Rajiv Gandhi
Rajiv Gandhi was prime minister of India from 1984 to 1989, the airline pilot who had wanted nothing to do with politics until his brother Sanjay, the heir, died in a stunt plane in 1980, and who was sworn in on the evening of 31 October 1984, hours after his mother Indira was shot by her Sikh bodyguards, and led the Congress to the largest majority in its history in December, four hundred and fourteen seats on the wave of sympathy and of the pogrom against Sikhs in Delhi that killed nearly three thousand, of which he said that when a big tree falls the earth shakes. The government of Mr Clean, as he was called, brought computers and telephones to India, the accords that ended the insurgencies in Punjab, Assam and Mizoram, the panchayat reforms. Then came the Bofors scandal of 1987, the Swedish gun contract whose commissions led toward his friends, and the Indian army's intervention in Sri Lanka in 1987, which was meant to disarm the Tamil Tigers and ended fighting them, and which killed him. He was born in Bombay in 1944, Nehru's grandson, studied engineering at Cambridge without a degree, married the Italian Sonia Maino in 1968, and flew Boeings for Indian Airlines until 1981, when he took Sanjay's seat at Amethi. The majority of 1984 he spent within three years. The Shah Bano case, in which he overturned by statute a court's maintenance award to a divorced Muslim woman to please the clerics, and then unlocked the gates of the Ayodhya mosque to please the Hindus, opened the two questions that governed Indian politics for the next generation. Bofors cost him his finance minister V. P. Singh, who left to lead the opposition, and the election of November 1989, which Congress lost. The Sri Lanka accord of July 1987 sent a peacekeeping force that lost twelve hundred men and was withdrawn in 1990. On 21 May 1991, campaigning at Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu, he was killed by a Tiger suicide bomber, a woman who bent to touch his feet. Sonia refused the party's leadership for seven years and then took it; his son Rahul leads the opposition.
- Lived: 1944 CE – 1991 CE
- Nationality: Indian
- Roles: prime minister, politician
