Rajiv Gandhi and Rama's Kingdom [Hardcover]

Ved Mehta (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 30, 1994

This chronicle of a dozen years of recent Indian history covers the unsettled conditions that preceded the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to the Hindu revival that followed the assassination of her son Rajiv. The text explores the impulses behind the political and economic changes between 1982 and 1994, revealing what life is like in modern India. Beginning with a description of the politics that surrounded Indira Gandhi during the last two years of her life - in particular, the growing hostility between Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims - the author tells of the Sikhs' demand for special status, their uprising against the Hindus in the Punjab, the government's retaliation, the murder of Mrs Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards and the anti-Sikh rioting that followed. The book reconstructs the circumstances surronding Rajiv's election as his mother's successor; the change in atmosphere from optimism to disenchantment as Rajiv's govenment became mired in a money-laundering sscandal; Rajiv's loss of office to V.P. Singh in the 1989 election; and his murder by a secessionist Tamil group from Sri Lanka in 1991. It provides details of Indian history and culture throughout, such as the impact of the accident at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, the debate between the judiciary and Muslim clerics over economic support of divorced Muslim women, the peculiarities of the Indian telephone system, and the effect of television and movies on Hindu revivalism.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In a quietly devastating, gripping political chronicle based on his frequent trips to India between 1982 and 1994, Indian-born Mehta, a New Yorker staff writer, ruefully portrays a nation mired in corruption and intimidation at every level of society. He relates Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's military assault on Sikh separatists in 1984, and faults her for failure to negotiate; four months later she was assassinated by two Sikh bodyguards. Mehta criticizes Indira's son and successor, former airline pilot Rajiv Gandhi, for trickle-down economic policies that focused on the urban middle class but ignored India's 570 million villagers who live in squalid poverty. After his assassination by Tamil secessionists of Sri Lanka in 1991, India plunged deeper into religious, ethnic and political violence. Mehta (Up at Oxford) questions the national priorities of this Third World nuclear power, which recently doubled its military budget while neglecting the basic needs of its citizens. He also reports on the Union Carbide toxic-gas disaster in Bhopal, India's maddening telephone service, divorced Muslim women's legal struggles for rights and the revival of Hindu extremism.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Mehta has written many books and New Yorker pieces about India, the land of his birth, including the autobiographical series, Continents of Exile. Here, in his usual impeccable prose, he considers the main events of the last dozen years in Indian politics, beginning with the contentious aftermath of the accidental death of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's eldest son, Sanjay, and the sensational dispute between Gandhi and her ambitious daughter-in-law. Anxious to consolidate her power and preserve the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, Gandhi persuaded her surviving son, Rajiv, to give up his peaceful life as a commercial pilot and enter the political arena. Although a soft-spoken but firm critic of Indira Gandhi, Mehta is an admirer of Rajiv, a decent, courteous, and dignified man who preferred reconciliation to confrontation but who was doomed to share his mother's fate: assassination by radical Sikhs. As for other matters, Mehta exposes the shameful facts about the tragedy at Bhopal, the wasteful Ninth Asian Games of 1982, and New Delhi's notorious telephone system. Donna Seaman

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1ST edition (November 30, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300060386
• ISBN-13: 978-0300060386
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,781,417 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Considerably Informative & Clearly Objective.., July 15, 2006

By 

Mr. Aditya B. Surti "Bookoholic" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rajiv Gandhi and Rama's Kingdom (Hardcover)

Rajiv Gandhi, a scion to the world's most populous democratic monarchy was condemned, not by ambition but by circumstances, to be the ultimate prime minister of Independent India following the assassination of his mother Indira Gandhi. As a Prime Minister he was a naïve politician, of course not efficient in the games of diplomacy as his mother was, and by the time he was contesting the general elections of 1991, he had very much become a power hungry status seeking politician, whose reputation was by then already tarnished by allegations of corruption, and mistrust within his own immediate political circle. But this book is not just about Rajiv Gandhi; this is a book documenting the life of Indian politics from 1983-1993; an extremely important yet turbulent decade in the history of Independent India. The book begins with the infamous Indira Gandhi-Maneka Gandhi episode, the ostentatious 1982 Asian Games burkha veiled above the ugly face of Indian poverty, the government-led Operation Bluestar, and the retaliatory assassination of Mrs. Gandhi followed by the Hindu-Sikh riots running collaterally with the Sikh secessionist movements. The book also documents two important landmark judgments - the Bhopal Gas Tragedy and the Shah Bano case - laying a comprehensible background of the circumstances in which these cases occurred and the extent of unforeseeable repercussions they generated having a substantial impact on Mr. Gandhi's governance and his prime ministership. The book devotes some space to inform the reader of the Congress's precipitous decline in power resulting primarily from the blame attached to Mr. Gandhi and other Congress politicians in the Bofors scandal and the role of V. P. Singh in the uncovering of such a concealed scandal. Some episodes in the book are remote in the context of Rajiv Gandhi and his role as the head of government, but they are nonetheless important as they introduce the reader to some of the obscure challenges that India had faced and still continues to face as a `functioning democratic anarchy'. The last chapters of the book focus on the rise of Hindu extremism and the Hindu revivalist movements and the much controversial Ayodhya issue. Throughout the entire text, the author stays objective in his perspective, which makes this book a good informative study.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Needed, but problematic, May 26, 2005

By 

Seth J. Frantzman (Jerusalem, Israel) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Rajiv Gandhi and Rama's Kingdom (Hardcover)

We do not have a good history of the period 1985-1995 in Indian history and yet it is a fascinating period. Not only is there Operation Bluestar and the Punjab crises, but also the problems in Sri Lanka, Kashmir and of course the rise of the BJP. This book begins with this backdrop to trace the rise and governance of Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi's son. His brother Sanjay was killed in a plane crash and Rajiv, by all accounts a mild mannered man, assumed the helm of the worlds greatest democracy. He did so against a back drop of communalism and poverty and other issues. This is a fascinating short read.

One problem is the authors treatment of the BJP and the Ayodha case. A very biased opinion is given on the origins of the Ayodha temple and the dispute, with no regard to the history of India, the Islamic colonial occupation of the subcontinent and the rise of Hindu `nationalism'. Despite this drawback the book is a needed contribution to the paucity of books on India in the post independence period.

Seth J. Frantzman

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars readable and informative, February 20, 2002

By 

Jeffrey Lehman (Market Harborough, UK) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rajiv Gandhi and Rama's Kingdom (Paperback)

A well-written study of the rise of the modern Hindu nationalist movement in relation to Rajiv Gandhi; including ways he distanced himself and ways he tried to pander to them to retain power.
The book is actually broader than the title suggests, beginning with Indira Gandhi and the events leading up to her assassination, and looks at how Hindu nationalism revived after the assassination of Rajiv.
Written from a journalist's perspective, the narrative moves smoothly and coherently at all times.
If you are interested in modern Indian history, politics or religion, this book gives you a nice picture of this period of time (around 1984-1994), to help you understand how things in India got the way they are now.