A Nasty End for the Nice Gandhi

Back when his mother was a prime minister who had trampled on her fellow citizens’ civil liberties to keep herself in office, back when his brother was an arrogant young political thug, Rajiv Gandhi was “the nice one.”

That was in 1976-77, when Rajiv was a pilot for Indian Airlines, the nation’s domestic airline. The handful of foreign correspondents in New Delhi would stop by the Gandhi residence periodically. Indira would refuse to see us. Sanjay would sneer at us. Rajiv would shoot the breeze about nonpolitical matters and offer us a cold drink that slaked the 110-degree heat.

Then Sanjay was killed in 1980 while piloting the small plane he had learned to fly; Indira turned to her surviving child to keep her dynasty intact, for she was the daughter of Jawarharlal Nehru, first prime minister of independent India.

I felt sad for Rajiv. He was then 36, the same age as I, and about as well-suited for politics, which is to say, not at all.

Even though he did rise to become prime minister himself, drawing the same band of sycophants and the same charges of corruption among his followers that are endemic to so many politicians in so many countries, I still felt sad. I didn’t know him well, but I just couldn’t see how he could ever succeed in the cutthroat world of politics.

And then, last Tuesday, came the news that he had been assassinated, just as his mother had been in 1984.

In the 3 1/2 years that I lived in New Delhi, I covered three major countries: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. All their leaders have been assassinated.

Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan was killed when terrorists sabotaged his airplane, causing it to crash; also killed in that crash was the U.S. ambassador, Arnold Rafael, one of America’s better envoys and a man who had helped negotiate the release of the American hostages in Iran before taking the top post in Pakistan.

In Bangladesh, Ziaur Rahman was assassinated. Given the family political dynasties of South Asia, it’s not surprising that Ziaur Rahman’s widow, Khaleda Zia, is now prime minister of that country, which is filled with wonderful people and some of the worst natural disasters on earth.

Before Zia ul-Haq seized power in a 1977 coup, I had known the man he ousted, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto was hanged in 1979, and his daughter later became prime minister, after Zia ul-Haq was killed in the crash for which no one was ever brought to trial.

I thought Ziaur Rahman was the most talented of the rulers I met, and offered the most for his country, but it is Rajiv Gandhi’s death that saddens me most.

India worked hardest to establish democracy after Britain struck the flag and granted “freedom at midnight” to its South Asia colonies in 1947. It has never been ruled by the army, unlike Pakistan and Bangladesh.

It’s one thing for some tin-pot dictator to be assassinated by a tinhorn usurper, usually in the nation’s army; it’s quite another for a leader or ex-leader chosen democratically to spill his blood at the hands of a lunatic.

And because it was Rajiv, “the nice one,” the man who took such joy in his children and in climbing into a cockpit to do the job he loved, it saddens me more than I would have expected.