21st May marks the 25th anniversary of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the third member of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty to become India’s prime minister.
He was blessed with perfect leadership qualities and he was India’s youngest prime minister, one under whom the Indian National Congress party won its best-ever tally of more than 400 seats in the 545-member Lok Sabha in 1984, riding on the sympathy generated by his mother Indira Gandhi’s assassination.
Rajiv was assassinated on 21 May in 1991 in Sriperumbudur, that is 40km from Chennai, by a woman operative of the Sri Lankan rebel group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The 46-year-old leader was campaigning for the 1991 general election.
Rajeev Gandhi
Rajiv Gandhi instant death came as shock for everyone. His death was a huge loss to India and specially for the Congress Party.
Politically, his death propelled the Congress party back to power in 1991, but it remained short of a majority. And it
hasn’t won a majority in Parliament since.
The period thereafter saw an era of coalition governments and this coalition era ends in 2014 when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) secured more than the 272 seats required to form a government on its own.
This steady and slow decline of the Congress, and the rise of coalition
politics, has also seen the begining of the regional parties and leaders like Mulayam Singh Yadav and Mayawati in Uttar Pradesh, Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal, and Lalu Prasad in Bihar.
Again Congress needs a leader like him because from past few years, the party is going through a rough patch.
