Word: rajiv
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...