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Although Rajiv and Sanjay and their families lived together under their mother's roof, there was occasional friction between the two dissimilar brothers. Once, when a Western friend asked Rajiv why he did not simply move elsewhere, he seemed startled and replied, "I could never have done that to Mummy." Later on, after Mrs. Gandhi was returned to office from her post-emergency defeat, Rajiv is said to have taken a dim view of the oldtime politicians who were again fawning over his mother and his brother. "All the old gang is back," he once remarked with a touch of irony.
When the reckless Sanjay died in the crash of his stunt plane on a hot summer day four years ago, Rajiv became the crown prince. He quit his pilot's job, entered politics, and soon won his brother's parliamentary seat. Named a general secretary of the Congress (I) Party in February 1983, he made a reputation for himself as a quiet-spoken reformer determined to bring new life and leadership to a largely corrupt and ineffectual machine, leading some Indians to refer to him as Mr. Clean.
Equally important, he served as trustworthy counsel to his lonely and relatively isolated mother.
Gradually Rajiv became the most powerful of the party's seven general secretaries, making crucial decisions on his own. He fired the chief ministers of states and local party leaders whom he considered incompetent. He organized a mass campaign to build up a party cadre for the coming parliamentary elections. Sometimes Rajiv's efforts misfired. Many Indians believe he was responsible for the central government's efforts to strengthen its control over the southern state of Andhra Pradesh by getting rid of Chief Minister N.T. Rama Rao, who belonged to an opposition party. But Rama Rao turned out to be stronger than the Congress (I) realized, and the state governor, a Gandhi loyalist, was forced to reinstate him. Whether Rajiv also counseled his mother to order the assault on the Golden Temple last June is not known, but it is considered unlikely that she would have taken such a step without his approval.
Even after four years in politics, Rajiv remains uncomfortable before large, unruly crowds. He disdains the sycophancy of public life in India. When told that he was to ride in a gilded chariot to a party conference in Calcutta last December, he refused and went by automobile instead.
On a trip to his parliamentary constituency in Uttar Pradesh, Rajiv winced as old women fell to the ground at his feet and ragged, barefoot young men chanted, "You are the hope of India—Rajiv, Rajiv, Rajiv!"
He is also uneasy about talk of his role in a Nehru dynasty. "I don't see it like that at all," he once said. "There's a very big challenge before us today: how to get India into the 20th century." He speaks of the need to eliminate the vestiges of colonialism and the country's age-old social inequities. "We must get the poor and the weak of India out of their rut, out of the morass they are stuck in," he said recently. Most political experts see him as a pragmatist, like his late brother, who favors a somewhat larger place for private enterprise within socialist India than did his mother.