TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=91TT1234> <link 93XP0300> <title> June 03, 1991: India:Death's Return Visit </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 June 03, 1991 Date Rape </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> WORLD, Page 28 INDIA Death's Return Visit </hdr> <body> A horrific assassination claims India's most famous son, leaving the nation to ponder a future of growing violence and division By James Walsh--Reported by Edward W. Desmond and Anita Pratap/ New Delhi and G.C. Shekhar/Sriperumbudur This is the art of darkness: a young woman offers a sandalwood garland, bows from the waist--and, suddenly, the once and likely future hope of India, a figure invested with the symbolic weight of generations, is obliterated in a deafening roar and a ball of flame. A man whose incandescent family had long been identified with one-sixth of the human race, Rajiv Gandhi last week went the way of his mother Indira, falling to a climate of violence that has steadily overtaken the subcontinent. Rajiv, 46, heir to a miraculous name, disappeared in a fiendish conjurer's trick: amid the theatrics of an electioneering stop, and in the puff of smoke from a bomb. With one blow, the fortunes of 844 million people became hostage to a terrible uncertainty. On the comeback trail for months, the former Prime Minister had gone a long way toward regaining public faith in his ability to rescue India from a deepening hole of debt, drift and alienation. His death sickened the country with shame and impotent rage. It was horrifying enough that a bomb could have ripped apart the latest and perhaps last standard bearer of the Nehru-Gandhi line. But India, like most mourners, basically wept for itself. Said Natwar Singh, a former deputy in Gandhi's Cabinet: "What has this country of Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi come to? We were an example to the world. Now we are a warning." Indians did not love Rajiv in the universal way they adored his grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first and longest-serving Prime Minister. Nor did they honor him with the widespread, if sometimes grudging, respect that they paid Indira Gandhi during her checkered leadership. But they regarded him as an essentially decent man, a reluctant politician struggling to live up to his inheritance of noblesse oblige. Beyond that, he was virtually one of Midnight's Children, the generation that came into the world on the eve of hard-won independence from the British Empire in 1947. After Rajiv was born in a Bombay hospital in August 1944, Nehru, then a political prisoner, wrote that when "a new birth is intimately connected with us, it becomes a revival of ourselves, and our old hopes center round it." In an important way, the old hopes of India's founding fathers also exploded on May 22, 1991. The desperation of the hour was vividly illustrated by the Congress Party's resort to nominating Gandhi's Italian-born and determinedly apolitical widow Sonia to the party presidency. Her polite refusal, returned within a day of the offer, forced the party to look within for the first nondescendant of Nehru who might hold the reins of government since Lal Bahadur Shastri briefly succeeded the late patriarch in the gentler year of 1964. India is much changed today. Apart from the egregious act of violence that killed Rajiv, the bloody shirt of extremism and communal vengeance has been threatening to supersede all norms of democracy in the nation. Last week's first round of balloting was attended by an unprecedented wave of killings and vote rigging. And yet Gandhi had held out an at least plausible promise that a restoration of his leadership might help bring back stability after 18 months of rudderless rule. His campaign swing through Tamil Nadu, the keystone state of south India, was almost a perfunctory exercise; it was safe territory, and his Congress Party seemed en route to recovering the national government. In the rural temple town of Sriperumbudur, 26 miles southwest of Madras, Gandhi stepped out of his touring car and greeted a crowd of well-wishers. Though the itinerary had been hastily drafted, Sriperumbudur was electric with late-night festivities as a throng of 10,000 turned out to welcome Gandhi. At a far corner of the large, hummocky rally ground was a temporary speaker's platform flanked by VIP and press enclosures, with a barricaded space for photographers in front. Security was light: a scattering of police, no automatic rifles, no metal detectors in evidence, if present at all. Gandhi had been campaigning with little protection, a marked contrast to his previous style. His mother's assassination by Sikh bodyguards in 1984, the event that catapulted the former airline pilot into the prime ministership, had highlighted his vulnerability. For