'Rajiv Was Willing To Listen'

After Sanjay (Gandhi) died in 1980, everyone was very shaken. Rajiv was drafted into politics at that time, though he was a reluctant entrant. But once things started moving, his transformation was tremendous. The guy who once confused “ganatantra” with  “swatantra” soon went on to deliver a competent extempore speech in Hindi in Parliament.

We worked out of 2A Motilal Nehru Marg—Arun Nehru, who handled the political work, was more often at the Sanjay Gandhi Memorial  Trust office on Willingdon Crescent, while Arun Singh and I looked at policy issues. We would all get in at 9 am, then congregate in  the evening to report on the day, and have work allocated for the next day. And we would work well past midnight.

The great thing about Rajiv was that he was willing to listen—unlike Sanjay. The difference between the two brothers, really, was that Sanjay took decisions, and Rajiv made them after consulting everybody. Rajiv was gentle, warm, instinctively kind.

	It was an exhilarating period of learning. Once a petroleum ministry official asked me: “Which one of our 900 reports do you want to see?”

Politics was easier for Rajiv than it is today for Rahul. Rajiv was in a situation where  everything was available, the Congress was stronger—he gained confidence very quickly. Indira Gandhi was a perfectionist—you could not go to her unless you were fully prepared. Her relationship with Rajiv, when it came to work, was not a mummy-son one. Otherwise, they were both perfect family persons—at the dinner table, for instance, no politics was discussed. There was one big difference between Rajiv and his mother—he met people in an air-conditioned office; brought up in more austere times, she did not!

It was an exhilarating time for us—a period of learning. I got involved, for instance, in  learning about the petroleum sector. So I went to meet a joint secretary in the ministry who looked at me and said, “We have 900 reports. Which one do you want to see?” We were really babes in the wood, but committed. That is when Rajiv came out with the push for “accelerated production in oil and gas”.

In those early years, when buying a two-wheeler, getting a gas or a telephone connection was next to impossible, we began to get a glimpse of Rajiv’s vision. He told me once that Toyota in Japan and Hindustan Motors in India both began at the same time in collaboration with Morris and “look where they are, and where we are”. There were many new entrepreneurs who shared Rajiv’s vision at that time—Venu Srinivasan of TVS, Subhash Chandra of Zee TV, Ratan Tata. All of them subscribed to the future and Rajiv’s vision.

We all had great respect for Dhirubhai Ambani. Once, when he met us, he was very  agitated at how expensive telephone calls were and Rajiv agreed with him—Rajiv suggested the one call system. That was the start of the communications revolution. He was also interested in health and education —he would ask why we couldn’t have 200 Doon Schools. And it was he who gave his full backing to Naresh Trehan to start Escorts and Dr Pratap Reddy to expand the Apollo chain out of Hyderabad and Chennai.

Then, suddenly, Indira Gandhi was assassinated. Rajiv was not in Delhi—I remember Arun Nehru went to the airport to meet him. I had known all along that Rajiv would become PM but to take over even as your mother is lying dead—that was hard. There was a great deal of controversy of course, but no one gave him a choice.

Sadly, the euphoria lasted only a year and then things started falling apart. Rajiv was bogged down and not able to fulfil the wide-ranging commitment he had made to himself.

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As told to Smita Gupta