Rajiv Gandhi, son of Indira Gandhi and Feroze Gandhi, grandson of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, and the great grandson of Pandit Motilal Nehru, one of the founders of Indian National Congress, was the prime minister of India from 1984 to 1989, through the tumultuous 1980s.
He became the prime minister of India after the tragic assassination of his mother on 31st October 1984. A sympathy wave created by this ghastly act gave him unassailable majority of 411 seats in the parliament out of the possible 542, thus winning him ¾ majority in the new parliament.
Arguably the most important contribution of Rajiv Gandhi was sharing his vision of India marching confidently into the 21st century with the head held high. In retrospect, apart from telecom revolution, the seeds of which were sown in his regime with the help of Sam Pitroda, this vision remains his greatest legacy.
Did Rajiv foresee India emerging out of poverty in the 21st century? The way it appears now, he did. The vision he painted in the first three years of his prime minister-ship was so captivating that he virtually wanted to fly to touch and feel it-after all he was a pilot himself. He energised the crawling masses so that they could stand on their own two feet and then walk quickly towards their cherished dreams, may be with the help of the surface transport. He actually wanted people to fly to their future-to the 21st century, because he had actually flown people to their destinations. He was flyer who flew high even in his imagination. In a country where so few people flew in the mid eighties, he was mocked by the naysayer; those who did not believe in the abilities of Indians and India.
Being a visionary is more like being an Albert Einstein. His mind was his laboratory. Likewise a political and economic visionary cannot conjure anything out of thin air, for he has no magic wand. It has taken many decades to the experimental physics to verify as true the many things that Einstein predicted through mathematical model building, things like Bose-Einstein condensate; though this state of matter was predicted by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein in 1924 - 1925, but this could be proved experimentally in 1995, after 70 years, because actual technology lags far behind the theoretical physics.
In politics, pragmatists often win because they are rooted in the present as opposed to visionaries, who foresee the future.
A person who envisions for the multitudes, the laboratory that proves him right or wrong is much more slippery due to the shifting ground of public opinion. And people often forget visionaries whose vision is realised. But, can a resurgent India afford to do that to Rajiv?
It appears that the life of a Rajiv Gandhi is somewhat more difficult than the life on an Einstein.
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