Opinion Rear View: How Rajiv had a great fall

They told him not to listen to his bureaucrats “who knew little about politics and much less about the Hindu sentiment”. No wonder, communal discord and conflict worsened by what followed. Amidst Hindu-Muslim riots at various places, the VHP fixed a date for shilanyas (foundation stone-laying ceremony) for a Ram temple at Ayodhya.

Instead of persuading the VHP to abandon or at least defer the plan, Rajiv entered into secret negotiations with it through his home minister, Buta Singh, in search of a compromise. The agreement reached was that the VHP would confine itself to laying the foundation stone and build no structure on it, however small, and that shilanyas would take place on land that was undisputed. On both counts, the VHP stabbed the government in the back and communal tension worsened.

Before continuing the narrative, it must be explained that the prime minister’s urgent need to embrace those whom he had vowed to destroy was the direct result of another of his unwise decisions — to pick a fight with the republic’s president, Giani Zail Singh, a past master in the art of political intrigue and infighting. Disagreement over Punjab, where a virulent new insurgency had erupted after the collapse of the Rajiv-Longowal accord, had much to do with this.

But Rajiv pettily stopped showing the president even customary courtesies. He wouldn’t report to him even on his own foreign visits. When the media asked him why he was violating the established conventions and rules regarding relations with the president, he retorted: “Haven’t I broken so many other conventions also?” One of his biographers, Nick Nugent of the BBC, recorded that by this time he had become “his mother’s son”.

The wily Zail Singh bided his time and hit back only when Rajiv made in Parliament a manifestly wrong statement that the “president was being fully informed”. He sent to the prime minister a sharp rejoinder and quietly leaked it, further eroding Rajiv’s already declining credibility. Zail Singh also started a war of nerves with Rajiv by letting the word spread that he was about to sack the prime minister on charges of corruption, as the vigilant Indian press was digging up more and more information on Bofors.

Despite his monumental majority in Parliament, Rajiv remained nervous about what the president might do, and heaved a sigh of relief only when Zail Singh retired and was succeeded by the vice president, R. Venkataraman, who had masterminded Rajiv’s selection as the successor to his slain mother.

Ironically, however, Rajiv suffered a serious blow to his reputation and authority precisely at the time Zail Singh was leaving Rashtrapati Bhavan. As is well known, when Rajiv came to power, his most trusted confidants were two Aruns — Arun Nehru, a cousin, and Arun Singh, a crony of Rajiv since their school days. After enjoying great power and influence as a minister of state for energy first, and then as minister for internal security in the home ministry, Nehru fell by the wayside. Rajiv had started doubting his loyalty and sacked him before the end of 1986. By the time V.P. Singh emerged as Rajiv’s principal political adversary in 1987, Nehru promptly joined him. However, there was never any doubt about Arun Singh’s fidelity to his friend and boss.

When Rajiv decided to take over the ministry of defence (MoD), he shifted Singh from the PMO to the MoD as minister of state. In the third week of July 1987, he resigned. From that day until now, he has not uttered a single word about his reasons for quitting. But most Indians believe that he was “disgusted” with the way the Bofors scandal was being handled.

While the insurgency in Punjab was still raging, Rajiv created an even more dangerous one in the more sensitive state of Jammu and Kashmir. It can be argued that he had partly inherited the mess from his mother. But instead of cleaning it up, he made it messier. On July 2, 1984, barely three months before her assassination, Indira Gandhi ordered the dismissal of the state government, headed by Farooq Abdullah, the towering Sheikh Abdullah’s son. In his place, she appointed as chief minister Farooq’s bitterest enemy, who was also his brother-in-law, G.M. Shah.

Like the rest of the country, Rajiv discovered that this was a classic case of the remedy being worse than the disease. But he erred in joining hands with Farooq again and then rigging the fresh elections so brazenly as to infuriate the younger generation of Kashmiris wanting fair elections and greater autonomy. A large number of them went across the Line of Control to Pakistan, got training in the Pakistani army’s camps and were given a generous supply of automatic weapons. They returned, together with Pakistani infiltrators, and created such murder and mayhem that it took long years to bring the situation under a semblance of control.

While trying to contain various movements for secession within the country — with mixed results, according to journalists, scholars and historians — Rajiv chose to mediate in a vicious and vile ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka between the Sinhala majority and the Tamil minority that eventually led to a barbarous civil war lasting a quarter of a century. The highly professional Indian army also suffered because it was sent to the island republic as a peacekeeping force. This long, complex and painful story has to be told separately.

The writer is a Delhi-based political commentator