We lost Rajiv Gandhi on May 21 more than a decade and a half ago; he was in active politics for barely a decade. Yet he left a lasting impact; some of our central ideas were given concrete shape in his years in power: high growth as a strategy with decentralisation and markets as instruments; technology-based opportunities to resolve India’s problems; human development and growth based on local communities; and integration with the global economy with an independent mind-set as the redefinition of self-reliance.

This column has often reflected on the experience and relevance of each of his ideas while discussing the present. There is a reason why the ideas survived, and that is that Rajiv didn’t just set objectives. As Gopi Arora once told me, he was India’s first prime minister who had worked in an organisation and for a living; he knew the discipline required to cover the last mile. It was never enough to say that we need faster-growing agriculture, he would want a spreadsheet for each district and then he would go out to look.

At one level, he was about detail; at another, about integration. Local government was to be integrated with agro-climatic plans and hence watersheds, aquifer plans and diversification. The network we laid still lives, even as subsequent governments sabotaged ideas only because they were not theirs.

Now the critics. That India has been growing from the ’80s is now accepted. But it is interesting that the fulcrum of that growth, the policy initiatives of those years, are neither fully understood nor causally related with that growth. (Even though technology, strategic domestic reform and widespread agricultural growth are the policy initiatives succeeded and lauded since.) Later coalition policy regimes with little that was new to offer, some in borrowed “reform” attire and comparatively lacklustre performance, deliberately underplayed (and sometimes ravaged) the legacy. Those critiques, some by very influential persons, can be ignored for they are not worth the government paper on which they are written.

... contd.