No prime ministership has been as full of ironies as Rajiv Gandhi's was. Here's the first one: if his government had lasted for the two-and-a-half years that is pretty much the norm these days, he would have been regarded as one of our best prime ministers ever. By the spring of 1987, accords were in place in Punjab, Assam and Mizoram, our foreign policy was looking up, V.P. Singh's finance ministry was being heralded for its honesty and liberalising zeal and the prime minister was astonishingly popular. If his government had fallen that March, then Rajiv would have been treated as world-class statesman.

The problem was: his government lasted five years.

Here's a second irony. The very factor that got him elected ensured that he was seen as a failure by the end of his term. In 1984, his youth, his political inexperience and his air of cheerful amateurishness turned him into an icon in a nation that was fed up of professional politicians and their sleazy shenanigans. By 1989, the same people who had loved him for his naivete were now dismissing him as a dilletante who did not understand politics. Even today, when we talk of Rajiv, we speak of wasted mandate. The man could have transformed India, we say, but he did nothing. Contrast this with P.V. Narasimha Rao who changed everything, though he didn't have a majority.

In saying this, we miss the irony. The only reason Rajiv got that mandate was because he was not Narasimha Rao. Of course, he lacked Narasimha Rao's political skills -- but that's exactly why he won the election.

In 1990, a few months after he had moved out of Race Course Road, I asked Rajiv why he thought he had won the 1984 mandate, the biggest ever accorded to an Indian prime minister. He looked genuinely bemused. "I don't know," he said. "Perhaps, it was because nobody really knew me so they were able to see whatever they wanted in me."

He was right, of course. The notion that a country that has been driven to the brink of disaster by an imperious prime minister, during whose term militancies have threatened to turn into civil war, should elect as her successor her completely inexperienced son without knowing what he stands for is so preposterous that it defies reason. And yet, Rajiv benefited from a wave, the likes of which India had never seen before. It wasn't so much that he was his mother's son, more that he offered an alternative to everything that she had stood for.

Indira believed in confrontation. Rajiv believed in conciliation. Indira was arrogant. Rajiv was charming. Indira was surrounded by obsequious courtiers. Rajiv depended on well-educated school and university buddies. For a nation traumatised by five years of Indira's misrule and shell-shocked by her assassination at the hands of her own security guards, Rajiv offered an irresistible combination: change but with continuity.

And, of course, as he finally realised, everybody projected their own aspirations and wishes on him. He was every young person's chosen candidate. He was every middle-class person's role model: the first prime minister in history to have ever held a salaried job with a large corporation. Because his early image was so bland, he began with a clean slate, a slate on which everybody wrote whatever they wanted.

Nobody could have delivered on those expectations. Too many people wanted too many things. And even if Rajiv had tried to give them what they wanted, there was another problem: he didn't know how to do it. In the course of that same conversation in 1990, he was both reflective and defensive. "Yes, yes, I made mistakes. But you know if any one of you guys (the journalists who attacked him) had got the job, you would have made the same mistakes. It takes time to learn how the system works."

To his credit, he tried his best. His early agenda was determined by the circumstances of his accession. India was falling apart. It was his job to try and put it together again. The Punjab Accord may not have been the success that he had hoped for but equally, it is hard to deny that in 1984 when Rajiv took over, Khalistan seemed like a real possibility, while by 1989, it was an empty slogan. With the Assam Accord he managed what his mother had failed to do: he brought the state back to the national mainstream. In Mizoram, he ended a militancy that had raged for 50 years. Similarly, while his Sri Lanka policy eventually failed, Colombo recognised that he had abandoned Indira's agenda of creating trouble for all our neighbours.

Unfortunately after he had spent two years doing the obvious things, he ran out of steam. His drawback was that he had no unified vision of the India he wished to create. When he was elected, that did not seem so important. At that time, the priority was to save the India we had, not to create a new one. Moreover, his laidback charm and easy wit helped cover up for the lack of vision. Asked about his priorities at an early press conference, he dodged the question with a one-liner. "Your mother gave us a government that worked. What will you give us?" asked a reporter. "A government that works faster."

Working faster. For the first two years, that was what it was all about for Rajiv. He had no desire to change the system, he just wanted to make it move more swiftly. If you look back at the things he said during that period, they were all the kinds of things that any educated middle-class person of his background would have said. There was too much bureaucracy. We needed to cut down on red tape. Politicians should be better educated. We should all learn to use computers. We should look for managerial solutions to such problems as the population explosion. Market research would tell us what the people of India wanted.

The sad reality is that you cannot transform India with an agenda that could have appeared in the pages of the Doon School Weekly. By his third year in office, Rajiv had learnt the limitations of Doscospeak. But he was still groping for a vision, for a new way to go forward. When he did come up with an alternative agenda, there were two problems. One: his chosen vision centred on Panchayati Raj (a vision so far removed from the managerial solutions of his first year that it made no sense to his middle-class constituency) which he was unable to sell to his party, let alone the country.

But it was the second problem that was the clincher: it was simply too late. By the summer of 1987, the Rajiv mandate had begun to collapse. The electorate admitted that he had restored stability to India, but complained that he had failed to make the country a much better place to live in. The extravagant expectations that had created the mandate now tore it apart. When V.P. Singh revolted, and allegations of corruption were hurled at Rajiv, the government simply did not know how to cope.

Deserted by the press that had glorified him for two-and-a-half years, and abandoned by the middle class, Rajiv went back to his mother's people and asked them for advice. From then on, he ceased to be his own man and fell back on such Indira-strategems as the claim that all opposition to the prime minister was, by definition, foreign inspired.

Just as his mother invoked the foreign hand, Rajiv quoted the destabilisation theory. Far from trying to win back support of the press, he opted for pressure tactics: raids on The Indian Express and an ultimately abortive Defamation Bill.

That there would be no happy ending was inevitable. The prime minister who could do no wrong for the first half of his term, could do nothing right for the next two years. Worse still, he never again seemed like the Rajiv of old. He became an imperious, aloof figure who tried hard to bluster that he was in control of events while actually being swept away by forces he could not handle. When he lost in 1989, some were sad but nobody was really surprised.

And here's the final irony. Rajiv spent all of 1990 trying to work out where he had gone wrong. He recognised that neither approach -- the public school solutions of 1984-87 or the hardline of 1987-89 -- would be successful if he ever came back to power. For the first half of 1991 he spent his time with position papers and research back-up. If he came back, he said, he would get it right.

And then, just as it was all on the verge of coming together again, it fell apart forever.

Vir Sanghvi is editor, The Hindustan Times

P.V. NARASIMHA RAO
Born 1901: Indira Gandhi's trusted lieutenant will be remembered for large-scale economic liberalization he initiated in 1991. Though always more comfortable in the role of foreign minister, this scholar who became prime minister faded at the end of his term in 1996. So did reforms.