years he wore a bulletproof vest and surrounded himself with security so tight that opponents had begun ridiculing him. That proved to be an important factor leading to his defeat in the November 1989 elections. V.P. Singh, a former Congress notable whose opposition bloc went on to win the government, charged at the time that Gandhi, who usually kept out of the crush and was shielded by a phalanx of commandos, "had lost touch with the people." It was a mistake--as Rajiv saw it--that he did not repeat. While pressing the flesh in the northern state of Bihar on May 5, he spoke about the change. "I used to campaign like this when I was secretary-general of the Congress, in 1984, but when I was Prime Minister I was hijacked by the system," he said. "There is still a threat, of course; it hasn't come down. But there is no choice. Either you campaign or you look after your security." So it was that when he arrived in Sriperumbudur, he barely paused before wading into the crowd. A woman, judged to be Tamil and in her late 20s, pushed her way forward to the red-carpeted greeting queue and handed him a garland. As she bent forward deferentially, as if to touch his feet, a sophisticated explosive device went off with a huge blast, triggered by a manual detonator. It killed him instantly, ripping into his torso and mutilating his face beyond recognition. It also killed at least 15 others. A policewoman lay dead with both legs severed. Nearby was a slain photographer, his camera still slung around his neck. Amid the mangle of flesh and torn limbs was the garland offerer herself, apparently a suicidal assassin. Her back had taken the full force of the explosion, and her head had been sent flying nearly a dozen feet into the photographers' compound, where it was later discovered with face intact. As investigators reconstructed the crime, she had worn a brace of the kind usually associated with victims of back pain. But the girdle seems to have packed three to five sticks of cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine, a powerful plastic explosive commonly used for demolition work. Suspicions zeroed in at once on the Tamil Tigers, a combat-hardened band of guerrillas who have been fighting for a separate state in northeast Sri Lanka. Notoriously dedicated and vengeful, the Tigers have mastered terrorist bombing to a degree still unknown among India's own insurgents. Gandhi, whose mother's policies had done much to whelp and teethe the Tigers, earned their enmity in 1987 when he co-authored a peace plan for their offshore island republic. Instead of surrendering their arms, the Tigers fought Indian peacekeeping troops in hit-and-run warfare with extensive casualties. In the atrocity's immediate aftermath, Gandhi supporters on streets across India wanted to strike back but lacked clear-cut targets for their fury. As the news reached the capital that night, roving groups of young men with stubbly faces and mean looks converged on No. 10 Janpath, Gandhi's home in the heart of New Delhi. They were a rough, ill-clad bunch, much the sort that had gone berserk after Indira's murder and slaughtered thousands of Sikhs around the capital. Their mood worsened as the night wore on, and they beat up several cameramen for no apparent reason. Some chanted slogans blaming the CIA and called for an attack on the U.S. embassy. Others randomly pointed to V.P. Singh one minute, the ultra-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) the next. Later Sonia Gandhi, 44, and her 19-year-old daughter Priyanka quietly escaped from the residence and flew to Madras on an Indian air force plane to claim Rajiv's body. The rest of India was in shock. By government order, shops and offices remained closed, and security forces patrolled the capital. A crucial decision came when elections commissioner T.N. Seshan put off the second and third main rounds of voting for a month. Election-related mayhem had taken 229 lives across the country even before Gandhi's assassination; in its wake, 26 more people died. A week of national mourning was proclaimed, and Gandhi's body was laid to rest in state in Teen Murti House, the spacious dwelling that had been the residence of the colonial armed-forces chief under the British Raj. Gandhi had spent most of his boyhood in Teen Murti (Three Statues) after Nehru had taken it over as the prime ministerial residence. Now the Nehru Memorial, it was the house in which Indira Gandhi had served her father as hostess during the early years of independence. It was an era in which Rajiv and his younger brother Sanjay saw most of the world's major political figures trip through: Presidents and kings, commissars and emerging Third World statesmen. One anecdote relates that the young Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama were missing at the house during a visit. The