So where did he go wrong? He began blundering the moment he started submitting to his party’s basic instincts. The first false step was the Shah Bano case where, under pressure from cynical old-timers you could only describe as the “Congress clergy”, he amended the law to overturn a reformist Supreme Court judgment on a divorced Muslim woman’s rights. Preferring the maulanas and old vote-bank politicians over a young, promising, modern Muslim leader like Arif Mohammed Khan was not a result of his inexperience or innocence, but of his inability to rise above the oldspeak. This had many other consequences. Arif became the first rebel and attracted others in the course of time, including such loyalists as Arun Nehru and V.P. Singh.

The cynical compromise on the Shah Bano case was made to please the “Muslim voter” and, soon enough, it became evident that it had alienated a lot of the Hindu voters. So he succumbed to distorted politics again by allowing the unlocking and then shilanyas at the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi site, even launching his disastrous 1989 campaign from there, with the promise of Ram Rajya. This was not Rajiv, the modernising new leader who had fired our collective imagination acting on his own instinct. This was Rajiv, now a prisoner of his old party. You could use the same logic to analyse how he let the Bofors issue get out of control or, at least for a year, seemed not fully in control over his military establishment (an aggressive chief, Sundarji, nearly took us to war with Pakistan and China, with exercises Brasstacks and Chequerboard), and at war with a president from his own party (Zail Singh). Halfway through his term, in 1987, his government had lost its way and momentum.

... contd.