TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/060391/0603000.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 14.4 KB | 296 lines

                                  
                                            WORLD, Page 28

INDIA

Death's Return Visit


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.