ABSTRACT
Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, son of Indira Gandhi, and spokesman for what Salman Rushdie called midnight's children, the generation born after August 1947, seemed for a time to be revitalizing his grandfather's vision of a "modern" 21st century India. Rajiv Gandhi is the fourth generation of what in Indian political parlance is referred to as the Nehru dynasty. Rajiv's political capital included the villagers who regarded the Congress government as their grandfathers' generation had regarded the British raj, as sarkar. The Punjab crisis that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi helped to create and that ended her life remained to burden her son's political career. The emergence in April 1987 of V. P. Singh, the new "Mr. Clean," as a potential alternative to Rajiv Gandhi reoriented national politics. Throughout 1988, the Punjab problem remained the greatest test of Rajiv Gandhi's leadership.
