A RECOLLECTION : Even in Defeat, Gandhi Never Wavered From Mahatma’s Principles : Leadership: He fumbled his way through office. But he finally seemed to have reached past his uncertainty to discover self-truth.

He was beaming with delight, his balding and graying head peppered with rose petals and his gait buoyant. To the uneducated eye that night, Rajiv Gandhi appeared to be the victor or, at the very least, a celebrator in defeat.

It was Nov. 29, 1989, and the last of three generations of India’s glorious, ruling Nehru dynasty had just presided over one of the family party’s most crushing and bitter defeats. They had said he was incompetent, corrupt and unfit to rule, and the voters clearly had agreed with Gandhi’s most strident opponents, most of them former party members who had fled the family’s 106-year-old Congress Party to challenge India’s tradition of dynastic political rule.

And yet, there he was, standing in a parliamentary meeting room of India’s Lok Sabha (the People’s House), covered with flower petals and almost exultant in the loss, as if to prove to the press crowded around him that Rajiv Gandhi had never wanted the job, despite the five years he served as prime minister of the world’s most populous and convoluted democracy.

But the moment the former political maverick began fielding tough questions from the Western and Indian press in the room that night, it was clear that Rajiv Gandhi was not celebrating defeat. Rajiv, quite simply, was being Rajiv.

“This election has shown that democracy is strong and deeply rooted in India,” he told a Times reporter who asked him the meaning of the defeat that night. “The verdict of the people is before us, and we respect that verdict with all humility.”

But will you serve as leader of a loyal opposition? Gandhi was asked.

The flesh around his eyes creased deeply as his smile grew wider. He paused to make sure everyone in the crowd was listening. And finally he said in the soft, singsong, near-lisp that was his trademark: “Absolutely. I will be a very good watchdog.”

Tuesday night he was dead, the victim of an assassin’s bomb in one of the hundreds of hamlets he had barnstormed by helicopter, plane and car in the weeks leading up to the parliamentary elections. He knew the vote was his last chance to redeem not only his family’s name and political power base, but the very foundations of the Indian nation--the principles of secularism, equality and minority rights that he so often quoted from the near-saint who first espoused them, Mohandas K. Gandhi.

Despite his name, Rajiv was not a relative of the man known as Mahatma. And the youngest generation of a political dynasty that had begun with Jawaharlal Nehru lacked the physical presence and lifelong commitment of India’s legendary independence fighter, renowned for his simple dress, his walking stick and his endless battles for liberation of the world’s poor and oppressed.

But the paunchy Rajiv Gandhi, whose face and body aged visibly in the five years he served as prime minister, will be remembered among those who knew him best as a leader who never wavered from his deep faith in the same principles that guided the Mahatma.

Even on that evening with the press a year and a half ago, as he graciously and professionally conceded defeat, Gandhi made a point of stressing the threat of the then-brewing Hindu fundamentalist wave, which in 1989 swept 88 seats in the 545-seat Parliament--86 more than in the previous elections in 1984--and now stands on the brink of establishing the first Hindu-supremacist government in the history of this secular state.

“The biggest challenge before this country today is that of fighting communalism (religious bigotry),” Gandhi told the small group gathered around him. “And it requires some introspection to see why we were not able to stand up to this communal onslaught.”

Introspection indeed. That was among Gandhi’s strongest suits--that, and consultation. He listened, even to visiting journalists, often interrupting interviewers to ask, “Don’t you think so?” or, “What are the people telling you in the villages?” or even, “How do you see it?”

When Gandhi was reluctant to assume the leadership of India’s often-anarchic and deeply polarized 840 million people seven years ago, he said so.

“It’s true, I never wanted this job at all,” he once told an American journalist. “But then, there’s fate; everyone has a fate, and one must always seek to endure it, to use it to the best of one’s ability.”

True, he fumbled his way through his five years in office. And even during his exhaustive nationwide campaign during the past six weeks, the prestigious bimonthly magazine India Today commented: “Confident and relaxed, Rajiv has rid himself of his earlier uncertainty and bumbling. But he seems to have failed to find the pulse of the masses.”

But what Gandhi appears to have found before his violent death was something many others have spent lifetimes seeking in vain--the truth about himself.

“You know, believe it or not, after the election results, I found him in a very cheerful disposition . . . very relaxed,” H. K. L. Bhagat, a longtime friend and confidant, said a few minutes after Rajiv, still beaming, left the Parliament meeting room that night in 1989.

“Some say it’s in the nature and blood of the congressmen in the Nehru family. But I can tell you it is certainly the essence of Rajiv,” Bhagat said. “The bigger the danger, the bigger the smile on his face.

“I’m sure the Congress-I will return someday, but to Rajiv that is not so important as to others. For Rajiv Gandhi, what is important is keeping the Indian nation together, and that is now his only role in life.”

Indeed, just an hour or so later that night, on India’s state-run Doordarshan TV network, Gandhi appeared live to address the nation and, still beaming his youthful grin, to declare, “Elections are won and lost, leaders come and go, but the work of the nation never ends. . . . “