Doon School, Indian Airlines and the All India Congress Committee. Rajiv Gandhi, had friends broadly from these three phases in his life. Gandhi apparently made no enduring friendships when he was studying at Trinity, Cambridge "" beyond his partner for life, Sonia Maino.
But his friends from Doon School were to become his political confidants. Among them were Suman Dubey who chose journalism as a career but continued to advise Rajiv from the fringes of politics, and Amitabh Bachchan and Arun Singh, who joined Gandhi in politics but later distanced themselves both from politics and the family.The one friendship that endured was with IA buddy Satish Sharma who joined politics and became a family friend, rising to become minister for petroleum.
But Rajiv's network of political friends was drawn more from the pool of people he met as general secretary of the Congress party than after becoming Prime Minister. It was as general secretary that he met and befriended Ajit Jogi, the young district magistrate of Raipur, whom he persuaded later to join the Congress party.
It was also during his Bharat Darshan, as party leader, that he met in Tamil Nadu a young lawyer and Youth Congress leader lately returned from the US with big dreams for India. This was Palaniappan Chidambaram, current finance minister, who also joined Rajiv's first council of ministers.
When Rajiv became Prime Minister in 1984, he naturally came into contact with a large number of bureaucrats. Rajiv was serious, pleasant and vulnerable despite a mammoth 440 MPs in the Lok Sabha. He was a Nehru-Gandhi, of course, but belonged to a class that viewed politicians as scoundrels.
But here was one among them, choosing politics as a profession and actually surviving the challenges. He became a role model for many idealistic bureaucrats and inspired by him, Mani Shankar Aiyar quit the foreign service and joined politics, becoming a friend and colleague.
Many professionals "" doctors, engineers, lawyers "" flung caution to the winds and plunged into public life. These included Gita Reddy in Andhra Pradesh, Non Resident Indian Sam Pitroda, journalists Rajiv Shukla, Udayan Sharma and Santosh Bhartiya and many other technocrats.
Rajiv had just one "inherited" friend who betrayed him and whose betrayal he neither forgot nor forgave. This was Arun Nehru, his cousin who was brought to centrestage by Sanjay Gandhi, whom, later, Rajiv retained as main political manager. Nehru is thought to be the eminence grise who was referred to as the man Bofors dealt with in getting India to accept the Bofors gun deal.
