Revisiting Rajiv Gandhi

In chess, one never exposes one's king. And yet, Rajiv Gandhi's advisers got him to meet V. Prabhakaran and made him principal defender in the Bofors attack when Parliament was on the boil. Yes, he was far more energetic than the jaded bureaucrats and took on a lot upon himself. He was a doer. But what were his advisers doing?" No one knows the nuts and bolts of governance in India as well as Naresh Chandra. Now an alert 80, he has been cabinet secretary, governor of Gujarat and ambassador to the US. He has also, as secretary to the Government of India, worked closely with Rajiv Gandhi and while it is fashionable these days to damn the late prime minister with faint praise, Chandra believes Rajiv was extraordinary in many ways. Whether it was the intricacies of drafting a note (he would get agitated if it didn't have appropriate spacing and had a tendency to throw it at the unfortunate draughtsman) or stepping up the nuclear programme (through a complex process of pencil written chits that Chandra alludes to with relish), Rajiv was purposeful. His hunches were usually right, says Chandra, and it took particularly shortsighted bureaucrats to short circuit his plans-for instance, forcing him to stop over in Kremlin on his way to the US in 1985, which resulted in a cool reception and poor press, despite much initial interest in a progressive new prime minister from India.

He believes Rajiv's biggest mistake was the reversal on the Shah Bano judgment which led to the opening of locks in Ayodhya and a series of deadly consequences for which we are still paying the price. But like R.D. Pradhan, whose book My Years with Rajiv and Sonia is witnessing a new lease of life after Natwar Singh's revelations in One Life Is Not Enough, Chandra believes the Rajiv of 1991 was a changed man, more capable of understanding the pitfalls of politics. In one revealing conversation with Pradhan in the run-up to the 1991 election campaign, Rajiv complains of how in the previous election, his problem was that everyone thought he was working for them-"No one appeared to be working for me." One of the greatest gifts of Natwar Singh's book is not just that it shines a light on Sonia Gandhi's watchful style of functioning, but also causes us to re-examine Rajiv Gandhi as prime minister. For students and practitioners of governance it is a valuable lesson: keep your prime minister away from battles because you need him for the war; ensure he is surrounded by advisers who understand rules and regulations of governance as well as the intricacies of politics; keep him away from his friends who can be more dangerous than enemies; and don't waste his time. Chandra believes Rajiv's India tours, which were managed by the PMO, were counter-productive. These tours kept the local administration out, filtered out genuine crowds and created grand mobs, but failed in their purpose-to give Rajiv a sense of how India was thinking.

Naivete is charming, but in small doses, and not in those who occupy high office. Perhaps being a gentleman, which is how Rajiv is described by everyone, can also be a handicap. Good governance requires deceit in the defence of virtue. It requires a constant flow of information from every source-something Rajiv knew, involved as he was in several complex back-channel negotiations such as on Punjab, described at great length in P.C. Alexander's Through the Corridors of Power. And it requires a restraint, which he often didn't display with flashes of temper and irritability. Rajiv Gandhi never got the opportunity to show us he could be better, greater. But there is no reason others cannot learn from his mistakes.