Raju Korti
Happenstances can sometimes have eerie forebodings. I am referring to my meeting with then prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, just a week before he was assassinated in a bomb blast after addressing a public meeting in the Tamil hotbed of Sriperumbudur. Of course, that was my third meeting with Rajiv. I will not bear on the first two since they do not serve the purpose of this blog.
Pitchforked to the country's top post in a manner perhaps rarely seen in the electoral history of any country, Rajiv, who was just 40 then, had zilch experience in administration and politics. However, piggy-riding on a massive sympathy wave in the wake of his mother Indira Gandhi's assassination, Rajiv's biggest asset was his being a greenhorn in a party that had antiquated leaders comfortably ensconced in their perceived invincibility. He was generally believed to be Mr Clean and inclined towards building a "modern India."
The first happenstance was his anointment as the general secretary of the party. When I cornered him after a customary press conference, he outlined his vision for India as an emerging technical superpower. It was an image he carried with his affable personality and many, including the party's sworn detractors, had begun to see a welcome change in the country's putrid and corrupt politics.
The party had, however, learnt little from the glaring lessons history had thrown at it. Indira's political strategy of resolving a problem after allowing it interminably to fester and take credit backfired badly in Punjab. The Sikhs did not take in kindly to the entry of army in the Golden Temple and she paid the price with her life. That political algorithm should have opened the eyes of the party's superannuated and creaky leaders but the Congress in its ultimate complacency wasn't any wiser. The party's egregious "coterie culture" was always in evidence. I make a mention of the "coterie" culture to validate my point later.
A reluctant starter, Rajiv struck the right chord with the masses by making a straight reference to the caucuses in the party and I distinctly remember that at a party plenary, he even obliquely referred to some party leaders as "whining, moaning and groaning" and warned them against being power brokers. But for a man who made a welcome beginning, he fell prey to the same caucus. If it showed that while the famed coterie was freaking out in the corridors of power, it also revealed Rajiv's susceptibility to elements who were more seasoned at political nitty gritty. He got sucked into that vortex faster than he realized.
The anti-Sikh riots after he took over as the prime minister was baptism by fire and should have been warning enough for him to see the writing on the wall. Even as a novice, he could have seen that the Punjab backlash should have served as a lesson when he was grappling with the ethnic problem in Sri Lanka. The Bhopal disaster, Bofors scandal and Shah Bano case among others showed that here was a prime minister who was falling in the same abyss. The 1989 election, during which I traveled extensively with Vishwanath Pratap Singh, once his trusted aide and later his bete noire, and Rajiv, was an irony of sorts. Although both were Left of Centre, Singh was the emerging Mr Clean while Rajiv's stocks were plummeting and as it happened, Congress lost the battle of hustings. That actually should have been a timely platform for the party to break from its dynastic image but Congress rallied round the family once again and Rajiv became the party president with not even an iota of opposition. The young, and perhaps, some deserving young guns either lacked courage or stood no chance to have a crack at party's leadership. No lesson learnt.
I had a much longer audience with him in 1991, the happenstance that I mentioned at the outset. By a strange development, I was also working as Special Police Officer in charge of regulating VIP traffic along with my regular duties as a journalist. Rajiv was faced with the dangerous and ticklish situation in Sri Lanka where Indian Peace Keeping Forces were involved in a serious combat with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) then widely regarded as the most powerful and ruthless terrorist outfit even ahead of the likes of Taliban, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and Hezbollah.
At a press conference in Nagpur where he was on a whirlwind election tour, I approached him for an interview. He asked me to accompany him to the Gandhian district of Wardha where he was scheduled to address a public rally and eat lunch at industrialist Ramkrishna Bajaj's residence. I was not sure whether the meet would actually happen given his hectic schedule and the manner in which he was constantly surrounded by party leaders but the lunch where I was also an invitee, gave me an opportunity.
