Reluctant Politician Became Last of an Elected Dynasty : Asia: Gandhi was thrust to forefront when his brother was killed in the crash of a stunt plane.

As the mother died, so has the son, in a brutal assassination that now has ended one of the democratic world’s longest-serving elected dynasties.

Rajiv Gandhi, dead at 46 after a powerful bomb exploded in a remote south Indian village, represented the last of three generations of Indian leaders committed to socialism, secularism and the promotion of the Indian nation as the vanguard of the Third World.

In his youth, Gandhi was the black sheep of the family that had led India from centuries of colonial repression into nearly half a century of democratic--although often chaotic--freedom. He had dropped out of university in London and gallivanted around Europe, where he met his future wife, the elegant, Italian-born Sonia Maino. Ultimately, he chose to be thousands of feet above India’s rough-and-tumble political world, picking a career as a pilot.

But the political fate of the only surviving grandson of the father of the Indian nation, Jawaharlal Nehru, was sealed just a decade ago. And it began then as it ended Tuesday--in sudden death.

At the age of 36, Rajiv was thrust to the forefront of India’s dynastic politics when his younger, far more politically active, brother, Sanjay, died in the crash of a stunt plane. Reluctantly, the deeply shy Rajiv ran for Parliament, winning handily, and set himself up for the job he hoped he would never have to take. In less than four years, he again found himself with no choice.

His mother, Indira, who had run the Indian nation with a tough and only sometimes benevolent hand, was shot more than 40 times in her garden in October, 1984, by two Sikh bodyguards seeking revenge for her order several months before to send the Indian army into the Sikhs’ holiest shrine to free it from the grip of Sikh insurgents.

It is said that Rajiv Gandhi, who was on tour in eastern India, shed no tears at the news of his mother’s murder . He returned to New Delhi with full army escort that night, and was sworn in as prime minister in an act that defied the Indian constitution.

No Challenges

None of India’s 840 million people challenged their new leader or his right to rule, though, and two months later they voted to return him to office in a massive wave of sympathy and support that gave his long-ruling Congress-I Party an unprecedented majority.

It was not to last. Gandhi served his term, five years of unchallenged rule that ended in bitter defeat in November, 1989. The young leader was finally seen as incompetent, corrupt and incapable of managing the nation that calls itself the world’s largest democracy.

Some thought that the defeat marked the end of the Nehru dynasty, that Gandhi would leave quietly, taking his “foreign” wife and son away from the bitterness of Indian politics to settle somewhere in Europe, a culture that his critics always insisted he preferred. But Gandhi stayed and fought, heading a loyal opposition, watching, waiting and learning. All that time, he sought a way to repeat the feat of his mother, who charged back to power just two years after the family’s only other defeat in 1977.

This campaign was his attempt to do just that. It ended Tuesday when an assassin’s bomb halted the shortest of the Nehru family’s political careers.

“Well, we have learned how to get things done in government, which I was totally new to,” an exhausted Gandhi said in typically soft-spoken tones during an interview with the magazine India Today toward the end of his campaign last week. In assessing his five-year stint as prime minister, Gandhi added, “You must remember, I had no administrative experience. . . . We only had concepts. We had the bureaucracy to work the details, and they were in no mood to bring about massive change. So we ended up playing Ping-Pong.”

In another recent interview, Gandhi was asked whether he had warmed to the idea of a position of power he had once so resisted--indeed, whether he actually would be returned to office after this week’s voting.

“Of course,” he said. “I am confident. Just watch us.”

A Painful Road

Clearly, it had been a long and sometimes painful road since he told an American journalist, who had asked him his opinion of politics in 1984, “I don’t think I’m enjoying it.” Two years later, in an interview with India Today, he said, “Oddly enough, I still do not feel as if I am prime minister, if you understand what I mean.”

It was just such self-effacement that many voters had taken to heart in 1989.

But last week, Gandhi told another India Today interviewer: “We are getting a lot of support. There’s tremendous enthusiasm. The hostility in the last elections has totally gone. So, in a sense, we’re fighting on fair ground.”

With the body of the last of the Nehrus en route to New Delhi early today, the tragedy was intensified by the fact that Rajiv Gandhi, given his choice, never would have been near the election dais in a south Indian village Tuesday night.

Had it not been for the twin deaths of his brother and mother, there is no sign that Gandhi would have aspired to anything grander than the job of airline pilot.

But those two deaths left him as the only surviving descendant of India’s ruling political dynasty--the son of one prime minister and the grandson of the country’s first prime minister. In India, family succession is at the core of society, business and, to a surprising degree, government. Even the lowliest jobs on the railroads are often passed from father to son. For Rajiv Gandhi, to reject the mantle of leadership was unthinkable.

So in 1984, only hours after his mother was shot down, Rajiv Gandhi, then 40 and a junior member of Parliament, was sworn in as prime minister.

Two days later, after Hindu gangs had slaughtered Sikhs in the streets to avenge the assassination, Gandhi presided over the cremation of his mother. He did so with much dignity, the perfect son in a land that adores sons, faultlessly performing the fiery last rites of Hinduism in a ceremony seen by millions on television.

There is little doubt now that this was the moment when he reached the height of his popularity as a leader of this disparate, contentious land that former U.S. Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith once described as a “functional anarchy.”

A few weeks later, he and his Congress-I (for Indira) Party were swept into office by the biggest electoral majority ever recorded in India.

Gandhi, on the wave of emotion that carried him into office, had some initial successes. He reached short-lived agreements with opponents in two key states, Punjab and Assam. He mounted a campaign against corruption in his party that caught the public’s fancy for a time. The press dubbed him “Mr. Clean.”

But soon the country’s internal antagonisms--competing castes, warring religions and language rivalries--began to eat away at the image of competence he had acquired at his mother’s last rites on the banks of the holy river Jamuna.

