INDIA: Death of the Crown Prince

An air crash kills the heir apparent to the House of Nehru

In the 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,...

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