Word: rajiv
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India is much changed today. Apart from the egregious act of violence that killed Rajiv, the bloody shirt of extremism and communal vengeance has been threatening to supersede all norms of democracy in the nation. Last week's first round of balloting was attended by an unprecedented wave of killings and vote rigging. And yet Gandhi had held out an at least plausible promise that a restoration of his leadership might help bring back stability after 18 months of rudderless rule. His campaign swing through Tamil Nadu, the keystone state of south India, was almost a perfunctory exercise...
...elections. V.P. Singh, a former Congress notable whose opposition bloc went on to win the government, charged at the time that Gandhi, who usually kept out of the crush and was shielded by a phalanx of commandos, "had lost touch with the people." It was a mistake -- as Rajiv saw it -- that he did not repeat. While pressing the flesh in the northern state of Bihar on May 5, he spoke about the change. "I used to campaign like this when I was secretary-general of the Congress, in 1984, but when I was Prime Minister I was hijacked...
Later Sonia Gandhi, 44, and her 19-year-old daughter Priyanka quietly escaped from the residence and flew to Madras on an Indian air force plane to claim Rajiv's body. The rest of India was in shock. By government order, shops and offices remained closed, and security forces patrolled the capital. A crucial decision came when elections commissioner T.N. Seshan put off the second and third main rounds of voting for a month. Election-related mayhem had taken 229 lives across the country even before Gandhi's assassination; in its wake, 26 more people died. A week of national...
...boyhood in Teen Murti (Three Statues) after Nehru had taken it over as the prime ministerial residence. Now the Nehru Memorial, it was the house in which Indira Gandhi had served her father as hostess during the early years of independence. It was an era in which Rajiv and his younger brother Sanjay saw most of the world's major political figures trip through: Presidents and kings, commissars and emerging Third World statesmen. One anecdote relates that the young Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama were missing at the house during a visit. The spiritual leaders of Tibetans were found...
...bend the nation to their fancies, even compelling some sterilizations in the dictatorial years of Indira's 1975-77 Emergency. Sanjay proceeded to kill himself as he had lived -- recklessly, in the 1980 crash of an aerobatic plane he was flying. It was then that the self-effacing Rajiv, a pilot with domestic Indian Airlines, was recruited to be his mother's next in line...