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That sort of heritage, a bridge to India's early dreams as a nation and even earlier struggle for freedom, will not be replaced easily. The Indian National Congress, with Nehru's father Motilal at its head before him, had been the sturdy vehicle that liberated India from white sahibs, created a promising republic and shaped a sense of common purpose among a kaleidoscopic variety of / religions, complexions, castes and tongues. But if the party had once relied on secularism and consensus building, in more recent years it became the fief of one family. Devoted to her country as she was, Indira cultivated the idea that India would come apart at the seams if a Gandhi did not clutch the threads.
She kept her sons sheltered from politics when they were young, and they came of age as political naifs. But in the 1970s, as she centralized power in the Congress and made over the party in her own image, the willful Sanjay was groomed as her logical successor. Wielding power outside of office and the constitution, Sanjay and his Youth Congress loyalists undertook to bend the nation to their fancies, even compelling some sterilizations in the dictatorial years of Indira's 1975-77 Emergency. Sanjay proceeded to kill himself as he had lived -- recklessly, in the 1980 crash of an aerobatic plane he was flying. It was then that the self-effacing Rajiv, a pilot with domestic Indian Airlines, was recruited to be his mother's next in line.
Rajiv's goal was to give his country reform, modernization, deregulation -- all catchwords underpinning his frequently quoted aim of "bringing India into the 21st century." But he failed to do so in his first stab at leadership, and whether he could have done so during a second time around had remained open to question. "Computerji," as he became known, long ago found that he and his privileged circle of technology lovers were not equal to the task of budging old-line party pros and the bureaucracy-infested Industrial Raj. As columnist Sunanda Datta-Ray remarked in the Statesman of Calcutta last week, "He faltered at least partly because he was a young man in a hurry, because he lacked the conceptual framework and the experience to match his vision." His later years in office were also clouded by charges of hefty bribe taking among aides and by his own imperiousness.
It may be that the Congress Party will benefit from a large sympathy vote. An alternative theory is that Indians, aghast at the party's desperate flounderings, will opt in large numbers for the better-organized but politically ominous B.J.P. The outcome in either case would be an ironic footnote to the history of an illustrious clan: its latter-day stamp on public life would have come from an act of great violence.
It was no consolation to supporters of the family that the deaths of both mother and son may have originated in policies of their own devising. Indira had covertly helped promote the rise of Sikh extremism in Punjab in an effort to thwart a more moderate rival party in the troubled northwestern state. In his turn, Rajiv had gone along for a while with arming the Tamil Tigers and furnishing them with sanctuary and training camps in southern India. But he had abandoned that effort by mid-1987, and the image that survives him is mostly favorable.