated mother and widespread admiration for his youthful dynamism and modern outlook. His politics as prime minister was not divisive or controversial, nor very striking or groundbreaking, compared to that of his mother and his grandfather. His tenure was notable for promoting high technology in India, though without much impact on reducing poverty.

In the foreign arena, he continued his mother's close ties with the United States, and in particular, promoted the close personal ties that she had established with President Ronald Reagan. Closer to home, his fateful foreign policy mistake was India's intervention in Sri Lanka, which was locked in a devastating civil war between the Sinhalese government and the rebellious Tamil areas of the north seeking an independent Tamil Ealam (nation). In an agreement with President Julius Jayawardene, the Sri Lankan president, Rajiv committed several divisions of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) to the Colombo government to help it disarm and pacify the Tamil militants. Having gone to "disarm" the rebellious Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) and bring about peace, the IPKF ended up fighting the LTTE, and was withdrawn ten years later with no peace in sight.

Scandals and allegations of corruption during his tenure plagued Rajiv Gandhi, especially one that revolved around claims that he had received "kickbacks" from Bofors, a Swedish company that made the long-range guns purchased by India's defense ministry. The Congress Party suffered electoral defeat in 1989 and was succeeded by a coalition led by the Janata Dal party under Vishwanath Pratap Singh as prime minister. This coalition government proved shaky, however, and Rajiv started campaigning again in 1991, when new elections were called. While campaigning outside Madras (now Chennai) in South India, a female LTTE suicide bomber detonated a bomb, killing Rajiv Gandhi and eighteen others.

Raju G. C. Thomas

See alsoGandhi, Indira ; Gandhi, Sonia ; Nehru, Jawaharlal

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aggarwala, Adish C. Rajiv Gandhi: An Assessment. New Delhi: Amish Publications, 1993.

Bhattacharjee, Arun. Rajiv Gandhi: Life and Message of India's Second Slain Prime Minister. Kolkata: Ashish Publishing House, 1992.

Gandhi, Sonia. Rajiv Gandhi's World View. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing, 1991.

Healy, Kathleen. Rajiv Gandhi: The Years of Power. New Delhi: Vikas Publishing, 1989.

Merchant, Minaz. Rajiv Gandhi: The End of a Dream. New Delhi: Viking, 1991.