Rajiv Gandhi in by the back door

Press, 24 January 1984, Page 16

Rajiv Gandhi in by the back door

By

CHAITANYA KALBAG,

of Reuter,

in Calcutta

Rajiv Gandhi, the 39-year-old son of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, has emerged as the rising star of Indian politics at a national convention of her ruling Congress Party. Hailed by party workers as India’s hope for the future, Rajiv took centre stage at the conference earlier this month next to his mother and is regarded by many across India as her chosen heir apparent. Critics accuse Mrs Gandhi of trying to impose Rajiv as her successor in an effort to perpetuate the political dynasty founded by her father Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first post-independence Prime Minister.

Mrs Gandhi dismisses suggestions that she is grooming Rajiv as the dauphin, saying it is up to the people to decide, but few, even in her own party, take her at her word.

Rajiv made a triumphal entry into Calcutta for the conference aboard a special train festooned with placards and posters of himself and his 66-year-old mother, who has ruled India since 1966, with a brief gap between 1977-80.

Dressed in traditional Indian loose-fitting kurta-pyjamas, Rajiv looks more handsome in the flesh than in photographs.

As he sat on the conference podium among the old men of the

Congress leadership, he was described as “a rosebud in a bed of over-ripe cabbages” by Khushwant Singh, one of India’s leading political commentators.

A slow-speaking, slightly balding man,, Rajiv was a late starter in Indian politics. He was drafted in by the Prime Minister after the death of his younger brother, Sanjay. Until he died in a plane crash in 1980, Sanjay was his mother’s chief lieutenant and played an important part in her period of emergency rule from 1975-77. Rajiv, a former airline pilot married to a pretty Italian girl, was content to sit on the sidelines. “I was very happy with the airlines, but after Sanjay’s death there was a void in the party, and a feeling that only I could fill it,” he told Calcutta’s main Bengalilanguage daily newspaper, “Ananda Bazar Patrika.”

At present he is one of five secretary-generals in the Congress Party. So far he has achieved position and influence without a fight.

Suggestions that internal party elections would be held at the Calcutta convention never materialised and, until now, no one has dared challenge his rise. Today, he occupies the de facto number two position after his mother.

“Crucial governmental decisions are made by the Prime Minister often only on the son’s advice and often by the son himself,” wrote H. K. Dua, the “Indian Express” newspaper’s political correspondent, during the week’s conference. “The ill-concealed dynastic functioning is evident to the rank and file of a captive ruling party and no one dares question it,” he added.

Hailed as “Mr Clean” when he entered politics, he is building up a □and of young men around him. Many of them have experience in industry and were his classmates at an exclusive private school in northern India.

Displacing the white cloth caps of the era of Mahatma Gandhi, the new men have introduced modern advertising techniques and com-

puterised poll forecasting to Indian electoral politics. He is trying to breathe new life into a party founded almost 100 years ago but now riven by internal bickering and saddled with stale ideology. His mother, the party’s president, has launched a campaign to revive its village-level contact with the people in an effort to drum up new support ahead of a coming general election. This could be Rajiv’s biggest test.

Having taken over Sanjay’s former parliamentary constituency in the north Indian district of Amethi, he now faces the prospect of a family fight with his brother’s widow, Maneka Gandhi. Maneka, a 27-year-old former model and journalist, fell out with Mrs Gandhi after Sanjay’s death and has become an embarrassing thorn in her side.

She formed her own fledgling

political party last year and assisted in the dramatic defeat of the Congress Party in its former southern stronghold of Andhra Pradesh 12 months ago. Now she has vowed to take on Rajiv in his own constituency —

and as Sanjay’s widow she can command a sympathy in Amethi. Rajiv, who is having to learn the cut and the thrust of politics, used the conference to lash out at the opposition of both Left and Right. He accused the Communist Government of West Bengal, which has Calcutta as its captial, of economic mismanagement and produced a string of figures to make his point.

In a biting rebuke, the West Bengal Finance Minister, Ashok Mitra, said that he was “not prepared to learn economics from an airline pilot whose only qualification is that he is Mrs Gandhi’s son. We have our own economics

and policies which have received the mandate of the people ” Mrs Gandhi herself is particularly touchy about Rajiv. She refused to answer a question at a press conference here about how she assessed his performance as party secretary-general. “Is it of national importance? I am not answering this question. Freedom of the press does not mean saying and doing things which are not in the national interest ...” she snarled.

The “Calcutta Telegraph” believed some local Congress Party workers may have shown some unwitting political acumen.”

It noted that just outside the entrance to the conference stadium was a poster proclaiming: “Welcome to Rajiv Gandhi, hope of tomorrow.” Immediately below was the notice: “Please use the back door.”