Impetus for War or for Healing? : Rajiv Gandhi’s murder rocks India

The murder of Rajiv Gandhi, India’s former prime minister and the man who was widely expected to hold that office again after this month’s elections, was the most reprehensible act of violence to mar an already shockingly violent national election in that troubled nation.

Gandhi’s death is eerily reminiscent of the assassination of his mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who was killed by two of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. Riots erupted after her death. The great fear now is that similar violence could erupt now, with India already on edge as a result of election-related violence that has killed at least 200 other people. More violence would further erode the fragile stability of the world’s largest democracy.

India has long been a powder keg of conflicting religious, separatist and political interests. So far, Indians have been able to resolve most of their differences at the ballot box, not in the streets. That is still the way to preserve India’s unity and precious democracy.

Gandhi, 46, rose to power after the death of his mother. He helped to bring a new national unity to India in 1985 when he led the Congress-I Party to a sweeping victory in Parliament. With this mandate, Gandhi, a former airline pilot, tried to liberalize India’s closed economy by implementing economic reforms. Resistance from the entrenched Indian bureaucracy thwarted him.

Gandhi was attempting a political comeback, two years after his Congress-I Party lost favor with voters in the 1989 election. The Congress-I Party was expected to emerge as the strongest in Parliament after the election, although short of a governing majority.

Right-wing Hindu militants and Sikh and Muslim separatist movements have made significant inroads into the political process in India. They also have made stability harder to maintain. Two tenuous coalition governments have emerged since 1989, but both failed. The most recent one lasted only 117 days.

Religious tensions in India have also worsened since 1989: Some of the worst riots in India’s history erupted last autumn when militant Hindus threatened to level a Muslim mosque to make room for a temple. After a period of calm, a new round of violence erupted this month. Gandhi was killed by a bomb in southern India, not far from the troubled island nation of Sri Lanka, where Indian troops crushed an uprising by Tamil rebels in 1987. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that Tamil rebels may have been involved in the assassination.

But whoever was responsible for Gandhi’s murder, it was the culmination of terrible violence that has made the elections the most bloody in India’s 44 years of independence. Now the nation Gandhi and his family (his grandfather was India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru) have tried to lead toward modernity is at a dangerous crossroads. His assassination could ignite an all-out civil war. Or it could be the national tragedy that brings a grieving nation together to mourn and build a better future.