ABSTRACT
In October 1984, Rajiv Gandhi became the prime minister. He was drafted to that high position in the wake of the assassination of his mother, Indira Gandhi. Until the Bofors scandal Rajiv Gandhi had scored a number of policy successes, the major ones being an accord with the Punjab leader, Longowal, and his initiatives on the conflict between Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Viswanath Pratap Singh’s victory was almost completely owed to his anticorruption drive, which had, in the first place, brought about the rift between himself and Rajiv Gandhi and led to his expulsion from the Congress Party in 1987. The Mandal Commission, so named after its chair, B. P. Mandal, had been appointed by the Janata government a decade earlier, in 1978, to decide the criteria for defining the socially and economically backward classes and recommend measures for their advancement and amelioration.
