Rajiv, Rajesh, Ranga — Where have all the young men gone?

All three packed into the brief span of their political lives more, much more than many of many more years in public service. They were not similar and their life courses each took its particular direction. For Rajiv and Ranga, it was partly pre-ordained, for both came from a distinguished political lineage and for both, politics would inevitably begin at or near the top. The risk is that from there it is a much longer way to fall. Rajesh was of more humble origin but long before the end, emerged as a major leader of his community, a powerful voice in both Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, a Congress top brass whose seniority far exceeded his calendar age, and a nationally-known political personality.

All three were mavericks in their own way. Rajiv Gandhi weighed in with his indictment of the power-brokers. And his new-fangled computers. Rajesh Pilot was a media darling — always with enough dissidence in him to provide juicy copy, but never so far out of line as to risk expulsion. And Ranga startled everyone when he — of all people — opted for the BJP. Each built on what he was born with but had the courage to hoe his own furrow, not content to merely seed what others had ploughed.

For Rajiv, the key lay in the white heat of technology, energised by the empowerment of the people. For Rajesh, it lay in the polity responding to the yearning for clean governance. For Ranga, it lay in abandoning the magic of socialism for the magic of the new economy, liberalised and globalised. Together, they might have spelt an entirely new era, the agenda-makers of the second half-century of independent India. Theirs was certainly a clarion call that awoke the young. Creative inquisitiveness, a penchant for innovation, the courage to try out the new, an impatience with the tried and the tested, combined, however, with a healthy respect for what went before, and the underpinning of millennial tradition, characterised all three of them. They were, in the best sense of the term, modern men, men of their times, men who wanted to leave the world different — for the better — to the one into which they were born.

But the country has taken a different course. Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination paved the way for the return of the by-passed generation. Indeed, his death restored to power the by-pass generation. The average age of Prime Ministers rose to the late sixties and mid-seventies. The doctors on duty, and the ambulance in the carcade, which seemed such an anomaly when a man in his forties was Prime Minister, have since the Nineties taken on a different — and more sinister — import.

But history, watching from the wings, mocked the pretensions of the young. The sickle harvested them first. Those born in the aftermath of Gandhiji’s first satyagraha are yet with us. It is Midnight’s Children who are being picked off, one by one.

It was always this way. There is no law which says we must queue up at Death’s doorway in the order stipulated in our birth certificates. Gopalkrishna Gokhale was gone at 49. Subhas Chandra Bose at just about the same age. Deen Dayal Upadhyaya when there were still miles to go. And C.N. Annadurai when all but the doctors would have given him a score or more years.

It is a Law of Nature that governance must be by a mixture of the young and not so young. The septuagenarian Atal Behari Vajpayee has shown as much care in choosing the young to leaven the venerable — the two Aruns and Pramod Mahajan, for example — as the youthful Rajiv Gandhi and his three Parliamentary Secretaries — Amar, Akbar, Antony — had older, wiser, long-experienced heads to temper impulse with maturity. Yet, when one considers the leaders around the world — be it the 52-year-old Bill Clinton or his contemporary in years, George W. Bush or Al Gore; or Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, just 46; or Vladimir Putin in Russia at 54, all years below 60 — the successive loss of the three Rs — Rajiv, Rajesh, Ranga — rams home the immense loss in human talent our young Republic has suffered.