Rajiv Gandhi, Ministry of Food Processing and a sense of history

all the Ads have been released just to ensure that the individual minister gets highlighted with the high command, all these are taxpayer money. As mentioned RG was not anything as all the ad/news clips contain. When will the media/public learn to stop this habit of spending taxpayer money for party ads. Maybe CAG should publish & censure such expenditure.. Jai Hind..Vande Mataram

Isn’t the Sikh pogrom a much more serious issue than Bofors etc? The same people who continue to call Narendra Modi Hitler are omitting to use similar adjectives for Rajiv Gandhi, and are not bothering to oppose everything in the country being named after him (again, the same people who mock everything being named after Shivaji Maharaj).

Here is one reason a lot of Indians like him – to exaggerate a bit, most politicians look like beasts. Rajiv Gandhi (just like Rahul Gandhi has a pleasant, smiling face, which makes people subconsciously consider him “harmless”. I have noticed so many of my relatives liking some people just because of pleasant looks. This is again the main reason why pseudo-seculars like Amir Khan and Saif Ali Khan are so popular. Such biases have been imbibed subconsciously, and hence have to be proactively identified and removed.

P. S. : Looks do help politicians in US also, occasional news reports mention that. But at least there is greater consciousness regarding it, as at least some articles explicitly state that correlation.

Yesterday, CoR tweeted some details. ToI bangalore had 6 ads. The Hindu in AP had 5 ads. ToI Delhi, I came across a tweet which said, has 20 ads. At least all of them in ToI and The Hindu were from various ministries. I wonder what is wrong with our ministries. Why do they do this? Then there are these fundoos who say that even during NDA same thing happened? So? Does it make it right? NDA was wrong. So is UPA. Why dont ppl come out of this finger pointing?

Hi Shantanu. I agree with you as to ‘how little sense of history we have’. Consider this, for example.

Finance Minister V.P. Singh, working in Rajeev Gandhi’s government, simplified the tax regime drastically. Just before him, the highest personal tax bracket was 85% with a 15% surcharge. How much would that leave for the person? I could give you the link that describes his pathbreaking work if you wish to read about it.

That was the enabling work that paved the way for empowering Indian individuals and entrepreneurs. Both Rajeevji and V.P. Singh were visionaries. They did some great things. They also made mistakes, but you cannot take away their credit.

Please, let us try to be Indians first…. Don’t forget your pledge on 15th August.

Here are two of the meanings of the word ‘visionary’ from Merriam-Webster.

1 a : of the nature of a vision : illusory b : incapable of being realized or achieved : utopian c : existing only in imagination : unreal
4 : having or marked by foresight and imagination

There seems to be a confusion about the meaning of this particular word. For example, here is a sentence from Vir Sanghvi’s article “But he was still groping for a vision, for a new way to go forward”.

Quite simply, a visionary doesn’t have to know the way to get there, he only needs to imagine the view once one gets ‘there’. You have to give credit to Rajeev Gandhi for having a vision about use of Technology, about imagining reforms in Politics at Panchayat level, a vision about simple Tax regime, a vision about formal agreements with regions etc.

Congress is very good at building a brand value for the Gandhi-Nehru family using public money and remembering Rajiv Gandhi, hailing him as a God and blaming P.V Narasimha Rao for Rajiv’s failings is all a part of the plan!

bofor’s rajiv was a visionary who wished to take india to the golden period of india’s existence i.e 250 yrs before 1989.
thank god for the unfulfillment of the vision/dream.

I think the question to ponder about is wheather the praise is commensurate with what is deserved. Agreed that Mr Rajiv Gandhi had some good contributions and made some great blunders. But there are other prime ministers of India who have done better than Mr Rajiv like Mr Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Forget about prime ministers, there are great leaders like Netaji Bose, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bhagat Singh, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Jaya Prakash Narayanan etc, to whom this nation owes a lot. But there exist no plausible reason for so little recognition of the contribution made by these great leaders. Lets call a spade a spade. Lets appreciate the reign of Mr Rajiv to the extent it deserves.

Few of the things Shantanu did not write about:
1. Sikh pogrom.
2. His arrogance – Slapping Anjaiah (CM of AP) in full public view, calling Calcutta a dead city (I protest, it is a dying one) and calling the planning commission members “bunch of jokers” (our present PM was heading PC then, everyone resigned except MMS, the price of loyalty is usually good). He did more to destroy Congress than any BJP leader could ever do. BJP actually filled the void that VP or Chandrasekhar or Lalu could not manage to fill.
3. The LTTE misadventure. Not much talked about in Indian media. LTTE was what he described as “our boys”, then the “boys” grew up but they were not as loyal as Arjun Singh or MMS.
4. When he completed his term, the country was so poor, that it nearly failed to pay the monthly interest. It was Chandrasekhar govt which deposited gold to Bank of England so that it can pay the interest to IMF/World Bank.

When I hear the fiction of economic liberlisation, I keep laughing. VP was a good finance minister, he has done a lot to reduce the license raj, pursued black money and illegal practices in the share market. But he had nothing to do with liberalisation. Chandrasekhar was a Nehruvite socialist but IMF officials forced him to swallow the liberalisation medicine and the then-FM Jaswant Sinha drew the first draft. MMS’s main credit was to draw the plan based on the draft and Rao’s credit was to give him a superb political support so that the plan can be implemented (probably only GoI plan that ever worked).

The only credit that I can see is to handover telecom to Sam Pitroda (a personal friend) who really did a great job because he understood the business. But this may well be the unintentional consequence because other personal friends (like Pranav Mukherjee) did not do well as far as India is concerned (they, however, did not fail to do well for themselves).

If we couple this with his failure to complete the Boing test, the portrait of a not-so-bright but idealist and naive man emerges. A less-than-ordinary leader for an extra-ordinary nation – God’s practical joke.

@Prakash,
CPM & BJP’s opposition to liberalization in eighties? What was BJP then? Holder of three Loksabha seats? What was CPM then in the national level? Rajiv had a solid majority in ’84 election. Nobody had that kind of majority since then. What did he do with that majority? Sikh Pogrom, Bhopal, Bofors, LTTE and Shah Bano? Also, what do you mean by “independent” research paper? How do you know that it is independent? Just because a foreign university published it, it has to be independent or valuable?

@Sid

If you know.. RG’s vacations became very famous and touring so many countries in just few years! Also his promise to change education system.

My statement was “Mrs. Gandhi’s helplessness in getting certain things done, and about the CPM and BJP’s opposition to liberalisation in the early 80’s”. CPI+CPM had 47 seats and Janata, 31 – BJP being part of Janata then and Lalu+Paswan+Rajnarayan of Janata secular (41 seats). You have missed the word early in quoting the statement.

I tried to present a balanced view. It seems this is a wrong forum to do that. Enjoy your chat. Good luck to all of you.