Rajiv Gandhi was born on August 20, 1944, in Bombay. He was just three when India became independent and his grandfather became Prime Minister. His parents moved to New Delhi from Lucknow. His father, Feroze Gandhi, became an M.P., and earned a reputation as a fearless and hard-working Parliamentarian.
At 40, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi was the youngest Prime Minister of India, perhaps even one of the youngest elected heads of Government in the world. His mother, Indira Gandhi, was eight years older when she first became Prime Minister in 1966. His illustrious grandfather, Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru, was 58 when he started the long innings of 17 years as free India’s first Prime Minister.
As the harbinger of a generational change in the country, Rajiv Gandhi received the biggest mandate in the nation’s history. He ordered elections to the Lok Sabha, as soon as mourning for his slain mother was over. In that election, the Congress got a much higher proportion of the popular vote than in the preceding seven elections and captured a record 401 seats out of 508.
What makes it even more unique is that Rajiv was a late and reluctant entrant into politics even though he belonged to an intensely political family that had served India for four generations—both during the freedom struggle and afterwards.
Rajiv Gandhi spent his early childhood with his grandfather in the Teen Murti House, where Indira Gandhi served as the Prime Minister’s hostess.
After leaving Doon school, Rajiv went to Trinity College, Cambridge, but soon shifted to the Imperial College (London). He did a course in mechanical engineering. It was clear that politics did not interest him as a career. His greatest passion, however, was flying. No wonder then, that on returning home from England, he passed the entrance examination of the Delhi Flying Club, and went to obtain a commercial pilot’s licence. Soon, he became a pilot with Indian Airlines, the domestic national carrier.
While at Cambridge, he had met Sonia Maino, an Italian who was studying English. They were married in New Delhi in 1968. They stayed in Smt. Indira Gandhi’s residence in New Delhi with their two children, Rahul and Priyanka. But his brother Sanjay’s death in an air crash in 1980 changed the scenario. Pressures were on Rajiv Gandhi to enter politics and help his mother. He resisted these pressures at first, but later bowed to their logic. He won the by-election to the Parliament, caused by his brother’s death, from Amethi in U.P.
In 1982, as General Secretary of the Congress, he started streamlining and ener-gising the party orga-nisation with diligence. All these qualities came to the fore later in far more testing and trying times. For no one could have ascended to power—becoming both Prime Minister and Congress President—in more tragic and tormenting circums-tances than Rajiv Gandhi did in the wake of his mother’s brutal assassination on 31 October, 1984. But he bore the awesome burden of personal grief and national responsibility with remarkable poise, dignity and restraint.
He was assassinated on May 21, 1991, whilst campaigning in for the upcoming parliamentary elections in Tamil Nadu, by the suicide bomber.
He was awarded Bharat Ratna posthumously in 1991.