spiritual leaders of Tibetans were found in the backyard playing around a wigwam with the Gandhi boys. That sort of heritage, a bridge to India's early dreams as a nation and even earlier struggle for freedom, will not be replaced easily. The Indian National Congress, with Nehru's father Motilal at its head before him, had been the sturdy vehicle that liberated India from white sahibs, created a promising republic and shaped a sense of common purpose among a kaleidoscopic variety of religions, complexions, castes and tongues. But if the party had once relied on secularism and consensus building, in more recent years it became the fief of one family. Devoted to her country as she was, Indira cultivated the idea that India would come apart at the seams if a Gandhi did not clutch the threads. She kept her sons sheltered from politics when they were young, and they came of age as political naifs. But in the 1970s, as she centralized power in the Congress and made over the party in her own image, the willful Sanjay was groomed as her logical successor. Wielding power outside of office and the constitution, Sanjay and his Youth Congress loyalists undertook to bend the nation to their fancies, even compelling some sterilizations in the dictatorial years of Indira's 1975-77 Emergency. Sanjay proceeded to kill himself as he had lived--recklessly, in the 1980 crash of an aerobatic plane he was flying. It was then that the self-effacing Rajiv, a pilot with domestic Indian Airlines, was recruited to be his mother's next in line. Rajiv's goal was to give his country reform, modernization, deregulation--all catchwords underpinning his frequently quoted aim of "bringing India into the 21st century." But he failed to do so in his first stab at leadership, and whether he could have done so during a second time around had remained open to question. "Computerji," as he became known, long ago found that he and his privileged circle of technology lovers were not equal to the task of budging old-line party pros and the bureaucracy-infested Industrial Raj. As columnist Sunanda Datta-Ray remarked in the Statesman of Calcutta last week, "He faltered at least partly because he was a young man in a hurry, because he lacked the conceptual framework and the experience to match his vision." His later years in office were also clouded by charges of hefty bribe taking among aides and by his own imperiousness. It may be that the Congress Party will benefit from a large sympathy vote. An alternative theory is that Indians, aghast at the party's desperate flounderings, will opt in large numbers for the better-organized but politically ominous B.J.P. The outcome in either case would be an ironic footnote to the history of an illustrious clan: its latter-day stamp on public life would have come from an act of great violence. It was no consolation to supporters of the family that the deaths of both mother and son may have originated in policies of their own devising. Indira had covertly helped promote the rise of Sikh extremism in Punjab in an effort to thwart a more moderate rival party in the troubled northwestern state. In his turn, Rajiv had gone along for a while with arming the Tamil Tigers and furnishing them with sanctuary and training camps in southern India. But he had abandoned that effort by mid-1987, and the image that survives him is mostly favorable. Rajiv's greatest liability--the fact that he was not by nature a politician--was also his virtue. "Those who talked to Rajiv Gandhi noted the absence of humbug that is so typical of our political leaders," wrote Datta-Ray. Yet many thoughtful Indians and foreign leaders are not at all ready to write off the world's largest democracy. "Indian democracy has weathered such blows before and can do so again," said a senior British diplomat. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith, U.S. ambassador to New Delhi during the Kennedy Administration, called the system "imperfect but secure." Said Galbraith: "The idea that the people of India would surrender their sovereignty to any form of dictatorship is not true. And I would feel sorry for anyone who tried to impose it on them." What may be the end of the line for the Nehrus and Gandhis may also rid India of the cult of personality and the stranglehold of centralized power. When Indira was elevated to the Congress presidency in 1959, Nehru was the first to abhor the prospect of a dynasty. He later told an American interviewer, "I am not capable of ruling from the grave. How terrible it would be if I, after all I have said about the processes of democratic government, were to attempt to handpick a successor. The best I can do for India is to help our people as a whole generate new leadership as it may be needed." A full generation later, that time of need has come. </body> </article> </text>