The Sikh nationalist movement degenerated into terrorism, sinking the strategic state of Punjab, India’s richest, into a mire of fear and death. More than 700 people were killed there in the first four months of 1988.

A Military Quagmire

The Indian army, sent to Sri Lanka in the summer of 1987 to deal with Tamil insurgents, found itself bogged down in a costly military quagmire. Gandhi’s bid to portray India as a regional superpower demonstrating its manifest destiny fell somewhat flat.

The economy, spurred by Gandhi’s liberalization of government controls, failed to take off as his advisers had hoped. Inflation soared and industrial growth stagnated.

A section of the press, notably the influential Indian Express chain, turned against Gandhi amid unproved--and mostly unsubstantiated--charges that members of his party had received huge kickbacks on defense contracts.

Gandhi’s death brings to an end 38 years of nearly continuous family rule over the world’s second most populous country. No other dynasty in modern history has ruled so many people for so long a time. Even in India it is necessary to go back to the 17th-Century Mogul empire to find a parallel.

Rajiv Gandhi was not related to the great Indian nationalist Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi. His father was Feroze Gandhi, a modestly successful journalist and politician from Bombay whose family was of the Parsee, or Zoroastrian, faith.

The dynastic line ran through the maternal side, all Hindus of the white-skinned Kashmiri Brahmin cast. Indira was prime minister until she was assassinated in 1984. Her father, Nehru, was India’s first prime minister, a position he held from 1947 until his death in 1964.

Rajiv Gandhi’s great-grandfather, an Allahabad lawyer named Motilal Nehru, who was so successful he could afford to hire an English governess for his children and is believed to have sent his laundry to Europe, was a nationalist, too, and a co-founder of the Indian National Congress, the forerunner of the party headed by Indira and Rajiv Gandhi.

There were two brief breaks in the dynasty’s rule. Lal Shashtri replaced Nehru but was killed in an airplane crash a year later. Indira Gandhi was out of office for nearly three years after 1977 following an election defeat. She was reelected in 1980 and served until her death.

In all, the Nehru-Gandhi clan presided over India for all but about six years of its history after obtaining independence from the British in 1947.

Despite his pedigree, Rajiv Gandhi had no apparent wish to go into politics. Even as a student at Doon School in the Himalayan foothills and later an unsuccessful candidate for a degree at Cambridge, he made it clear that he disliked the vulgarity of politics and preferred to stay out.

Shy, with Westernized tastes and only a fair speaker of Hindi, the Indian national language, Gandhi at first abdicated his right of succession as the eldest son in favor of his younger brother, the volatile and charismatic Sanjay.

While Sanjay politicked, becoming virtually a dictator during Indira Gandhi’s controversial emergency rule in 1975-76, Rajiv happily pursued his career as a pilot for the state-owned domestic airline, Indian Airlines.

He was so sensitive about his political lineage that he would introduce himself to his passengers as “Capt. Rajiv” rather than by his surname. He was an avid photographer, and submitted his work to magazines under a pseudonym to avoid the fawning favoritism that is a hallmark of Indian society.

It was only after his brother’s death that Rajiv entered the political arena, and he did so, he said, only because “it was something Mummy asked me to do.”

Elected to Parliament

He was elected to the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, from his brother’s constituency in Uttar Pradesh, but he was an undistinguished member, seldom rising to take part in the often-raucous debate.

His mother put him in charge of several key projects, including planning for the 1982 Asian Games. Given a party leadership post, he attempted to computerize some of its voluminous voter rolls.

The computer project gave him the image of a science-minded, forward-looking young man. But in retrospect it was perhaps another indication of his aversion to the grit and sweat of mass politics.

Politics in India involves personal contact on a grand scale, literally immersion in the masses. When people turn out to see a national leader--a crowd of 100,000 is routine--they are present not so much to listen as to “take darshan ,” to bask in the leader’s spiritual power.

For Rajiv Gandhi, even when as prime minister he appeared before millions for countless speeches and dedications, darshan was all too personal and too close. He never developed the personal, populist connection with the masses that his mother had.

It was not that the people disliked him. But with the possible exception of the day when he presided over his mother’s cremation, when he stood stiff-backed and silent, he never really “connected” with his fellow Indians.

A Dynasty in India

The Nehru-Gandhi family helped shape politics in India for four generations. The political dynasty began with Motilal Nehru, who in the early 19002 served in the legislature and helped build the Indian National Congress Party. His son, granddaughter and two great-grandsons followed him into politics. Here is a look at the family tree:

JAWAHARLAL NEHRU (1889-1964) India’s first prime minister after the country gained independence from Britain. He held office from 1947 to 1964. The party started by his father, Motilal Nehru, ruled within a democratic framework while he was in power. Died in May, 1964.

INDIRA GANDHI (1917-1984) Nehru’s daughter; married Feroze Gandhi (died 1960; no relation to Mohandas K. Gandhi, the father of Indian independence). Prime minister from 1966 to 1977; formed her own party, Congress-I. Defeated in election by opposition coalition, then reelected in 1980. Shot to death by Sikh members of her bodyguard in 1984.

RAJIV GANDHI (1944-1991) Gandhi’s son, an airline pilot. Entered politics in 1981 following the death of his brother, Sanjav. Succeeded his mother as prime minister after her assassination in 1984 until 1989, when he was defeated in election. Contender for prime minister in the current election. Assassinated by a bomb Tuesday. He is survived by his wife, Sonia, a son and a daughter.

SANJAY GANDHI (1946-1980) Rajiv’s younger brother, was more politically active than Rajiv. Many thought he was being groomed to take over for his mother. Killed in June, 1980, in a crash while learning to fly a stunt plane. Survived by his wife, Maneka, and a son.