INDIA: Death of the Crown Prince

An air crash kills the heir apparent to the House of Nehru

In the waning moments of a blistering hot New Delhi afternoon, the elder son of India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi performed the ancient Vedic rites for the dead. Rajiv Gandhi, 35, put the torch to the funeral pyre that held the battered body of his younger brother Sanjay, who had died in an air crash the day before. The ceremony, attended by hundreds of thousands of mourners, brought a sudden and tragic end to the Gandhi family’s dynastic hopes that Sanjay, 33, would eventually succeed his mother as Prime Minister of India.

Sanjay Gandhi (whose family is not related to Mahatma Gandhi) was the second most powerful figure in Indian politics, after his strong-willed mother, and by far the most controversial. While Rajiv, a commercial airline pilot, showed little interest in politics, Sanjay became his mother’s chief political adviser, even as she had been the closest confidante to her widowed father Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister.

From adolescence Sanjay had loved fast cars, and as a very young man he formed a company that developed an Indian minicar that he called the Maruti, after a Hindu wind god. The factory produced a few prototypes of the Maruti but never put it into full production. Sanjay’s critics, who dismissed him as arrogant and ruthless, charged that he had received government licenses and financial backing through favoritism and chicanery. Later they blamed him for some of the worst excesses of Mrs. Gandhi’s 1975-77 state of emergency, including the sterilization and slum-clearance campaigns, the unpopularity of which led directly to the fall of her government in March 1977. To his supporters, on the other hand, Sanjay was an activist with a Brahman’s sense of entitlement, an impatient young man who cared little about orthodoxy or ideology but had a knack for getting things done.

In a sense, it was Sanjay’s overriding impatience that cost him his life. After his mother’s 1977 defeat, he earned a commercial pilot’s license and an instructor’s rating. Early last week, however, he began to fly a craft for which he had no rating: a small American-built Pitts S-2A biplane, designed for aerobatics. On Sunday morning, June 22, he flew the plane with a test pilot at the Delhi Flying Club. In the afternoon he took it on a series of joyrides with his wife Maneka, his mother’s personal secretary R.K. Dhawan and the family’s special guru, Dhirendra Brahmachari.

Next morning Sanjay was up early, chafing to take the little red and white plane through its paces again. He took off from Safdarjang Airport, in the heart of New Delhi, at 7:58 a.m. with an instructor, Captain Subhash Saxena. Impatient as ever, he did not climb to the minimum 5,000 ft. before starting his spins and dives. Apparently the engine stalled. At 8:10 the plane crashed in Chanakyapuri, not far from the house at 12 Willingdon Crescent where Sanjay had lived with his mother before her January victory, and where he and his supporters had since had their offices. Both Sanjay and the instructor were killed instantly.

Hospital technicians worked for five hours to prepare Sanjay’s disfigured body for visitation. Barricades were erected hastily at the Prime Minister’s residence as thousands of mourners, many of them from Sanjay’s home constituency in Uttar Pradesh, came to pay their respects, weep, and shower rose petals on the bier, which was surrounded by huge blocks of ice to prevent deterioration of the body. Tents were put up in front of the house to protect the throngs from the 100° temperatures. Water wagons arrived; so did the fruit and nut sellers, the garland threaders and the hawkers of betel nuts.

The funeral took place in New Delhi’s Shanti Vana Park, less than 100 yards from a memorial to Nehru. The cortege arrived at 6:30 p.m., with the family riding in a jeep. There was only one slipup: Rajiv began to put incense and camphor on the body before the flag of the Congress Party (I) (for Indira) had been removed. When this was done, mantras were chanted and the pyre was lit.

Because Sanjay did not hold a national office, the elaborate cremation ceremony was actually a private service. Flags in the capital flew at half-staff, not for Sanjay but for V.V. Giri, a former President of India who had died that day at the age of 85. But if Sanjay did not hold prominent office, he had an unofficial position of vast power. He vetted candidates for Cabinet posts and was rebuilding the party. In the January elections that returned his mother to power, Sanjay not only won a seat for himself but hand-picked at least 100 winners in other constituencies. Wholly loyal, these young politicians even imitated Sanjay’s customary dress: a pajama suit and kashmir shawl. More recently, Sanjay had run the campaign of his mother’s party in state elections, where it won majorities in eight legislative assemblies and lost only in Tamil Nadu (formerly Madras).

During the election campaigns, Mrs. Gandhi was repeatedly asked whether she planned to give Sanjay a government post. “No, why should I?” she would answer. Sanjay had no need of office to gain his mother’s ear at the breakfast-table sessions with advisers, where many of her key policies were argued out. Presumably, he played a part in her tough decisions to raise prices on petroleum, fertilizer and rail tickets, and to cut taxes as a way of reducing inflation (currently 20% a year) and stimulating growth.

So far as is known, Sanjay had limited influence on India’s foreign policy, an area in which Mrs. Gandhi thus far has shown less interest than she used to. Since her return to office, Washington has been worried about a possible pro-Moscow tilt by New Delhi. Indian condemnations of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were less than ringing, and Mrs. Gandhi did sign an agreement with Moscow to purchase $1.6 billion in Soviet arms (mostly T-72 tanks and missiles) over a 17-year period. But government spokesmen point out that Moscow has long been one of India’s major arms suppliers and that India also buys military aircraft from Britain, missiles from France and antitank weapons from the U.S. Mrs. Gandhi’s defenders also note that her most significant diplomatic move has been to seek normal relations with Moscow’s ideological rival, Peking.

The real questions posed by Sanjay’s death are long-range ones. Above all, what effect will it have on his mother, at 62 an intensely private and relatively isolated political figure? For better or worse, the history of India since independence has been intertwined with that of the House of Nehru. With the removal of the heir apparent, the future of both the nation and the dynasty is more deeply mired in uncertainty than before.

—By William E. Smith

Reported by Marcia Gauger/New Delhi