Description of Rajiv Gandhi on PM website may irk Congress

Mangalore Today News Network

New Delhi, May 28, 2014: The description of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi on the revised and refurbished PM website may enrage the Congressmen.

A “modern-minded, decisive but undemonstrative” Rajiv Gandhi married an "Italian" national "Sonia Maino" whom he had met in Cambridge, it says in a 818-word profile on Rajiv in “former prime ministers” section of the website.

The BJP had been raising Sonia’s foreign-origin issue from the late 1990s, when she entered politics but toned it down after she refused to assume the chair of prime ministership in 2004.

“While at Cambridge, he had met Sonia Maino, an Italian who was studying English. They were married in New Delhi in 1968. They stayed in Indira Gandhi’s residence in New Delhi with their two children, Rahul and Priyanka. Theirs was a very private life despite the surrounding din and bustle of political activity,” the profile reads.

The Congress president is not described as Sonia Gandhi and her current position is not mentioned anywhere in the website.

The profile, however, credits Rajiv for being the “harbinger of a generational change”. It also acknowledges that he received the biggest mandate, winning 401 seats in Lok Sabha in 1984 after he “travelled tirelessly from one part of the country to the other, covering a distance equal to one-and-a-half times the earth’s circumference”.

Rajiv’s “reluctance to enter politics” though he belonged to an “intensely political family that had served India for four generations – both during the freedom struggle and afterwards” was also mentioned.

Manmohan Singh, whom Modi succeeded, gets a glowing tribute. Singh is “rightly acclaimed as a thinker and a scholar” who is well regarded for “his diligence and his academic approach to work, as well as his accessibility and his unassuming demeanour”.

“His role in ushering in a comprehensive policy of economic reforms is now recognised worldwide. In the popular view of those years in India, that period is inextricably associated with the persona of Dr Singh,” the profile says.

While V P Singh got just a 246-word profile, his Janata Dal counterpart H D Deve Gowda is described as a “crusader for freedom and equality”.

A “workaholic” Gowda, it says, is “no stranger to the fickleness of political fortunes” as he had lost elections but had bounced back by “re-examining his own style of politics”.

While Nehru, Gulzari Lal Nanda and Indira Gandhi got matter-of-fact profiles, Lal Bahadur Shastri was eulogised for his “great integrity and competence”.