Cost of an Indian life $500 (PO)

M D Nalapat Prime Minister Rajiv Ratna Birjees Gandhi’s political future was permanently darkened by the 1987 revelations about illegal payments made for purchase of Bofors guns. At the time, there were suggestions that the media frenzy in India was being fuelled by leaks from a competitor of Bofors that had lost the gun contract. Whatever the source, the information about illegal payments was so detailed that Rajiv Gandhi spent his last two years in office firefighting, his effectiveness eroded despite an overwhelming majority in Parliament. The Bofors wave resulted in the Congress Party’s defeat in the 1989 Lok Sabha (Lower House) elections,resulting in the formation of a government headed by Rajiv’s former Defense Minister V P Singh, whose main campaign slogan was that he would bring the guilty to book within a year. Of course, nothing of the kind happened. As soon as V P Singh began to occupy the Prime Minister’s spacious office in South Block, his enthusiasm for Bofors died, perhaps because quite a few of his allies were also implicated in the scandal. Instead of seeking to clean up the administrative machinery of the Government of India (where people turn from paupers to billionaires in a year’s time), V P Singh decided to let loose caste fury across the country, by pushing for a higher reservation for “Backward Castes” in government jobs. This group ranks just above Dalits in the traditional Hindu hierarchy (which incidentally is largely followed by Christians and Muslims as well, who are each divided into “high”, “middle” and “low” castes, although not on paper. The resultant uproar led to his resignation and replacement by political rival Chandra Shekhar, who in his turn was quickly overthrown by Rajiv Gandhi, who sensed that his party could return to power in the elections. The Congress Party did get close to a majority in 1992,but this was due to the sympathy wave that followed the assassination of the young leader by the LTTE, in revenge for his having sent an Indian military force to Sri Lanka four years earlier.