Rajiv Gandhi, who served as the seventh Prime Minister of India from 1984 to 1989, was born on August 20, 1944. He was the last member of the Nehru-Gandhi family to hold the post of Prime Minister of India.
He was a pilot before he had joined politics. Heacquired a commercial pilot’s license and, beginning in 1968, worked for Indian Airlines. He hardly showed interest in following the footsteps of his mother (Indira Gandhi) and grandfather (Jawaharlal Nehru). Rajiv Gandhi remained apolitical till his brother Sanjay Gandhi’s death in 1980.
In June 1981 he was elected in a by-election to the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of national parliament) and in the same month became a member of the national executive of the Indian Youth Congress (the youth wing of the Congress Party).
Rajiv Gandhi became the Prime Minister of India when he was 40. He became the youngest Prime Minister of the country and sworn-in on October 31, 1984, the same day his mother was assassinated by her own bodyguards.
He resigned his post as prime minister in November 1989 after the Congress (I) Party was defeated in parliamentary elections, though he remained leader of the party.
The developmental projects launched by him included the overhaul of national education policy and major expansion of the telecom sector. He reduced tax on technological industry, reformed import policies related to telecommunication, defense, and commercial airline. He put emphasis on introduction of contemporary technological advances in various sectors, thus modernizing industries to attract higher foreign investment in the economy.
He was posthumously awarded India’s highest civilian award, Bharat Ratna in 1991, by the Indian government.
Rajiv Gandhi also emerged as one of India’s more controversial Prime Ministers due to his alleged involvement in the cases like Shah Bano Case, Ayodhya Case, and Bofors Scam.
His aggressive efforts to curb the LTTE in Sri Lanka led to his untimely assassination by the group in Tamil Nadu’s Sriperambudur. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated on May 21, 1991, in a public meeting while campaigning in Sriperambudur for a Lok Sabha Congress candidate.
In 1998 an Indian court convicted 26 people in the conspiracy to assassinate Gandhi. The conspirators, who consisted of Tamil militants from Sri Lanka and their Indian allies, had sought revenge against Gandhi because the Indian troops he had sent to Sri Lanka in 1987 to help enforce a peace accord there had ended up fighting the Tamil separatist guerrillas. After Rajiv’s death, his widow, Sonia Gandhi, took over the leadership of the Congress Party (the “I” designation was formally dropped in 1996).