During the lunch, he saw me and beckoned me to a quiet corner. "My hands are full as you see. but I will give you 20 minutes, he told me with an apologetic smile." I lost no time and came to the point straightaway. "Don't you think you should avoid going to Madras? The LTTE is gunning for you. Back home, the Tamils are also not happy with you." If he had been warned before by the Intelligence of the impending threat to his life, he didn't show it. It was apparent he had what he believed was a simultaneous master-stroke to secure India's Big Brother hold over Sri Lanka and sweep the carpet from under Karunanidhi's DMK government. "This is an opportunity for me to bring peace to the strife-torn island and strengthen the Congress in Tamil Nadu," he replied. "But don't you think the Sri Lankan government is playing smart? It managed to get India's peace-keeping forces to manage the Indian militants in its country. It may take Pakistan's help to neutralize Muslim extremists and watch all the fun doing nothing to handle an internal crisis which was of its own making," I persisted. Rajiv looked nonchalant. "I don't see the kind of threat perception that is being made out," he said with complete confidence. Either he couldn't care or he didn't have much faith in the Intelligence. He then went on to explain how the strife-torn island would return to normal with the marginalization of LTTE and help him establish a Congress government in Tamil Nadu later. A couple of times I tried to tell him about the dangers of campaigning in Tamil Nadu, he cut me off with a wave of his hand. "You wait and see. I will be on a comeback trail," he asserted and even asked me to tag along with him to TN to see how he would swing the electoral campaign in his favour. None of what he had planned happened. This was on May 12, 1991. Just a week later, he was killed by an LTTE suicide bomber. The sports shoes that I saw him wearing during my meeting with him were his only remnants and identification. The Lankan crisis hurtled from bad to worse, the LTTE lived up to its ominous reputation and the people of Tamil Nadu were remorseless and showed no grief. It was a calculation that went horribly wrong. Congress lost two front-line leaders in a span of 7 years and the nation two prime ministers in similar circumstances with similar outcomes and had similar ramifications.
My sense of foreboding also had a tinge of disappointment. On the day I met him, I filed a story about the threat to his life in Madras, based on my personal contacts with Intelligence officials. My editor called me and said how could I file the story without naming the sources in the Intelligence. I told him, one, that officials in that department never reveal their names and two, the story was based on the facts collated from circumstances. In his superior wisdom he discarded the story. He was of course apologetic in hindsight after Rajiv's killing. What finally mattered was both of us looked fools and it was a bad miss for both of us. The paper lost its we-told-you-so opportunity.
I will not delve into the many peripherals of the issue. As I said in the beginning the last meet with Rajiv was a happenstance that had a morbid portents. I brushed aside the temptation of writing about it all these years for the sheer morbidity of it. It is just that it found an outlet today on Rajiv's death anniversary.
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| Rajiv and Rajesh Khanna clicked by me in 1991 |
Pitchforked to the country's top post in a manner perhaps rarely seen in the electoral history of any country, Rajiv, who was just 40 then, had zilch experience in administration and politics. However, piggy-riding on a massive sympathy wave in the wake of his mother Indira Gandhi's assassination, Rajiv's biggest asset was his being a greenhorn in a party that had antiquated leaders comfortably ensconced in their perceived invincibility. He was generally believed to be Mr Clean and inclined towards building a "modern India."
The first happenstance was his anointment as the general secretary of the party. When I cornered him after a customary press conference, he outlined his vision for India as an emerging technical superpower. It was an image he carried with his affable personality and many, including the party's sworn detractors, had begun to see a welcome change in the country's putrid and corrupt politics.
The party had, however, learnt little from the glaring lessons history had thrown at it. Indira's political strategy of resolving a problem after allowing it interminably to fester and take credit backfired badly in Punjab. The Sikhs did not take in kindly to the entry of army in the Golden Temple and she paid the price with her life. That political algorithm should have opened the eyes of the party's superannuated and creaky leaders but the Congress in its ultimate complacency wasn't any wiser. The party's egregious "coterie culture" was always in evidence. I make a mention of the "coterie" culture to validate my point later.
A reluctant starter, Rajiv struck the right chord with the masses by making a straight reference to the caucuses in the party and I distinctly remember that at a party plenary, he even obliquely referred to some party leaders as "whining, moaning and groaning" and warned them against being power brokers. But for a man who made a welcome beginning, he fell prey to the same caucus. If it showed that while the famed coterie was freaking out in the corridors of power, it also revealed Rajiv's susceptibility to elements who were more seasoned at political nitty gritty. He got sucked into that vortex faster than he realized.
