This is the art of darkness: a young woman offers a sandalwood garland, bows from the waist -- and, suddenly, the once and likely future hope of India, a figure invested with the symbolic weight of generations, is obliterated in a deafening roar and a ball of flame. A man whose incandescent family had long been identified with one-sixth of the human race, Rajiv Gandhi last week went the way of his mother Indira, falling to a climate of violence that has steadily overtaken the subcontinent. Rajiv, 46, heir to a miraculous name, disappeared in a fiendish conjurer's trick: amid the theatrics of an electioneering stop, and in the puff of smoke from a bomb.
With one blow, the fortunes of 844 million people became hostage to a terrible uncertainty. On the comeback trail for months, the former Prime Minister had gone a long way toward regaining public faith in his ability to rescue India from a deepening hole of debt, drift and alienation. His death sickened the country with shame and impotent rage. It was horrifying enough that a bomb could have ripped apart the latest and perhaps last standard bearer of the Nehru-Gandhi line. But India, like most mourners, basically wept for itself. Said Natwar Singh, a former deputy in Gandhi's Cabinet: "What has this country of Buddha and Mahatma Gandhi come to? We were an example to the world. Now we are a warning."
Indians did not love Rajiv in the universal way they adored his grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru, independent India's first and longest-serving Prime Minister. Nor did they honor him with the widespread, if sometimes grudging, respect that they paid Indira Gandhi during her checkered leadership. But they regarded him as an essentially decent man, a reluctant politician struggling to live up to his inheritance of noblesse oblige.
Beyond that, he was virtually one of Midnight's Children, the generation that came into the world on the eve of hard-won independence from the British Empire in 1947. After Rajiv was born in a Bombay hospital in August 1944, Nehru, then a political prisoner, wrote that when "a new birth is intimately connected with us, it becomes a revival of ourselves, and our old hopes center round it." In an important way, the old hopes of India's founding fathers also exploded on May 22, 1991. The desperation of the hour was vividly illustrated by the Congress Party's resort to nominating Gandhi's Italian-born and determinedly apolitical widow Sonia to the party presidency. Her polite refusal, returned within a day of the offer, forced the party to look within for the first nondescendant of Nehru who might hold the reins of government since Lal Bahadur Shastri briefly succeeded the late patriarch in the gentler year of 1964.