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Not long ago, Rajiv was asked whether he missed the life of a pilot. "I sometimes get into the cockpit all alone and close the door," he replied. "Even if I cannot fly, at least I can temporarily shut myself off from the outside world." Can such a man long rule a nation so vast and complex? The question was being asked last week by India's friends and enemies alike. Referring to the murder of Mrs. Gandhi, a British Cabinet member said flatly, "It is a great tragedy that could lead to the breakup of the Indian nation." At the moment the separatist pressure is coming from Punjab; at other times it has been centered in Assam to the northeast, in Jammu and Kashmir to the north, and elsewhere.
If Rajiv can preserve the country's unity and prevent undue bloodshed over the next year, his future as Indira's successor will probably be assured. If he fails, and the union begins to crumble, the likeliest eventuality would be a military takeover. Since independence, India's generals have prided themselves on their respect for democracy in the British tradition, looking askance at their politicized counterparts in Pakistan. But if the alternative were to be the disintegration of the republic, they would probably not hesitate to act.
That prospect, however, may be remote. In its 37 years of independence, India has become largely self-sufficient in food production, made great strides toward industrialization, and generally retained the strength of its democratic institutions. Under Indira Gandhi it became the sixth nation to explode a nuclear device and one of the first to launch its own space satellite. Yet India has at the same time remained a nation mired in the bullock-cart age, whose exploding population is expected to reach the billion mark by the end of the century.
As the current chairman of the non-aligned movement, which her father helped found in the early '60s, Mrs. Gandhi was trying to overcome its Cuban and pro-Soviet dominance and restore it to its original position as a group of nations committed to neither the West nor the Soviet bloc. Nonetheless, Mrs. Gandhi's India was a little too friendly to the Soviet Union for Washington's taste. She signed a friendship treaty with Moscow and became a regular buyer of Soviet arms, while the U.S. lined up behind Pakistan. New Delhi was annoyed by Washington's opposition to India's nuclear program, and relations hit an alltime low when the Nixon Administration openly "tilted" toward Islamabad during the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war. Following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which Mrs. Gandhi refused to condemn outright, the U.S. began to supply Pakistan with heavy arms aid. Some U.S. officials predicted last week that relations between the two countries, already on the mend, might improve un der Rajiv. And so they may. But they will still be restricted by the fact that the U.S. is committed to providing Pakistan with $3.5 billion in American arms.