The anti-Sikh riots after he took over as the prime minister was baptism by fire and should have been warning enough for him to see the writing on the wall. Even as a novice, he could have seen that the Punjab backlash should have served as a lesson when he was grappling with the ethnic problem in Sri Lanka. The Bhopal disaster, Bofors scandal and Shah Bano case among others showed that here was a prime minister who was falling in the same abyss. The 1989 election, during which I traveled extensively with Vishwanath Pratap Singh, once his trusted aide and later his bete noire, and Rajiv, was an irony of sorts. Although both were Left of Centre, Singh was the emerging Mr Clean while Rajiv's stocks were plummeting and as it happened, Congress lost the battle of hustings. That actually should have been a timely platform for the party to break from its dynastic image but Congress rallied round the family once again and Rajiv became the party president with not even an iota of opposition. The young, and perhaps, some deserving young guns either lacked courage or stood no chance to have a crack at party's leadership. No lesson learnt.
I had a much longer audience with him in 1991, the happenstance that I mentioned at the outset. By a strange development, I was also working as Special Police Officer in charge of regulating VIP traffic along with my regular duties as a journalist. Rajiv was faced with the dangerous and ticklish situation in Sri Lanka where Indian Peace Keeping Forces were involved in a serious combat with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) then widely regarded as the most powerful and ruthless terrorist outfit even ahead of the likes of Taliban, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram and Hezbollah.
At a press conference in Nagpur where he was on a whirlwind election tour, I approached him for an interview. He asked me to accompany him to the Gandhian district of Wardha where he was scheduled to address a public rally and eat lunch at industrialist Ramkrishna Bajaj's residence. I was not sure whether the meet would actually happen given his hectic schedule and the manner in which he was constantly surrounded by party leaders but the lunch where I was also an invitee, gave me an opportunity.
During the lunch, he saw me and beckoned me to a quiet corner. "My hands are full as you see. but I will give you 20 minutes, he told me with an apologetic smile." I lost no time and came to the point straightaway. "Don't you think you should avoid going to Madras? The LTTE is gunning for you. Back home, the Tamils are also not happy with you." If he had been warned before by the Intelligence of the impending threat to his life, he didn't show it. It was apparent he had what he believed was a simultaneous master-stroke to secure India's Big Brother hold over Sri Lanka and sweep the carpet from under Karunanidhi's DMK government. "This is an opportunity for me to bring peace to the strife-torn island and strengthen the Congress in Tamil Nadu," he replied. "But don't you think the Sri Lankan government is playing smart? It managed to get India's peace-keeping forces to manage the Indian militants in its country. It may take Pakistan's help to neutralize Muslim extremists and watch all the fun doing nothing to handle an internal crisis which was of its own making," I persisted. Rajiv looked nonchalant. "I don't see the kind of threat perception that is being made out," he said with complete confidence. Either he couldn't care or he didn't have much faith in the Intelligence. He then went on to explain how the strife-torn island would return to normal with the marginalization of LTTE and help him establish a Congress government in Tamil Nadu later. A couple of times I tried to tell him about the dangers of campaigning in Tamil Nadu, he cut me off with a wave of his hand. "You wait and see. I will be on a comeback trail," he asserted and even asked me to tag along with him to TN to see how he would swing the electoral campaign in his favour. None of what he had planned happened. This was on May 12, 1991. Just a week later, he was killed by an LTTE suicide bomber. The sports shoes that I saw him wearing during my meeting with him were his only remnants and identification. The Lankan crisis hurtled from bad to worse, the LTTE lived up to its ominous reputation and the people of Tamil Nadu were remorseless and showed no grief. It was a calculation that went horribly wrong. Congress lost two front-line leaders in a span of 7 years and the nation two prime ministers in similar circumstances with similar outcomes and had similar ramifications.
My sense of foreboding also had a tinge of disappointment. On the day I met him, I filed a story about the threat to his life in Madras, based on my personal contacts with Intelligence officials. My editor called me and said how could I file the story without naming the sources in the Intelligence. I told him, one, that officials in that department never reveal their names and two, the story was based on the facts collated from circumstances. In his superior wisdom he discarded the story. He was of course apologetic in hindsight after Rajiv's killing. What finally mattered was both of us looked fools and it was a bad miss for both of us. The paper lost its we-told-you-so opportunity.
I will not delve into the many peripherals of the issue. As I said in the beginning the last meet with Rajiv was a happenstance that had a morbid portents. I brushed aside the temptation of writing about it all these years for the sheer morbidity of it. It is just that it found an outlet today on Rajiv's death anniversary.
I felt Sad - at the end of your lovely close encounters with a soft spoken accidental politician, PM - :)
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