Word: gandhis
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...waning moments of a blistering hot New Delhi afternoon, the elder son of India's Prime Minister Indira Gandhi performed the ancient Vedic rites for the dead. Rajiv Gandhi, 35, put the torch to the funeral pyre that held the battered body of his younger brother Sanjay, who had died in an air crash the day before. The ceremony, attended by hundreds of thousands of mourners, brought a sudden and tragic end to the Gandhi family's dynastic hopes that Sanjay, 33, would eventually succeed his mother as Prime Minister of India...
...Sanjay Gandhi (whose family is not related to Mahatma Gandhi) was the second most powerful figure in Indian politics, after his strong-willed mother, and by far the most controversial. While Rajiv, a commercial airline pilot, showed little interest in politics, Sanjay became his mother's chief political adviser, even as she had been the closest confidante to her widowed father Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first Prime Minister...
...prototypes of the Maruti but never put it into full production. Sanjay's critics, who dismissed him as arrogant and ruthless, charged that he had received government licenses and financial backing through favoritism and chicanery. Later they blamed him for some of the worst excesses of Mrs. Gandhi's 1975-77 state of emergency, including the sterilization and slum-clearance campaigns, the unpopularity of which led directly to the fall of her government in March 1977. To his supporters, on the other hand, Sanjay was an activist with a Brahman's sense of entitlement, an impatient young...
During the election campaigns, Mrs. Gandhi was repeatedly asked whether she planned to give Sanjay a government post. "No, why should I?" she would answer. Sanjay had no need of office to gain his mother's ear at the breakfast-table sessions with advisers, where many of her key policies were argued out. Presumably, he played a part in her tough decisions to raise prices on petroleum, fertilizer and rail tickets, and to cut taxes as a way of reducing inflation (currently 20% a year) and stimulating growth...
...known, Sanjay had limited influence on India's foreign policy, an area in which Mrs. Gandhi thus far has shown less interest than she used to. Since her return to office, Washington has been worried about a possible pro-Moscow tilt by New Delhi. Indian condemnations of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were less than ringing, and Mrs. Gandhi did sign an agreement with Moscow to purchase $1.6 billion in Soviet arms (mostly T-72 tanks and missiles) over a 17-year period. But government spokesmen point out that Moscow has long been one of India's major...